Design ethnography is the art of learning from the people, culture and contexts you are designing for. If design is in fact a human-centered discipline, the question becomes not only who are the humans we are designing for, but also why and when, how and why. Whether we call this type of research market research, usability research, user experience research, or ethnographic research, such methods can be applied in such a wide array of disciplines.
This course will look at how it is applied by anthropologists, sociologists, journalists and artists more generally in the fields of fashion design, food and film as well as larger corporate entities like Pixar, Apple, Netflix and Intel.
As a designer of things that people use or experience, products and services, you need to understand the various methods of research that can shape your process and outcomes. What are your goals, how will you get there and what happens when you do? At this stage it’s all about experimenting and coming up with a set of questions you might be curious about. Then, how might you learn more by interviewing processes and focus groups, and then what? Implement and even changing behavior. This class hopes to ignite your curiosity around how and why we come to make the things we make, by studying the how’s and why’s of previous designers and visionaries, and how they might have integrated research into their design processes, or not. Ultimately, it is about our own personal explorations of why we do what we do, and how to do it more thoughtfully with an end user in mind, whether to give them what they want or what we think they might want, or to give them something they never knew they wanted.
- Instructor: Cari Borja