Apr 3, 2022
“Why are you not writing any of this down?”
“You should write a Medium essay.”
“You need to write about this.”
Exhibit A: M, fellow researcher, erstwhile colleague, and longtime friend, calling me out after every conversation about research.
Okay, then. Okay, M. You win! (Even if it’s a year late.)
☼
For something I love so much, I talk about it so little.
I’ve met very few people who /get/ the kind of research I do. UX is a good shorthand for it, but UX draws on an image of usability testing and best practices and every single justification for every single product improvement.
If I had to make a comparison, I’d say design research is more akin to the research you’d do to produce a play, than the research you’d do to publish a paper. I say play because the outcomes of design research are affected so much by its environment: Whom you’re presenting to, why you started, and every variable along the way that might have shifted.
Design research is a way of understanding the present in order to create for the future.
My favourite moments from research are with participants:
☼
I love the doing. The interviewing, the immersion, the coding (no, not that kind of coding), the clustering, the stories. Above all else the stories. Finding my own writing voice; breaking down and building up frameworks from qualitative data; helping others navigate the misty world of design research; telling stories about humans and the funny things we do.
All of this love seems like it could be parceled nicely into essays / talks / workshops / tweet threads / posts on corporate social media i.e. solid experience repackaged into endless promotion material for easy consumption!
I haven’t done it because I don’t feel like I can.
It’s hard for the work in practice to live up to the ideals of the work in theory. There’s a type of shame that exists for me in the gap between the kind of research I want to do (provocative in interaction, elegant in experience, abstract in theme), and the kind of research that I end up doing, whether through a lack of time, budget, or willpower.
☼
My favourite moments from research are with stakeholders:
☼
By nature I’m a problem solver. I’m stubborn about things I care about, and gentle on everything else.
A problem I have yet to solve: My mind takes every piece of data and runs with it, extrapolates, finds patterns, makes connections; my heart is always anxious that I have not done enough. So I cram in as much as I can: Paint the picture, build the framework, try to land that plane — only to find that I’ve run too far ahead and now need to turn back for the rest of the village.
I am in love with information, but I am still finding a balance between fighting for it and fighting about it.
☼
My favourite moments from research are with my team:
☼
I wanted to write a list of my principles for design research, a little bundle of shorthand for all the knowledge I’ve earned in seven years of doing this. Instead I ended up talking about why I love the work and why it’s so difficult.
Is that a reason to keep doing it? Because it’s difficult and few people can do it well, at least in the flavour I know and love? Because it’s easy to get recognition for a skill that’s limited in history, that I find myself lucky to have found early?
My strengths and weaknesses as a person and as a professional are the same: I love the fuzzy, the unquantifiable, the click where it all comes together. I’m looking back all those years now at my freshly graduated self and realising that not much has changed: I want to solve interesting problems and create elegant experiences.
☼
Each researcher has their own measure of success: Is it verifiable? Is it reusable? Is it reliable? And these are all important, to varying degrees, to different organisations. But what I care about beyond honesty is: Is it inspiring? Is it surprising? Does it make you want to make something better for the future?
I still can’t write a list of top five tips that will change your research life, and I don’t know if that’s what I want to do. What I can do, I’m starting to see, is take a sincere look at the work I’ve accidentally spent all of my twenties on, and explain why it was worth it.
Caveat: This piece is still in live editing mode.