Design Research 2019 Wrap-Up

I had a wonderful time co-MCing the Design Research 2019 conference with Steve Baty this year! I’ve compiled all my tweet threads for the presentations with a short summary of what I got out of each presentation. Thanks so much to all the speakers for doing such a fantastic job :) this conference and community keep going from strength to strength!

If you haven’t been to Design Research it’s a 3 day single track conference dedicated to all things Design Research, as one of the attendees told me it’s unlike any other conference they’ve been too and you walk away with huge amounts of practical knowledge as well many considerations for Research as a practice.

So what was Design Research 2019 all about?

To take a quote from Steve Portigal’s keynote we really focussed on three key themes: 

(these are my interpretations of how the themes in Steve’s keynote were discussed over the few days)

Research as a Practice

• What does your research practice look like inside your organisation, what are you doing right, what can you improve and how do you scale your team to meet the growing demand for research.

Research as a Process

• How do we actually research, what are the methods you use within your research practice, can it be framework? What does it mean to compromise rigour to get more research done?

Research as a Profession

• Is the use of ‘Everyone’s a researcher’ detracting from our expertise or does it highlight how difficult it is to do high quality research?
• Are we having the difficult conversations about ethics, consent and self care that help to maintain research as a profession that keeps evolving and changing or are we just getting work done?
• How do we make sure we have jobs in the future?

Below are links to all my twitter threads from the talks, while I captured a good chunk of the talks I would encourage you to reach out to the presenters and check out #DR19 on twitter and linkedIn to get more context from each persons presentation.

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Steve Portigal — What we (don’t) talk about when we talk about research

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1105954682822750208

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/steveportigal

Steve’s keynote was excellent. He framed the conversations of the next two days and through out quite a few provocative statements about around why why do we still struggle to articulate the true expertise of our profession, do we detract from our own expertise by downplaying how difficult good research practices are to develop and maintain. Why aren’t we having the difficult conversations about safety, burnout and will we actually be employable in the near future.

What I appreciated was the love for the community Steve has and he made sure to mention that we have such an open, sharing and compassionate community surrounding us.

Quote that I loved — “Elevate the work you do by talking about what it brings, not what you've done.” — Steve Portigal

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Nova Franklin — Just add water: tips and tricks to help non-designers conduct impactful research

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1105980032218861568

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/novafranklin

Nova’s talk was a great overview of how Meld have partnered with their clients to make a larger impact with their research work. Nova goes through a bunch of insights from their experience making research work with willing partners when you can’t always be the researcher and there’s quite a few considerations that are worthwhile implementing straight into your practice.

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Tania Lang — The truth doesn't cost anything. But a lie could cost you everything

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1105990729183055872

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/tania-lang-4a5392

Tania’s talk was very interesting and while it can be quite confronting hearing someone tell you your participants are lying to you I think rationalising it as people may not tell the whole truth due to a number of factors helped me get the most out of the talk. Tania offered great advice on how to design your research projects so that you can ensure you get the most truthful information.

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10 Minute Talks

Vera Rhoads — Project Management and Design Thinking

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/verarhoads

Vera took us through the similarities of what PM’s & Users are trying to achieve, it was a really nice “WE ALL WANT THE SAME THING” moment through the lens of an expert Project Manager.

Samantha Yuen — 4 principles to synthesise evaluative research in a day

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/samanthayuen

Slide deck — slideshare.net/SamanthaYuen/design-reserch-2019-4-principles-to-synthesize-evaluative-research-in-a-day-136835798

This was another great 10 minute talk, Samantha’s 4 takeaways are below:

• Gain time upstream
• Good notes FTW
• Gut before data
• Go digital after 

You can grab a look at some of the other key points here in Ruth Ellison’s tweet and look through the #dr19 tag for more:

https://twitter.com/RuthEllison/status/1106026668563423232

Serap Yigit Eliott — Cross functional collaboration

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/serap-yigit-elliott-phd-3852b438

I don’t have any details for this talk, if you’ve got some please let me know!!!

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Brigette Metzler, Kate Towsey & Ruth Ellison — What is ResearchOps? A global odyssey with a strong Australian flavour

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106028944866709504

LinkedIn profile — Brigette: linkedin.com/in/brigette-metzler-874b6878 . Kate: linkedin.com/in/katetowsey Ruth: linkedin.com/in/ruthellison

This was one of mu favourite presentations at the conference for a couple reasons. It was amazing to hear how a call out turned into a collaborative open community of researchers who spent their time establishing the foundations of the ResearchOps practice. It’s a testament to how wonderful our research community is and I hope that we can all contribute back into the project because I can see how every single researcher is going to be benefitting from what these wonderful women have created!

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Kate Tilbrook & Leah Mackenzie — Taking the driver's seat: our journey to change hearts and minds

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106047600317218816

LinkedIn profile — Kate: linkedin.com/in/kate-tilbrook-92ab4911b Leah: linkedin.com/in/leah-mackenzie-98990329

A couple things I really loved about Kate & Leah’s talk was the fact they’d been on a rollercoaster ride from starting out in marketing to eventually landing as design researchers. It’s usually one of those stories where you’d expect a few staff changes so it was really interesting to hear how they had been through the transformation, highs & lows together. If you’re working in a large organisation maybe one that’s going through a huge transformation at the moment I highly recommend reading this one and maybe even getting in touch with Kate and Leah fore tips on how to survive it.

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Rawan Tayeb — Move over stigma! How design research helped us navigate past barriers to help seeking

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106053183263014912

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/rawantayeb

Rawan took us through how ReachOut had used design research to help uncover how they could encourage young people to engage with their services before they were in crisis. What I loved about this talk was how through every step of their campaign they reflected on their learnings and adjusted their methods to suit their audience of young teenagers. That flexibility and creativity in applying methods really paid off because the campaign they produced felt earnest, real and relatable even as an adult.

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Shae Quabba — Play time! Exploring digital experiences with board games, train sets & 3D printed toilets

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106058529796907009

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/shaequabba

Shae went through some interesting examples of when and how to use Play and how she built her methods. There were several case studies and Play frameworks that you can look over and hopefully adapt to your work. One thing I really enjoyed was She explaining where each method worked and why it wouldn’t have worked in different scenarios.

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Sarah Stokes — On empathy: defining empathy and its role in design research

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106315358229557248

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/sarahlucystokes

Sarah went through some theory about what empathy is and the difference between Emotional Empathy which is the empathy that is evolutionary in a lot of people and Cognitive Empathy which is the empathy that we can teach ourselves. Sarahs talk focussed on Cognitive Empathy with a lot of relevant examples from Indi Young’s Practical Empathy book.

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Nicola Rushton — Bringing the team along for the ride: lessons from including whole teams in user research

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106327415280689152

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/nicola-rushton

Nicola provided a framework and activities that you can use to help your non-researcher teams to participate more fully in the research process. There’s some absolute gems in here including the ‘Learning Goals’ activity which you can use to first draw out your teams assumptions and turn them into your research learning goals to reflect back on after you’ve finished conducting your research.

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Dalia El-Shimy — Creativity in research: designing your own methods when the usual ones won't cut it

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106346000917028865

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/delshimy

Dalia’s talk was another highlight for me blending theory with practice exploring how we are tasked with being creative as researchers trying to develop methods to answer questions. Dalia gave us a breakdown of Boden (1990)’s definition of H-creativity and P-creativity and a framework for how P-creativity (also know as everyday creativity) was used on a number of her projects.

It was very affirming that we’re able to flex our creativity in building and delivering research and recommend checking it out. The Sanders and Staplers (2013) P-Creativity framework (pictured in the tweets) was likely the most photographed slide of the whole conference.

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Gerard Hogan — Crowdsourcing insights

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106351988717940736

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/gerard-hogan-352a33182

Gerard’s talk was great, it was another on the theme of how do we scale research when we’re under resourced and gave a great guidelines for quality control based on what he learned trialling this methodology. 

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Amir Ansari & Aimee Gonzalez-Cameron — Old tools can do new tricks: using Trello to conduct qualitative research more efficiently

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106357699472588800

LinkedIn profile — Amir: linkedin.com/in/mramiransari Aimee: linkedin.com/in/aimeegonzalez

Amir and Aimee gave a deep dive into using Trello for research note taking, synthesis and analysis going. If you’re unfamiliar with Trello it was originally used as a project management tool but has been adopted by a number of UX and Researchers as a great tool for preventing the double handling of physical to digital notes/post-its/synthesis. Hopefully the tutorial video that Amir and Aimee spoke to will be released because it was a great illustration of how to use it!

During this talk Amir also managed to create a new UX dance move called the post-it shuffle: twitter.com/RohanIrvine/status/1106402445909856256

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10 Minute Talks

Omead Kohanteb — Research road trip

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/omeadk

Omead took us through the Google Research Van, how it was set up and why it had been so impactful getting them outside of the Silicon Valley bubble and into some unique places. Omead also shared that insights they gathered using the van lead to feature developments like park and ride time estimations and controlling your music within maps navigation.

Tim Kariotis — Embedding privacy into UX Design using contextual integrity

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/timothy-kariotis

This was a standout for me and one that definitely warrants a longer presentation! Tim smashed through a tonne of research into consent integrity and what it means to get consent for one situation that later changes, and with it, the participants view of whether or not they consented to it. Tim detailed his research and methods that he used to simulate what future experiences might look like so he could tease out how consent changed across contents. This was a very very brief look into a complex and integral part of our work and one I think we all need to spend a little more time thinking about.

Debbie Spence — Design Research & Branding

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/debbiespence

Debbie was really great at dispelling a few myths and stereotypes I’ve heard regularly about branding and taking everyone through the transformation marketing teams have been going through to use human centred design and design research as part of their evolving practice. Debbie then went on to go through a case study of how she had been using design research techniques to build better brands. If you’re interested in Design Research and Branding Debbie is currently hiring so hit her up!

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Cybelle Ledez — Shifting the needle on UN Sustainable Development Goals through targeted design research

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106391012128120832

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/cybelle-ledez-002302118

Cybelle works for a consultancy ThinkPlace who use the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) to asses what clients and projects they take on as an agency. Cybelle had a number of really interesting case studies that went though what the SDG’s of the project were and how to understand the communities they went into had to take a very unique approach. Unfortunately I missed tweeting the middle section of her presentation so definitely have a look on Twitter to find the case studies I missed!

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Kathleen Asjes — Overcoming the user researcher's fallacy

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106402038999482368

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/kathleenasjes

We were lucky enough to have some great international speakers at the conference with Kathleen coming flying in from Scandinavia to share her experience getting research done throughout multiple iterations of a research team at Schibsted Media. I really enjoyed hearing the problems of a team of one to a team of many and how while things changed a lot of what we struggled with remained. Kathleen like many other presenters was very pragmatic in her approach, I think they’re up to 34 different product teams at the moment and she was specifically told she would never get 34 researchers!

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Gary Barber — Dealing with compassion fatigue

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106414777725665280

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/garybarber

Gary’s talk was a great response to the conversation of how do we take care of ourselves so we don’t lose great people. It was a deep dive into the world of Vicarious Resilience and brought together a lot of the safety practices and principles you find in the social sector, medical professions and high compassion fatigue industries. It was a call to action to take our health seriously and gave concrete examples of how we can protect ourselves and the people around us from secondary trauma. As researchers we do a job, we should safe doing that job, and safety is a set of procedures that we can put in place and follow to ensure we, and the people around us don’t burnout. I recommend looking into this presentation!

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Weidan Li — Introducing Symbolic Interaction - a social lens to explore user experience

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106420486781583360

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/weidanlee

This presentation was both entertaining and informative as Weidan took the conference goers through the Symbolic Interaction Principles and taught us about social context and design. Weidan used several great examples both as an introduction to the concepts and then how it was applied researching Chinese Millenial’s relationship and social construct of money for a bank that Weidan did research for. It was a great framework for setting up the assumptions that his clients had and the real world social context that they actually had to design for.

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Nicole Fernandez — 7 skills I wish I learned before becoming a UX Researcher

Tweet thread — threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106426432098430976

LinkedIn profile — linkedin.com/in/nicolefernandez

Nicole’s 7 skills were all very practical and very relatable especially as someone who was self taught I found a lot of these lessons out only when I was trying to apply research. I think this would make an excellent set of “What to be mindful of” for your graduate program or juniors as they make their transition into Design Research.

My final thoughts

Massive thanks to Steve Baty for putting this program together, the amount of people who commented on how each presentation flowed into the next seamlessly with high level presentations dovetailing into the practical advice is a testament to the amount of time and effort you put in to make a great conference. Thanks also to the UX Australia team who helped put everything together.

Lastly I loved meeting and hanging out with the research community! We’re a special group of very caring, insightful and thoughtful people so any time I get to share with you is very special.