A participatory design session with stakeholders.

Brief

This seven-week collaborative project will divide you into teams (or individually) to work on exploring, investigating, studying, analyzing, and eventually, ideating and designing interventions for, a real-world social phenomenon. This project is meant to introduce you to the human-centered design process, leading you through the various stages of how designers conduct research and develop novel and innovative interventions, whether in the form of communications, art experiences, products, services, or other things, for people, by people, with people.

PHASE 1 – CHOOSING, exploring and mapping the domain

This part of the project focuses you first and foremost on identifying a single topic, space, theme that interests you and that you want to pursue for the remainder of our time together. Following, you will be trying to map and model what you already know or believe about the topic, issue, or phenomenon your team has chosen to investigate and will redefine that model, thanks to the reading, studying, secondary research (looking at academic papers, books, articles, industry white papers or case studies etc) you will be engaging in shortly.

One of the most helpful steps in this phase (and the following) is to create a basic mess map to begin your research questioning with. Work with your team to articulate what you already know about your topic. Then, spend the week all researching your topic and informing your understanding further – you may find that your initial beliefs or views might be challenged by the research you do. Finally, revisit your mind map: add to it new findings and insights, change things that no longer hold true, and develop it further with your team. Prepare to present your theme as it stands now and the research you were able to conduct so far to everyone during the next meeting.

Tasks

Develop an initial mess map with your team – you could use Mural, Miro or Kumu for this.
Develop a list of guiding questions, things you don’t know about and would like to or feel the need to learn to move forward. Begin conducting secondary research reading about your chosen prompt and share and discuss your findings with your group.
Revisit and modify and refine the mess map with what you know now.
Update your process blog with your progress over the week, emphasizing what you learned and did in your group.

Examples of mess maps

PHASE 2 – CONDUCTING SECONDARY RESEARCH

This part of the project has you trying to answer as many initial research questions as possible and has you formulating more as you continue to uncover new information and angles about your topic of choice. This phase focuses on expanding and deepening your understanding of your topic, issue, or phenomenon while continuing to refine and develop your mental model, through in-depth readings such as literature reviews, academic papers, books, articles, industry white papers, case studies etc. that are relevant to your area of study and contain answers to your questions.

Go back to revisit your mess map working with your team to articulate what you have learned so far and what areas might be worth following up on further. Continue to read and research your topic this week to inform your understanding and, finally, revisit your mind map by adding your latest research findings. Are there specific opportunities you and your team are seeing as calling for more research and investigations?

Tasks

Continue to conduct even more in-depth secondary research about your chosen topic as this will help you start to focus your efforts moving forward. Share and discuss your findings with your group.
Revisit, modify and refine the mess map with what you know now.
Prepare to report back and show your revised mess map to everyone else in the class and your new research questions. Update your process blog with your progress over the week, emphasizing what you learned and did in your group.

PHASE 3 – CONDUCTING PRIMARY research with stakeholders

This week you’ll be figuring out, based on your initial secondary research, who your stakeholders are and will develop a research plan, selecting primary research methods to run with your stakeholders, and conducting research ‘in the field’ to find out new things about them, including their needs, wants, habits and practices, wishes and dreams etc.

You will select at least two methods (per team member) to work with and run over the next week with real users. You may find that, given present circumstances, you might need to modify or change methods to adapt them to purely digital studies depending on the latest developments. Examples of research strategies may include:

Observational studies (this could include being a participant or observer in web forums or other digital spaces)
Transect tours or walkthroughs (get people to walk you through their spaces and talk about them)
Interviews (these could be done over the phone or via video-conferencing)
Surveys or polls (these could also be done on social media or via email, or by setting up a website to gain input or crowdsourcing data)
Cultural probes, diary studies, or other self-reporting methods (you could design and send out studies for people to fill)
Creative workshops (do exercises or workshops with stakeholders in a popular platform like Miro or LucidChart – this could include mess mapping with them!)

For more research strategy ideas, refer to Hanington and Martin’s Universal Methods of Design, Ideo’s Human-centered design guide. You may also reference artistic research projects such as Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More

After you’ve conducted a few research studies over the week, prepare to present what you did, who you did it with, and how you did it, to the rest of the class. It’s particularly helpful to reflect on and share with others about what was the experience of using these methods like, what was successful, what was challenging.

Tasks

Identify stakeholders categories and real individual members from those categories, to make sure you have a comprehensive representation of perspectives.
Choose at least two different methods to try with them, develop a research plan that covers when and how you plan on conducting these methods and prepare the materials you need to conduct them with your stakeholders.
Run your methods and document them.
Prepare to share your methods, why you chose them, and how you ran them with your stakeholders, what you learned, and what challenges you encountered, to the rest of the class. Update your process blog with your progress over the week, emphasizing what you did in your group.

PHASE 4 – IDEATING, prototyping & PLAYTESTING

Using at least two evaluative methods, have a look at the research you’ve done so far, and try and pick out the most valuable and salient insights that really speak to things that you could intervene on for your stakeholders. Prepare to develop narratives (possibly personas, if appropriate) based on your findings which connect your users’ needs, desires, or other findings to the insights that you’ll use to develop ideas, and develop no less than three different concepts in your groups for design interventions that would benefit your stakeholders. For evaluative methods, please refer back to Hanington and Martin’s Universal Methods of Design.

Based on the information you have heard so far, the data you collected and your stakeholders’ experiences mixed with your research findings from the previous weeks, do you and your team have any ideas of interventions, prototypes, gaps that design (of a product, service, experience, etc.) could fulfill? Spend some time ideating not only different versions of an idea but also different directions that employ different media, different senses, different tools. Each of these concepts should utilize and build on your insights and your research. Ideate and sketch these concepts and have them ready to present next week – you may also, if you have time, develop some basic mock-ups of your ideas to help better convey them: these could be wireframes, basic physical models, a service blueprint etc.

Among yourselves but also with your peers and stakeholders, try and get some super early feedback on those ideas that you feel to have the most potential. Update your process blog with your progress over the week, emphasizing what you did in your group.

Tasks

Analyze and synthesize your research findings so far using evaluative methods in order to help you develop a minimum of three concepts, with sketches and mock-ups, for design interventions based on your stakeholders’ input.
Ideate alone and with your team members to develop different early and rough concepts and try and gather some feedback on them as soon as you can to help you choose a direction.
Select one final direction to pursue further in your research and through more prototyping.
Start sketching and developing the concept for a higher-fidelity prototype to user-test with the class next week.

PHASE 5 – Analyzing findings & SYNTHESIZING Insights

Based on early feedback on your concepts, begin work on a prototype to showcase alongside your final presentation. You could, in order to better get a sense of what your final prototype would be, test your three previous concepts with stakeholders in a quick design charette or A\B testing exercise and get feedback from them. Your final prototype can synthesize multiple features across all of your earlier concepts, take one of them to develop and refine further or extend one of them in a slightly different or new direction. If you have a specific direction, you could iterate on your prototype in order to push its design as far as the time and current constraints allow.

Regardless, your prototype should show significant growth from its earlier iteration. Prepare to show your prototype to the rest of the class next week and talk about what you are aiming for and how you envision it working. Document your process well on your blog, and be prepared to present it, along with your finished work, in class.

Tasks

Continue designing and developing the concept for your higher-fidelity prototype to present alongside your final presentation. Test your designs with as many people as you can.
Start preparing narratives, personas for your key stakeholders, connecting them to insights that are useful to build your final presentation narrative around.
Prepare a draft of your presentation materials (storyboard, presentation skeleton, etc.) to share with the class during the next meeting.

PHASE 6 – editing & SHOWCASING

Prepare to showcase your project so far: your process, your research and your prototype. Your final presentation can include user flows, renderings, models, photos, videos, a website, etc., but it must include a prototype of some kind.

Write a short reflection on the things you tried in this project, the research you did, the methods you used, what you learned, what was hard, what didn’t work, what you made, what you tried, in your final blog post. Reflect on what you could have done better, or avenues or insights that were left by the side or untouched, and also talk about how you could extend your final prototype and improve and iterate further if you had more time in the future.

Also, turn in exhibition-ready documentation; Video, photo, or other formats that feels appropriate, as well as your slide presentation.

Tasks

Wrap up the development of your prototype and be prepared to showcase it.
Create a cohesive narrative, inclusive of all the major takeaways from your research such as personas, stakeholders, insights, ideas, feedback, future directions etc.
Edit supporting visual materials (presentation, websites, mockups, videos, animations etc.)
Prepare to share with the class during our final showcase!

Examples/Inspiration:

GRADING CRITERIA

These are a few general criteria to keep in mind for grading that apply to each phase of the project:

The rigor of your research process: how thoroughly you researched your space, how well you referenced and documented your sources, and connected your research questions to original sources and to research insights. Overall, how well you were able to follow your process and continue to question and stretch and expand your knowledge of the space.
The level of commitment and responsiveness you showcased towards your stakeholders’ and users’ needs, as well as your level of willingness to listen and incorporate feedback, throughout the design research process.
How freely you were able to experiment with primary research methods and research materials together with how thoroughly you designed and planned your research activities.
The quality of documentation and reflection: how in detail you were able to document the research and design process and the depth of your reflection on your steps and lessons learned, documented on your blog.

The entire Design Research Project assignment accounts for 35% of your final grade for the course, and therefore each week’s progress accounts for approximately ~5% of your grade.