Dissertation research (in progress)
As an industrial designer, I am interested in bettering the design/research dialogue and improving how designers access, utilize and integrate research in their work to ultimately create better end-user experiences. As the audience for technology becomes more diverse, resulting in less innate understanding of end-users, designers will need to rely on user research more to understand their audience. How individual designer capacity, proclivity and interests (informed by design cognition research) intersect with reliance, trust and ability to utilize user research is the central question of my dissertation.
I expect to defend my dissertation in winter or spring quarter 2010.
As an industrial designer, I am interested in bettering the design/research dialogue and improving how designers access, utilize and integrate research in their work to ultimately create better end-user experiences. As the audience for technology becomes more diverse, resulting in less innate understanding of end-users, designers will need to rely on user research more to understand their audience. How individual designer capacity, proclivity and interests (informed by design cognition research) intersect with reliance, trust and ability to utilize user research is the central question of my dissertation.
I expect to defend my dissertation in winter or spring quarter 2010.