Becca Smith

Goals

• Create a detailed, descriptive resource for students and practitioners to plan and carry out ethical, high-quality qualitative research, particularly in cross-cultural settings.

• Bring D-Lab's approach to community engagement to early-stage design research; adapt and develop appropriate methods.

Outcomes

• The co-design research method was developed, as a melding of D-Lab's creative capacity building methodology and social science research principles.

• The framework was published as a PDF in December 2014 (53 pages including appendices). It has since been translated into Korean and Spanish by outside parties.

• I have presented the framework content at MIT and UC Berkeley and continue to conduct workshops with MIT students as part of their fieldwork preparation.

Role

Project manager; Lead author; Graphic designer. 
Collaborator: Kendra Leith

location

MIT D-Lab

timeframe

2013-2015

process

Over a period of approximately two years, I began and completed the User Research Framework through an iterative and collaborative process.

I initially immersed myself in the content with extensive secondary research, interviews with practitioners and coursework. After drafting the framework, with content from colleague Kendra Leith included, we applied the process to a needs assessment project in Kenya. Based on this experience, the framework was iterated on, and this project example was incorporated throughout the document. The text was finalized after feedback from colleagues and outside experts; finally, I developed the visual design for the framework and laid out the content in Adobe InDesign. The document was published in December 2014 and revised in December 2015.