Meld Friday sessions: a research brainstorm

On Friday last it was my turn to organise the activity for our Meld Friday Sessions.

I’ve been doing some prep. for a new service design project and at the same time I’ve been reviewing my year of being a Meldster. After this review I decided I’d like to learn new design research methods as a way to keep my skills fresh. Getting the Meldsters’ help in this seemed a good thing (9 heads are better than 1).

For the activity we first divided into three groups. Each group was given a pile of 20 design research method cards (on stickies). In our groups we had to place each of the design methods into a job category. These categories cover some of the types of projects Meld is working on at the moment: Long-term strategy; Understanding users; Designing a new product or service; or Generating requirements.

We’ve now got a wall of 60 design methods aligned to different types of work. I hope that we can build on this. My intention is that the methodology wall will provide us all with the inspiration to use different processes during our research. I would hate to think that we’d ever get stale.

Here’s Niina and the methodology wall:

I’d like to thank the following sites, posts, people and books for help in collecting the 60 methods:

• Chauncy Wilson of Autodesk and Johnny Holland for the publication of Autodesk’s 100 UX Design & Evaluation Methods
• Jon Kolko’s book Exposing the Magic of Design: A practitioner’s guide to the methods and theory of synthesis
• Usability Methods from Foraker Labs
• Service Design Tools from Roberta Tassi’s thesis work
• IDEO’s Method Cards