From Design Research Workshop by Kelly Goto

Hi Everyone,

I went to the "Design Research: The art of getting it done" workshop by Kelly Goto yesterday, Wednesday, 7th October. This workshop is part of the Web Directions South 2009 Conference. The workshop was held at the Masonic Centre, Sydney. I've gained a lot of information and knowledge in one day. It's a pretty intensive workshop and we went through things very quickly. However, it was a pretty hands-on practical approach. Overall, it was a fun and enjoyable session.

I would like to share with you a few notes that I took, which I might be useful to you. I didn't take many detailed notes (I apologised in advance!). As I said before, it's pretty hands-on and we pretty much went straight into doing the practical exercise.

As mentioned before, the topic is about design research. To put it simply, it felt like I was doing a whole semester subject pack in one day.

We had lectures on Design Research. Kelly used a quote from Liz Sanders of Dubberly.com to describe what Design Research is. According to Sanders, "Design Research is a jumble of approaches that, while competing as well as complimentary, nonetheless share a common goal: to drive, inspire and inform the design development process". This includes research methods such as user needs analysis, usability testing, card sorting, contextual inquiry and so on.