Through observation and collaborative interpretation, contextual inquiry uncovers hidden insights about customer’s work that may not be available through other research methods.
Context Engineering | Meetup
"Context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step" - Andrej KarpathyLearn about tools, frameworks, and code that is in service of context engineering from practitioners in this space.Dive into the set of strategies fo
Lecture 16 - How to Run a User Interview (Emmett Shear)
When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods
20 user-research methods: where they fit in the design process, whether they are attitudinal or behavioral, qualitative or quantitative, and their context of use.
Context Engineering Guide – Nextra
A Comprehensive Overview of Prompt Engineering
Connecting with your readers on Semble [Patterns of Sensemaking #2] - Cosmik Labs
On how the references you make help your writing find its natural audience
Interviewing Users (2nd Edition) | Free EBook with Purchase | Steve Portigal
Expert researcher Steve Portigal updates his classic Interviewing Users to provide fresh guidance on interviewing techniques.
Exploring Conversation Design: Applications and Benefits
Discover the what, why and how of Conversation Design, including its definition, applications, and benefits.
MCP Research & Discussion Night · Luma
We're hosting a reading and discussion group for Anthropic's Model Context Protocol. We'll look at the fundamental protocol affordances, its consequences, and…
The Conversation: In-depth analysis, research, news and ideas from leading academics and researchers.
Curated by professional editors, The Conversation offers informed commentary and debate on the issues affecting our world. Plus a Plain English guide to the latest developments and discoveries from the university and research sector.
Welcome to the Relational Design Lab | LX Cast | 19 comments
Today I am VERY excited to share with all of you about my new home, Relational Design Lab! This R&D studio brings together a number of projects and will, I hope, grow to encompass many more. I imagine this lab as a gathering place for curious people who want to think about systems, and not in the typical mechanistic way they are described and implemented in technology. Instead, we'll feel into living systems, fractal ways of being, where the how is as important as the what. Over time, I hope the Lab will be a home or a waypoint for designers, researchers, community organizations, artists, storytellers, and technologists to explore togetherness together. Our 'theory of change' focuses on paradigm shift. Big change takes practice and possibility. Paradoxically, paradigm shift is a result of many small changes and repetitions in our behaviour and belief systems. We embrace emergence, mutual support, collective practice, and storytelling. One thing feels pretty clear, we need technology that is designed in solidarity with mutual care, does not depend on the whims of big corporations or its surveillance, and is joyful to use. To live in this reality, we also need to consider how business, funding, governance, scale, and context affect our work. We need embodied ways of knowing and sharing knowledge alongside our technical reasoning. And we need to face the reality of the consequences of our actions and those of our ancestors. This is not a project that aims to solve all the world's problems, but instead, to nurture the capacity for doing things together. We support and practice responding with curiosity and care, not with answers or attachment to ideals that no longer make sense amid collapsing systems. We are not "hiring" for this project now but there are many ways to get involved and would welcome opportunities to collaborate. Some of the projects we're holding include Folk Tech, Spacious, SEED Founding, and Relational Source License. We're also developing a very cool workshop process to help other organizations explore relational design through a community-driven futurism process. As ecosystem supporters, we are developing relationships with many aligned groups and projects as well. There will be more communications coming! If this all sounds like something you would like to support, contribute to, keep track of, or develop relationship with, for now you can subscribe to our calendar here https://lnkd.in/gPRFW7zC and message me directly! | 19 comments on LinkedIn
An introduction to radical participatory design: decolonising participatory design processes
Outside of community-led design projects, most participatory design processes initiated by a company or organisation maintain or even strengthen power imbalances between the design organisation and the community on whose purported behalf they are designing, further increasing the absencing experience. Radical participatory design (RPD) is a radically relational answer to the coloniality inherent in participatory design where the community members’ disappointment is greater due to the greater expectations and presencing potential of a ‘participatory design’ process. We introduce the term RPD to show how research and design processes can be truly participatory to the root or core. Instead of treating participatory design as a method, a way of conducting a method, or a methodology, we introduce RPD as a meta-methodology, a way of doing any methodology. We explicitly describe what participation means and compare and contrast design processes based on the amount of participation, creating a typology of participation. We introduce ‘designer as community member’, ‘community member as designer,’ and ‘community member as facilitator’ models and provide characteristics for the meta-methodology of RPD.
An introduction to radical participatory design: decolonising participatory design processes
Outside of community-led design projects, most participatory design processes initiated by a company or organisation maintain or even strengthen power imbalances between the design organisation and the community on whose purported behalf they are designing, further increasing the absencing experience. Radical participatory design (RPD) is a radically relational answer to the coloniality inherent in participatory design where the community members’ disappointment is greater due to the greater expectations and presencing potential of a ‘participatory design’ process. We introduce the term RPD to show how research and design processes can be truly participatory to the root or core. Instead of treating participatory design as a method, a way of conducting a method, or a methodology, we introduce RPD as a meta-methodology, a way of doing any methodology. We explicitly describe what participation means and compare and contrast design processes based on the amount of participation, creating a typology of participation. We introduce ‘designer as community member’, ‘community member as designer,’ and ‘community member as facilitator’ models and provide characteristics for the meta-methodology of RPD.
SparkMe: Adaptive Semi-Structured Interviewing for Qualitative Insight Discovery
Scaling qualitative data collection requires automating semi-structured interviews. However, existing LLM-based systems largely focus on covering predefined topics and struggle to follow up on emergent themes that arise organically in participant responses. This limitation stems from the absence of an explicit objective that formalizes the trade-off between covering a predefined topic guide and adaptive exploration. In this work, we frame adaptive semi-structured interviewing as an optimization problem and define interview utility as balancing coverage of a predefined topic guide, discovery of emergent themes, and interview cost. Based on this formulation, we introduce SparkMe, a multi-agent LLM interviewer that performs proactive planning via simulated conversation rollouts to select high-utility questions. SparkMe achieves higher topic guide coverage ($+4.7$% over the best baseline) and elicits richer emergent insights while using fewer conversational turns. We further validate SparkMe in a user study with $70$ participants across $7$ professions, where domain experts rate it as producing high-quality adaptive interviews that surface profession-specific insights not captured by baseline systems. The code and datasets for SparkMe will be released upon acceptance.
The Customer Discovery Handbook
This is a practioner's guide to conducting design research on personas, needfinding, value, and usability.
Field Studies
Field research is conducted in the user’s natural setting. Learn the unexpected by leaving the office and observing people in their normal environments.
