How well do you understand the community and or clients you serve? In today’s landscape, your community and or clients often can’t express their needs or desires. Design research can create a bridge and lead your design process in exciting directions, that get innovative results.

What is design research: a combination of ethnographic approaches by understanding behavior in context.  User centered value - leading with empathy value for user comes first. Needfinding- how you identify your community's actual needs vs perceived, What would you learn about how shop at your local grocery store if you were able to observe yourself do it. Qualitative results, results ctake form of user experience diagrams, personas, and narratives.

This workshop provides strategies and tools for engaging your community and or client base to learn their real needs versus perceived needs. You will learn the basic ethnographic techniques to test your assumptions through observation, how to build surveys, how to conduct interviews and how to engage in learning activities with your community. From deciding what problem to solve, what product to make, or who to make it for; there are many stages where design research can provide answers. At any stage of your nonprofit, business, design career or startup; harnessing the power of design research and learning to avoid common pitfalls, can lead to smarter and more impactful products, services and programs.

In this workshop, you will learn:
1.”How to” use best practices when conducting field research: we will focus on observation, surveying and  interviewing techniques
2.”How to”  make sense of the data collected on the field: organize and unpack observations using an empathy map
3. “How to”  process the findings into an actionable strategy.

In collaboration with  Brielle Maxwell of Live With Design:
Live With Design empowers a community of designers and organizations with innovative design tools and encourages collaboration among disciplines to form solutions for today’s challenges. Live with design produces educational events, labs, workshops and collaborations that focus on the transformative power of  social design. Learn more at www.livewithdesign.org.