CR 311D Creative Research: An Introduction

• CR 311D Creative Research investigates the research process for the creative industries

Objectives of the Course

• Recall principles of creative research
• Apply competencies in research projects in visual communication

Course Program

• Module 1
• Module 2
• Module 3
• Module 4

Grading System

• Excellent: 97-100 = 1.0
• Very Good: 94-96 = 1.25
• Good: 91-93 = 1.50
• Satisfactory: 88-90 = 1.75
• Fair: 85-87 = 2.0, 82-84 = 2.25, 79-81 = 2.50, 76-78 = 2.75
• Passed: 75 = 3.0
• Conditional Passed = 4.0
• Failed: 74 and below = 5.0

Module 1: Introduction to Creative Research

• Duration: January 16-February 3, 2023 (Weeks 1-4), 24 hours

Objectives

• Become familiar with creative research and design strategies
• Apply research strategies in given scenarios

Creative Research

• Creative research involves using research methods in graphic design
• Influences the approach to design
• Provides tools to plan research, account for project scope, and manage the creative process

Research-Driven Design

• Studying typographic principles, color theory, grid placement, shape relationships, and visual contrasts informs aesthetic decisions.
• Demands on visual communication designers now require designers to understand business issues and ROI
• Incorporating research methods into the design process aids in meeting this demand
• Research-driven design redefines the designer/client relationship, expanding creative and financial gains
• Research-driven design helps define the audience, support a concept, advocate for an aesthetic, and measure campaign effectiveness.
• Tools like market research, ethnographic study, and data analytics can communicate with a target audience, create effective messages, and assess project development

Person-First Design

• Person-first design crafts tailored communications by empathizing with the audience
• A research-driven design strategy enables a better understanding of the client and user needs with more upfront work
• Research findings and participant feedback allow for deeper comprehension of the issues at hand
• Metrics for project success can be established through research findings between the client and creative
• Audience participation and iteration can raise important questions in design process
• The creative team gains a better understanding of context, including environmental factors that influence use
• Validation and testing of concepts during prototyping helps avoid costly mistakes
• Linked to higher customer satisfaction, faster time to market, and greater ROI

User-Centered Design

• Integrates research into the creative process, offering insights into target audience needs, behaviors, and expectations
• Increases end user satisfaction with a product/service, experience, or brand
• Applicable to various design systems (interactive to print, packaging to campaigns) in commercial/socially driven projects
• Focuses on a specific audience, developing a project to serve their needs

Human-Centered Design

• Incorporates similar approaches as user-centered design, emphasizing deep research into behavior and iterative processes
• Addresses the needs of every individual, regardless of ability, age, education, or cultural background
• Aims to create design artifacts and systems that serve everyone, avoiding audience segmentation
• Terms include "Design for All" and "Universal Design" interchangeably

Ethical Considerations

• Emphasizing that embracing human-centered design is good for business, many also argue there is a moral and ethical imperative
• Many include the principles of accessibility over aesthetics/economics

Design as Understanding

• Graphic designers need empathy
• Research is a must in the design process.
• Needed to understand clients, their target audience, and the reasons for communication
• Research aids visual directions and solutions

Historical Perspective

• Practitioners throughout history have used research methods in design processes

Bauhaus Beginnings

• László Moholy-Nagy described a tactile design problem at the Bauhaus (Germany, 1919–33) and New Bauhaus (Chicago, 1937)
• User testing done on the blind population for projects
• Students created value scales from materials like leather/sandpaper with graduated steps, then testers gave comments and experiences

Nielsen Ratings

• Marketing research was pioneered by Arthur C. Nielsen Sr. in the late 1920s
• Developed innovative tools for clients with objective information on marketing effects
• Used random sampling to quantify market share
• Global expansion began in 1939, with offices now worldwide

Design Strategy

• Business is driven by innovation and customer insight
• Strategists integrate design and outreach into a company's culture
• The design strategist uses user research and a creative process
• combines design paradigms
• Has a deep understanding of the audience to address business and community needs

Design Creates Value

• It visually differentiates a business in a crowded marketplace
• Design can be viewed as subjective, but clients want assurance of success (ROI)
• Proving value generation is difficult, and smaller firms may lack resources
• Agencies and studios have proprietary methods for measuring proof

The Design Staircase

• Stage One: No Design - Design is not important in project
• Stage Two: Design as Styling - Design is decorative
• Stage Three: Design as Process - Design develops new products/services
• Stage Four: Design as Strategy - Design is aligned with the company

Chapter 2: Research Strategies + Tactics

• Research findings help designers solve problems and illustrate value
• A research-driven approach defines problem-solving

Quantitative and Qualitative Research

• Quantitative: measures variables and uses numbers/logic/objective data; Ex. measuring temperature to determine climate change to determine a rate
• Qualitative: Understands the qualities; Uses words and images; Ex. Group interview to understand social behaviour

Example of Quantitative and Qualitative Research

• Quantitative: He is 6 feet 7 inches tall, They eat 6 meals a day, The president's approval rating is at 60 percent, The cruise ship served 3,000 passengers, The cat weighs 20 lbs (9 kg).
• Qualitative: He is tall, They eat all the time, The president is well liked, The cruise ship was huge, The cat is fat.

Primary and Secondary Research

• Primary: Original research conducted by an organization for its own use. Ex. Observational research combined with surveys to target a set of people on a product
• Secondary: Reviewing data/findings that have been published. Ex. A record label obtaininng a copy of makeup research to determine marketing strategies for music sales.

Example of Primary and Secondary Research

• Primary: Commission a focus group of skateboarders, Hire a marketing research firm to collect data about BMW owners, Engage octogenarians in a photo-ethnographic study at a nursing care facility
• Secondary: Read skateboard magazines, Purchase previously published demographic data about the luxury car market, Surf stock photography websites for images representative of seniors in nursing care facilities

Formative + Summative Research

• Formative/Exploratory: Gain insight or define a question. Ex. Literature reviews, trend forecasting, video ethnography, surveys, and testing.
• Summative/Conclusive: Frame and decipher the outcome of an investigative process. Ex. Focus groups, user testing, surveys, and web analytics.

Basic and Applied Research

• Basic: gains new knowledge, done out of curiosity. For designers, can result in new business offerings.
• Applied: for a project, for commercial/public use. increasingly expected in design.

Triangulation

• Combines different research methods to illuminate one area of study, giving credibility to qualitative research
• Overcomes validity issues inherent in singular qualitative approaches, ensures more accurate representation of truth of findings
• Forms include secondary research, method, and investigator triangulation

Literature Review

• It's a comprehensive investigation using documents, publications, articles, websites, and books regarding a specific study
• Can include a client's corporate communications where it is a communicatons audit
• Allows researcher to understand associations and current market conditions
• Clarifies problems
• Literature reviews save time by framing problems and informing/preventing already undertaken efforts

Importance in Client Relationships

• Can give insight to corporate culture, market trends, and competing companies.
• It can influence search engine optimization as well
• Requires a plan to find/extract certain information
• Can include a librarian to aid the research

Thesis Context

• A type of academic essay where synthasizing and giving an overview of works
• It helps understand one's particular discipline

Guidelines in Organizing a Literature Review

• Introduction: defines topics with reasons and trends
• Body: groups different areas of thematic clusters by grouping themes and ordering them from cluster to cluster
• Conclusion: Reviews the themes of innovative studies, and questions/gaps in the field.

Module 2: Research Strategies + Tactics (creative research)

Communication Audit

• A review of organizations to better understand what a company is communicating (clients, customers, constituents)
• Goal in better understanding the messaging an organization hopes to communicate
• Builds on info gained from literature review
• Illustrates internal and external image.
• Helps reveal where different communications are working through examining media channels

How to do it

• Determine key areas to have audited
• Choose research methods
• Collect and evaluate existing communications
• Looking outward: Query customers
• Looking outward: Query your community
• Looking inward: Query your volunteers and staff
• Examine media coverage
• Look at SWOT analysis
• Look at future communication plans like a communications consultant

Tactic: Competitor Profiling

• Evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of an organization and its competition
• Uses open-source intelligence or secondary sources to determine the competitve advantages
• Helps with brand placing, and the qualities that show off a product in the market.
• Provides the designer with their client's understanding
• It helps a creative team communicate empathy for their company's bottom line, and shared understanding mitigation

Think of Competitor Profiling as a Communication Audit of the Competition

• Goal is to draft summaries so that people in the same market are better well informed
• Needs compilation of open-source information (competitor's company history, finances, personnel, etc)
• Facts and gathering assemble the reports to determine industry peers:
  • What does competitor A say about themselves
  • What do external audiences say about competitor A
  • What are the discernible strengths and weaknesses of company A

Forming a Plan

• It is used at the start of a plan to help the creative team understand the market and history
• combine with companies by auditable and identifying a different client (ex comprehensive process that combines companies)
• Careful investigations help for larger communication to determine messaging
• Helps you identify your target audience, and other factors

Ethnographic Research

• In design, ethnographic research helps the creative team understand their project's target audience- who is it even for?
• By analyzing user's perspectives, designers are able to note how the design piece should perform- what should it do with it?

Ethnography

• Created by anthropologists, ethnography is a research strategy that focuses on the link to human behaviour and culture.
• When choosing subjects for ethnographic study it can use the criteria of geographic and interests
• Macro-ethnography studies large populaces of people, where as micro ethnography focuses on smaller populations
• When choosing a community for the researcher to follow, they will conduct an exam, and research
• It is necessary for a researcher to gain the credibility from participants (people might not act natural if they are uncomfortable or anxious about observation)

Method

• A researcher might find people knowledgeable in that field, who may lead to new informants and will use a snowball method to conduct interviews
• Those interviews might contain open-ended questions
• It is important to document your interviews, the field notes, photos and videos, to provide valuable information for end users
• After that it will return to test that assumption

Ethnography and Qualitative Analysis

• Subjective researchers are considered to be as much or if not more than any quantitative analyses

Some researchers that have the prior experience

• Because ethnographic research involves humans
• Cannot separate one's personal worldview

In Depth Documentation

• With interviews, field notes, and photograph
• There are many ethical considerations for study and the community that the researcher must be wary of

Contextual Inquiry

• When interveiews are conducted near a location, it is called a contextual inquiry.
• This allows you to document what the subject is claiming to do
• Permits the team to consider physical space and people within
• Gives you cues for interpersonal interactions

Contextual Inquiry Reveals

• Real world issues that might be unnoticed
• Reveals environmental information
• Gathers a baseline and directs where some insight can be

Observational Research

• The the systematic process of views without interactions
• Instead of interviews observing human activity may provide useful information on a group's behaviour
• Researcher may be unaware with the group under the study

Research Keys

• Investigators must remain open
• If observations are conducted in different ways must be concealed.

Formative Hypothesis

• Can provide information on behaviours of a target audience
• Can be used as multilateral
• The investigator must have the ability to document and understand all goals of the observation
• Ethical considerations often hide cameras from the private eye

Photo Ethnography

• Subjects are asked to record daily activities
• Subjects can capture their attitudes, behaviourers motivations in extended periods of time
• Can help with perspective; provide insights into lives

Important

• Identify participants that are are representative of others
• Time spend on imaging

Benefit: Control

• It is cheap to do this technique
• However observational validity may occur
• Can cause other behaviours to be cataloged

Can be Difficult

• If participants cannot chose and select
• Select images that present something larger

Self-Ethnography

• Auto ethnography is and investigation
• A person document their own experience, as a a participant
• An activity in the user's perspective

Pros

• Lens into the perspective
• Familiarizes the team on a variety of the audience
• Can reveal new insights often

Self-Ethnography is useful.

• Doesn't require all requirements of a proper research plan such as scheduling etc
• However this may be an activity that kicks starts the research stage
• Personal experience can add addition to research questions

Interviewing

• Be immersive
• Requires one that is reflective and honest

Unstructured Interviews

• Information is gathered by the participant's direction
• Cover certain topics related to people involved
• Goal is to foster a relation with others so that they openly share understandings

Interviews and Objectives

• The researchers is able to see from the other's eye and uncover knowledge of what they do
• You should use interviews to frame a problem
• Collect plan and determine what you want as well as questions

Questions

• They structure the questions to allow answerability
• When applicable ask to teach something
• It is recommend you have another person help

Qualitative

• Can help create an understanding and invalidate things

Visual Anthropology

• Aid a means of interpeting cultural behaviours
• Is the trained eye of a researcher rather than the subject
• Illuminating an external view
• Documentation is good for solving

Important Information

• This may assist designers discover things regarding behaviours

Module 3 :

• Marketing Research
• Market analysis is the sociology of behaviour
• Does not refer to a singular analysis, but rather a way used to describe preference

Market Analysis

• Measures growing and composition of business
• Considers the interest and price numbers

Demographics

• Statistical data of people or segments
• Provides some information to a variety

In Depth Data

• Data allows you create profiles
• Offers an insight to people
• Includes but not limited to gender, race, religion

Researchers study data

• To clarity motivations

Demographics are formative

• Use demographics to divine an audience

Important Considerations

• Often makes general categories

Psychographics

• Measures opinions and interests
• Demographics, it counts information and tastes

Help Insight

• Psychographics provide insight of the group study

Using and Solving

• Clarify for creative approaches