role in the development of this project:

In my role of design strategist at Thirst-Aid, a social enterprise in Myanmar focused upon the design and manufacture of household water filtration systems, one of my responsibilities was to design and deliver a ceramic water filter that appealed to consumers more than our present model. To accomplish this, I lead the team that conducted user research around the habits and preferences of present and future customers with the goal of identifying what dissatisfied present customers and what would better convince potential customers to buy and use a household water filter.

 

expertise the project demonstrates:

As the included write-up indicates, this project allowed me to develop my research skills as I worked with field researchers to consider and properly phrase the questions we wanted to ask based upon what we hoped to find out. This project also developed my leadership skills as I worked with teammates to plan and lead a team of researchers to multiple sites over the course of several weeks of fieldwork.

This project gave me the opportunity to take responsibility for managing the planning, execution, and analysis of findings from user interviews. Beyond these things, I also got to train a small team of researchers in interview techniques and observation skills, and helped them plan to ensure that our research included users from diverse contexts and backgrounds. This project also gave me exposure to working with people outside of disciplines I traditionally collaborated with. While previous projects had me working alongside an in-house team of engineers and designers, this project required that I collaborate with tailors and vendors of various industrial fabrics in the product design process. From them I learned a new set of skills for selecting, testing, and prototyping with industrial fabrics. This project gave me the chance to plan and run a co-design workshop with a dozen of our most successful community marketers, which allowed our design team to solicit valuable feedback from those with closest contact with customers across diverse markets and with diverse sets of preferences, practices, and habits.

 

nature of the research undertaken:

Research methods for this project included contextual inquiry into different markets’ users, shadowing of salespeople’s village marketing sessions, organizing and running a co-design workshop with top-performing salespeople. I also taught both “shadowing” and “contextual inquiry” to my colleagues on my research team.

 

external validation:

Through this project I improved as a teacher of research techniques, and, by extension, was able to reflect more deeply upon my own practice of those research techniques through teaching others about them.