Design Research for Strategy & Innovation

Course Description

In this comprehensive course on Design Research for Strategy & Innovation, students will dive deep into the world of qualitative design research and design synthesis, gaining the necessary skills and knowledge to tackle complex problems in the domains of technology, behavior, and society. Through a combination of lectures, hands-on exercises, and real-world projects, students will learn various techniques and processes to gather data in the field, analyze it in a rigorous and substantial way, and extract multi-dimensional insights, meaning, and trends.

Throughout the course, students will develop a research plan that emphasizes the Contextual Inquiry methodology and learn how to conduct research according to that plan. They will also explore various methods of design synthesis, such as data mapping, work modeling, and task-flow modeling, in the context of a large-scale interaction design problem.

In addition to these technical skills, students will also gain valuable communication skills, learning how to educate non-designers in the value of ethnographic research and how to craft and communicate the functional and emotional attributes of a more ideal human-experience within a problem space. They will also identify and utilize the appropriate tools to capture and synthesize user data into visualizations of an existing service or problem landscape.

By the end of the course, students will be able to create comprehensive research plans, extract rich insights from data, and develop design criteria and opportunity statements that address real-world problems. These skills will be invaluable for students pursuing careers in design, research, or related fields, and will enable them to approach problems in a more structured and rigorous way.