Creative Research Module 1: Introduction

• CR 311D is a Creative Research Module
• Instructor is Ana Neliza B. del Mundo-Angeles from the College of Architecture and Fine Arts
• All references are found at the end of each module

Module 1: Introduction to Creative Research

• Course duration is from January 16 to February 3, 2023
• Course covers Week 1 to Week 4, totaling 24 hours
• To be familiar with creative research and application to design and design strategies
• Be able to apply research strategies in given scenario's

Creative Research

• It's about research methods and their practical application to graphic design
• It influences the way design is approached
• Provides tools and tactics to plan research approach, account for project scope, and manage creative process

Research-Driven Design

• Research methods aid in meeting design demands
• This redefines the designer/client relationship.
• It can help define an audience, support a concept, advocate for an aesthetic, or measure a campaign's effectiveness
• Tools include market research, ethnographic study, and data analytics

Person-First Design

• Targeted, resonant communications are crafted by empathy for the audience
• Research-driven design strategy focuses on understanding client and end-user needs.
• Research findings with participant feedback allow for tailored solutions
• Client and creative can establish project success metrics based on research findings
• Audience participation paired with an iterative process raises questions, provokes solutions and identifies new opportunities
• Better understanding of context including environmental factors that may influence use before designing
• Validation and testing of concepts through prototyping, avoid assumptions and production mistakes
• Higher rates of customer satisfaction, increased time to market, and greater return on investment (ROI)

User-Centered Design

• Integrates research for insight into the target audience's needs, behaviors, and expectations
• Used to increase end user satisfaction with product, service, experience, or brand
• It can be applied to interactive to print design, packaging to environmental and is often used in commercial endeavours
• Targets a specific audience and aims to develop a project that serves their needs

Human-Centered Design

• Incorporates approaches like user-centered design, deep research and iterative process
• Addresses the needs of every individual, regardless of ability, age, education, or cultural background
• Moves away from a user-centered focus, avoiding audience segmentation by creating design artifacts and systems that serve everyone
• Terms "design for all" and "universal design" are often used interchangeably

Design is About Understanding

• Graphic designers must have empathy for the client and for what they are designing
• Research avoids resultant design solutions that only satisfy the designer, or paint over the cracks of an issue
• Research is needed to understand a client, their audience, and the reasons for communication
• Should be employed to aid the generation of visual directions and solutions

Historical Perspectives

• Practitioners have incorporated research methods into their design processes throughout history

Bauhaus Beginnings

• László Moholy-Nagy described a tactile design problem assigned to second-semester students
• Students at the Bauhaus and the New Bauhaus had their projects user tested on the blind
• Students created tactile values/tones to create meaning
• Projects were user-tested by the blind, with testers' comments and experiences used to inform further investigations

Arthur C. Nielsen Sr.

• Pioneer in marketing research
• Developed innovative tools that provided clients with objective information about the effects of marketing
• Using random sampling techniques, he quantified market share as a key financial indicator

Design Strategy

• Business is driven by innovation and customer insight
• Developing new products, ideas, and discovering new markets are essential to long-term success
• Design strategists combine paradigms and audience understanding to address business or community needs
• Allows for agile response to fast-moving markets, social issues, and public opinions by helping companies and organizations find new ways to conduct business
• They are the leaders that integrate design and outreach into a company's culture

Design Creates Value

• Can visually differentiate one business from another in a crowded marketplace
• Design can be seen as a subjective pursuit but is a point of differentiation
• Clients want to know the difference between audience appropriateness and personal taste
• Design can represent risk to an outsider, therefore clients want ROI
• Proving value generation specific to design can be difficult
• Value calculations such as ROI can be elusive
• Agencies and larger studios may have established methods and specialized staff tasked but firms often lack the time, resources, and expertise

Design Staircase

• Stage One (No Design): Design plays no significant role
• Stage Two (Design as Styling): Design is decorative
• Stage Three (Design as Process): Design develops new products or services
• Stage Four (Design as Strategy): Design is integrated into company culture and aligned with business objectives

Chapter 2: Research Strategies + Tactics

• Research findings help the designer by supporting concepts and and measuring effectiveness of projects
• A research-driven approach can help define problems and illustrate the value of solutions

Quantitative + Qualitative Research

• Quantitative research measures sets of variables or quantities
• Quantitative research is built around numbers, logic, and objective data
• Qualitative research deals with subjective material such as words and images
• This research approach strives to understand the qualities of a specific field of inquiry
• Form uses tools such as individual or group interviews, literature reviews, and participant observation to understand/explain social behavior

Primary + Secondary Research

• Primary refers to original research conducted by an organization for its use
• A cosmetics company may use observational research combined with surveys/questionnaires to determine preteen purchasing habits
• Secondary research reviews data/findings published by an outside party for an alternative function
• A record label might use research from a cosmetics firm to aid marketing strategies for music sales to teenage girls
• Secondary investigation may or may not fit the exact needs of the researcher

Formative + Summative Research

• Formative/exploratory research provides insight or defines a question and aids in problem identification and solving for design applications
• Research tactics include literature reviews, trend forecasting, video ethnography, surveys, demographics, and user testing
• Summative/conclusive research is used to frame/decipher the outcome of an investigative process and confirms or illustrates that the original hypothesis is correct
• Research tactics include focus groups, user testing, surveys/questionnaires, and web analytics

Basic + Applied Research

• Basic research gains new knowledge or satisfies curiosity within a specific area
• The activity isn't initiated with intent for commercial application like creative exploration through drawing or painting
• Applied research is commissioned specifically for a project, or with commercial/public use.
• Goal is to develop new products, experiences, or services, serving commercial/social needs

Triangulation

• Combines different research methods to illuminate one area of study
• Used by the social sciences and adds credibility to qualitative research by overcoming issues of validity inherent with singular qualitative approaches
• Goal is to confirm each tactic's findings by focusing on where the collected information overlaps
• This area of overlap, called convergence, is considered the most accurate representation of truth
• Research findings can be triangulated

Literature Review

• Comprehensive investigation of documents, publications, articles, websites, and books regarding a specific area of study
• This step in the research process can include a client's corporate communications or as a communications audit
• Literature reviews help save time by enabling the design team to frame their problem and understand how similar problems may have been approached
• Can be used to gain insight into corporate culture, competitor analysis, and market trends
• Literature reviews are a relatively easy task compared to other forms of investigation

Guidelines for Organising a Literature Review

• Should have three parts for break down: introduction, body, conclusion

Module 2: Research Strategies + Tactics

• Objectives are to learn and apply different creative research tactics in given scenarios and case studies

Tactic: Communication Audit

• A comprehensive review of an organization's marketing materials and channels
• It better understands what a company is saying about itself, to whom, and how
• Outlines messaging and analyzes how it resonates with the audience
• Reveals components of working strategies, disconnects, or opportunities
• Provides data that influences media channels, project messaging/approach, and aesthetic rationale

Undertaking Communications Audit

• Determine areas to be audited
• Choose research methods
• Collect or evaluate past communications
• Query customers, staff, volunteers, community
• SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis
• Plan for future communications

Tactic: Competitor Profiling

• The process of evaluating strengths and weaknesses of an organization's competition
• Uses open-source intelligence (secondary sources) to determine competitive advantages
• Helps enhance brand position, adjust or confirm mission, and focus communication strategies
• Gives designer broad client understanding
• Reveals unique market conditions while communicating empathy for factors that influence a bottom line

Competitor Profiling Requires

• Collection of open source information
• Use it at the beginning of a research plan to help understand market conditions, history, unique strengths and the assets of a client

Strategy: Ethnographic Research

• Understand what it's like to be a member of their project's target audience (Who is it for?)
• Empathy from being immersed can also expose new opportunities for design (How can we make this better?)
• Ethnography is a research strategy that focuses on the link between behaviors and culture and often involves immersing in a chosen culture
• The researcher may identify key “informants,” who then lead to other informants, using a “snowball sampling” method

Documentation

• Open-ended questions, interviews, copious field notes, photography, and video help researchers develop a theory
• Subjective observations are valued more than quantitative or objective data
• Researches must respect participants and get thir consent for all activity

Tactic: Contextual Inquiry

• Unstructured interviews are conducted in a location related to how a person will use a design piece.
• Gives the researcher an opportunity to document what the subject actually does, not what they claim to do providing Context

Context

• Contextual inquiry also provides:
  • Influencers such as physical space and expected time-on-task
  • Cues from facial expressions, body language, and interpersonal interactions
  • Uncovers real-world user issues that a more sterile setting wouldn't

Tactic: Observational Research

• The systematic process of viewing/recording human behavior and cultural phenomena without questioning, communicating, or interacting
• Provides info/documentation of attitudes and perspectives without influencing group behavior.
• Also allows for greater observational validity because the group under study is unaware of the researcher
• The investigator remains quiet and objective and tries to understand the behaviors exhibited without intrusion

Tactic: Photo Ethnography

• Participants record experience with still/video cameras
• Then combines individual cases to form a larger understanding, similar to visual anthropology
• It illuminates the internal, perspective of the community under study (“How do the elderly view themselves?").
• Researchers can gain insight into the lives, needs, and motivations of participant(s) and how to communicate with them

Further Info

• Should be a part of a larger research strategy
• Ethnography is subjective and cannot be replicated
• Helps understand the intended audience's needs and can be used in problem solving
• The researcher identifies participants representative of the larger community and provides some training

Tactic: Self-Ethnography

• Individual documents his or her own experience, acting as both researcher and participant
• In a design context, the researcher engages in an activity specific to the intended audience for better understanding of the users' experience

Self Ethnography Info

• Provides a personal lens into the world of the user.
• Allows design teams to familiarize themselves with audience issues through activities, products, or services under investigation
• Researchers can be hyper aware/document every detail and can reveal insights. It is a springboard to kickstart action

Self Ethnographic Results

• Multiple participant can cross-reference results for design intervention leading to:
  • Formulating more questions
  • Plan subsequent research
  • Multiple rounds of observation

Tactic: Unstructured Interviews

• The researcher allows the participant to guide the direction of the interview with the goal to foster a comfortable rapport with research participants.

Results of Unstructured Interview

• See through the eyes of the respondent, uncovering relevant information.
• Reveal primary knowledge of the participant's beliefs, interests, and opinions.
• They can reveal areas of opportunity previously unimagined

Crafting a Unstructured Interview

• Craft a plan
• Ask open-ended questions
• Persistence is key
• Can take notes while being in the interview or ask for another researcher to act as a notetaker
• Great at start of projects to establish context, confirm, or invalidate assumptions from secondary research, and reveal concerns to the user

Tactic: Visual Anthropology

• Uses visual media to aid interpretations of cultural behavior
• By placing the camera in the trained hands of the researcher rather than in the untrained hands of a subject

Module 3: Strategy - Marketing Research

• Marketing research is a form of sociology that focuses on understanding human behavior as it applies to a market-based economy
• This does not refer to a research method but rather a multilateral strategy:

Market Analysis

• Quantitative business tool that measures the growth and composition of markets
• Considers elements such as interest rates, stock performance, and measurable statistics

Tactic: Demographics

• Collections of statistical data that describe a group of people or a market segment
• Can include information on cultural, economic, and social characteristics
• Researchers can use the data to craft hypothetical profiles
• Provide insight on what groups of people are doing, thinking, or buying
• Common demographic variables include age, gender, orientation, household size, income, education, race, and religion

Tactic: Psychographics

• Quantitative tactic used to measure subjective beliefs, opinions, and interests.
• A quantitative tool for measuring qualitative information.
• Instead counts information about opinions, religious beliefs, music tastes, personality traits, and lifestyles