Hasta La Ideas

For everyone returning, welcome back to Project Medusa. You’re (still) invited to this party! Every AIGA member who wanted to participate was invited to this party, in fact, which ensured a great cross-section of designers. Intrigued? (If none of this makes any sense to you, click here.) Ziba produced this research effort to look into AIGA’s future, and learn directly from its members—working in Reno, Providence and everywhere in between—what the future of the organization should look like. This meant, implicitly, that younger members’ voices were key, and that drove decisions about many of the elements we’re going to look at in Part 2. The key to designing your own research project is know your audience… you can’t expect much success hunting for a totally unfamiliar animal.

We’ll start with some overarching considerations, and then get into the nitty-gritty, with a checklist for conducting rich, relevant research.

1.) Preparation is key.
If you take only one thing away from this series, it should be the importance of being prepared. Without proper planning, you can only try and catch up after the fact: too little, too late. This flows directly out of advice from Part 1 of the Project Medusa How-To series. We can’t emphasize enough that you need to do your research before you start the research. What do you want to know? It’s difficult find anything of meaning unless you know (at the very least) where to start looking, even with highly sophisticated design research methods. With your goals identified, think back to your audience: if you don’t ask the right people, it won’t matter how good the question is. Rubbish in means rubbish out, no matter how you slice it. (More on this in Part 3, still to come.)

2.) Everything is intentional… and should be directed.
Project Medusa took the form of an interactive film with coordinating activities, to guide individual AIGA chapters to host their own informational workshops and sketch a new vision for the entire organization. This allowed Ziba to control the overall look and feel, in keeping with a designed research outreach, while still allowing us to leverage the personal knowledge and connections that each local moderator brought to the table.

Even if your research effort will be a simple web survey, consider how your presentation might affect your results. Be intentional with whatever tools you’ve got: slips of paper, a series of roundtable discussions, or formal focus groups. Consider your biases—what you think you know starting out, and any other assumptions surrounding the inquiry—and do what you can to make these supposed liabilities into assets, too.

(more…)