GDO710 - Week 8 - Research
This week we are focusing on research, something I am very excited to start exploring. In my current work I foresee a strong opportunity for better user research. In Cambodia and many parts of South East Asia user experience and design thinking are not a priority area for many companies or orginizations. One of the main reasons for taking this course was to get a better understanding of research methodologies in user experience.
Feelings
I have more clarity on the role of ethics and their importance within research methodology. I have done various types of research in Cambodia around user experience and technology, but this really helped me better understand the ethical aspects of how we conduct our research.
I also enjoyed reviewing the various sample scenarios given through this week and seeing how others approached or classified different research briefs.
Analysis
Ethics in our research is important to the integrity of our work and helps protect the participants. By understanding informed consent and the role it plays in our research is key to protecting our participants.
In my work in SE Asia with NGOs and the international development sector, I have focused on qualitative methods of research. I typically use interviews and cogitative walkthroughs to help understand users barriers to technology. I see opportunities for additional quantitative methods to be incorporated after my time at Falmouth. I would like to develop more questionnaires to help better understand behaviors. Quality quantitative research would provide a solid baseline for some of my work in Cambodia. Additionally, I would like to explore automated logging of app usage as another potential method that could be used to understand the reality of user behavior from a practical level.
In my academic research this week I focused on design thinking, its history, and the role designers have in the process. In her paper "Design thinkers’ profiles and design thinking solutions", Martha Corrales-Estrada highlights the original roots of design thinking with the first design methods movement: "During the design methods movement, researchers sought to understand the processes and methods by which designers went about solving design problems. In their work, Rith and Dubberly studied the influence of Rittel’s work, describing what he called “first generation” of design theories as those leveraging the fields of operations research and cybernetics, focused on the mechanistic and reductionist aspects of the design process. To Rittel, the science of design has to undertake three tasks: First, to further develop the theories of design, to learn more about the reasoning of designers. Second, it should pursue empirical inquiries into how plans come about, and what the effects of plans are in comparison with what they intended. Finally, on this basis, it should look for tools to support designers in their work. The human mind is fallible. Methods should be sought to amplify its abilities, even if it’s only to keep us from falling prone to our idiosyncrasies" (Corrales-Estrada, 2019).
Through the original design methods movement, designers worked to develop core theories of design, studied the plans on how they would be implemented, and seeks to identify tools to support the designers. I find this a fascinating origin of our work and how it has changed since this period. In the design thinking movement, there seems to be less of a focus on the theories of design, our tools, and our implementation. The central focus of our work seems to be on understanding the user, putting them at the core of what we are doing and being led by them.
Conclusion
User and design research is key to the work I want to focus on in the future. This week really helped set an understanding of what role ethics play in research and how we can classify them per Falmouth's research and ethics policies.
I am excited to explore this more at the end of my our program as we will have an entire module dedicated to research, which will hopefully inform our dissertation work.
Action Plan
No major actions this week, I am still continuing my focus on academic research for at least one hour a week. I feel like I've finally hit a groove with my writing and studying process, each week I am aiming to get a bulk of the reading and responses done by Monday and my reflection posts drafted by the end of the week.
References
Corrales-Estrada, M., 2019. Design thinkers’ profiles and design thinking solutions. Academia Revista Latinoamericana de Administración , 33(1), pp.9-24.