While design research wasn't the overall theme at this past weekend's northeast district conference, it was certainly a prominent part of it. On Saturday, Marty Gage spoke about the how to better communicate design research findings to designers - focusing on the essential transition between research findings and design solutions. And research was wide-awake on sleepy Sunday. We had our two-parter (panel/portfolio review)focusing on design research:
During the morning panel discussion, Art Swanson discussed the value of data visualization as a way of presenting information to clients. Visualization, as opposed to analysis, presents data in an unfiltered, interactive manner to allow people to draw their own conclusions. He suggested wefeelfine.organd gapminder.org as a couple of interesting examples of data visualization.
Sunmee Kim spoke next, focusing on the various aspects of a design research project at Motorola. She finished by discussing an internal tool used by all of the design researchers around the world at Motorola to document and share data.
And Marty Gage appeared again, combining clear tactical advice with humor in discussing what should go into a design research portfolio. It should be an extension of your design portfolio (if you have one), but is about meaning, not sexy imagery.
Following some great Q&A with the speakers, we had the first design research portfolio review, which was combined with the overall portfolio review (see photo above, courtesy of Core 77, and some more photos from that session).
My initial feedback on participating in the research portfolio review was that while there weren't many examples of detailed research projects to review, it was useful to have professional researchers giving input to design students. I'd love to hear feedback from other reviewers/reviewees, so please feel free to add your comments.
