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Another year, another wonderful Design Research conference! 

The first year Design Research ran I was excited to finally have a conference dedicated to research, not only for the content, but also to be surrounded by fellow research nerds celebrating, commiserating and breathing life into each other's research practice with new perspectives on challenges I had been thinking were insurmountable.

Even with the transition to a fully online conference I still leave re-energised, knowing there’s a thriving community of practitioners pushing our industry to do better and be better.

So what was Design Research 2021 like?

There was a good mixture of presentations this year, both immediately applicable to your work, and more philosophical approaches to design research.

I’ve grouped the presentations into a few different categories, somewhat to help you decide which ones you might want to explore in more detail, but mainly because I can’t help myself synthesising everything :D

Broadly they are, Research Philosophy, Methods, Research Practice, Stakeholder Engagement, Remote Research, and Complexity and Context.

Research Philosophy 

Indi Young, Jax Wechsler, Laura Ryan

These three presentations were about how we approach our research philosophy from a different perspective. Indi spoke about Purpose, Jax spoke about trauma and Laura spoke about the wellbeing economy.

Methods

Kim Chatterjee, Michael Bloom, Alana Wade & Serena Lai, Vidhika Bansal, Caylie Panuccio, Ben Kraal, Vivienne Dinh & Kimberly Nguyen-Don

The methods presentations had a couple sub categories, deep dives into methods and facets within methods.

The deep dives looked at empathy walks, diary studies, guerilla testing and recruiting diverse participants. In particular the empathy walks Kim presented seemed incredible for building connection.

The facets within methods looked at sociolinguistics and how we speak influences our research, how memory affects how we recall experiences, and why quantitative measures are integral and easier to learn than we think. In particular Ben’s presentation about measures was really insightful.

Research Practice

Jess Nichols, Stephen Cox, Ruth Ellison & Michelle Pickrell, Styliana Sarris

Jess and Stephen spoke about the research practice of a product company. They both had a wealth of knowledge and information about practice management. Jess focussed on formalising a framework of assessing where organisation’s research practice maturity, team maturity, and how you could best work within it. Stephen focussed on the transition from a design research practice into a product research practice and the different emphasis and toolkit he needed to adopt in the new practice. I found myself nodding in furious agreement throughout both these presentations!

Ruth & Michelle presented their methodology for turning data into actionable insights, it was only 20 minutes but they managed to pack a tonne of information into it. Styliana broke down the different sections of a psychology research paper and why they were important. It’s a really great way to reflect on how you could template your research and what you need to include to make them meaningful, scannable and repeatable.

Stakeholder Engagement

Dalia El-Shimy, Kate Hardgrave, Brooke Jamieson, Lucy Denton

A common topic in many of the presentations was where and how to engage stakeholders. Specifically Dalia spoke about how to assess the power and influence research has in your organisation. Kate spoke about how the influence of great research and communication keeps building upon itself for huge transformational change. Brooke focussed on communication and learning how best to develop your ability to engage with stakeholders and Lucy spoke about changing the way you report research to be more impactful.

Remote Research

Lauren Isaacson, Alex Crook, Stephanie Lamont

In case you missed it, there's a bit of thing going around globally and it’s thrust significant change upon our research practices, luckily for a number of years we’ve had researchers who work completely remotely!

Lauren’s presentation was a great overview of the tools and techniques she’s been using running her practice remotely. It was great and I recommend checking it out.

Alex shared her experiences taking the ABC’s in person research remote, with the added complexity of redesigning their methodologies to accommodate children! 

Stephanie’s presentation explored how remote research methodologies presented a new opportunity to get stakeholders engaged in research.

Complexity and Context 

Paul Merrel, Rebecca Hendry, Sean Rom & Peta Marks, Olivia Kirk & Belinda Tobias, Saher Zafar, Katrina Ryl & Roland Wimbush

These presentations are a collection of case studies highlighting complexity often uncovered as part of planning, conducting and reporting research. Each one emphasises the importance of understanding nuance, adapting or adjusting, and reflecting with an appreciation for how the product or service exists in the greater context of a whole experience.

The collaboration between Meld & InsideOut's as well as Olivia and Belinda’s presentation about people’s health journey were particularly interesting to me.

So what did I take away from the conference?

—Trauma is everywhere, we are likely to come across it by chance or by design because of the work we do as researchers. We need to be prepared for this, and reflecting back on my own experiences I haven’t been, and it’s likely harmed participants, colleagues and myself. So I want to reduce that happening in the future, and I’d encourage everyone to listen to Jax’s presentation and learn to be trauma informed researchers.

—We have to evolve our research practice to be able to accurately capture people’s purpose, open our organisation’s to the complexity of people’s experience and understanding this deep knowledge is necessary to accurately define the scope and context of the products and services that keep you competitive. Indi has some great illustrations capturing these concepts and I have no doubt they’ll help you articulate many things that have been on the tip of your tongue.

—There’s just so much work we do based on our experience which isn’t formalised into processes and frameworks, and I think it’s holding a lot of us back from being able to challenge our colleagues, create space for fulfilling research, and help us develop into the leaders our industry needs to thrive. Jess’s prioritisation framework and whole presentation is really good at covering this. I’d encourage everyone to start thinking about how they’re engaging in their practice and identify where you’re making those gut calls, it’s where your unique experience is setting you apart and is likely going to be incredibly valuable to share with the community.

—We never stop learning. Every year the breadth of things to learn gets wider and the depth people share gets deeper. I feel like there’s a million more areas of my own practice to look at now I’ve been re-energised. In particular I really want to learn Ruth & Michelle’s framework for actionable insights, which I believe is a half day workshop and I hope there’s one coming up soon! 

I hope the Design Research 2021 provokes you; to think about your own practice, to articulate your personal research philosophy, to know what you were already doing well, to try something new. Most of all I’m hopeful it scratched the always curious itch that comes with being a researcher, never happy with how it is because you know it could be better!

If you happen to have missed the conference this year, Design Research will be back again in 2022! Sign up to our fortnightly newsletter and follow our socials to keep up to date with event news!

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This article is by Rohan Irvine, Lead UX Researcher at PageUp. You can follow him on Twitter and Linkedin.

Design Research 2021 took place online from March 17 - 19. Presentation slide decks, audio and transcripts will all be available on our website soon.