Workshop Description
Understanding the Change Your Design Can Make...
Teacher: Karmen Franinovic (IAD) karmen.franinovic@zhdk.ch
Date: 25-28 September 2012
Room: Fi107
Participants: Second semester MA students in fields of excellence Interaction Design and Product Design.
Your design can deeply affect your user experience. In order to learn about the potential of your product/service/space to affect user behavior, you first need to understand the existing situation within which you act. In this course, will search for ways of understanding how this existing situation would change if your product becomes a part of it. We will learn how to discover insights into existing behaviors in a creative and designerly way. Understanding users does not mean becoming a sociologist or an ethnographer. It means developing empathy and understanding of what you as a designer can do for a specific situation, person, activity or context.
The goal of this workshop is to help you:
- narrow down your MA research question through direct engagement with your users in context
- study existing behaviors and propose how your design solution could affect them
- specify design methods and future steps needed to answer your MA research questions
- (above all) make your research a creative and fun process both for yourself and for your users
We will follow three steps in narrowing down your research question
1.
Observation: process of observing and collecting data about an activity in a location and people performing it
Methods: direct and participatory observation, video ethnography, interviews, questionnaires, photography, cultural probes, participatory methods etc.
2.
Analysis: organisation of collected data and presentation of findings
Methods: task analysis, use of the space analysis, transcription and analysis of the interviews, qualitative data analysis etc.
3. Idea Mapping: populating the space of findings with design ideas, arguments and solutions.
Methods: brainstorming, bodystorming, scenario-building, participatory methods etc.