Talk / Culture
Tools for the trek: Equipping community to explore uncharted space
Dave Hora & Tomomi Sasaki
How do you engage community to explore the unknown together? Over 60 organizers hosted workshops with
500 researchers & designers around the world to chart the edges of a growing design discipline.
Learn how—and hear their stories—in ‘Tools for the trek’ at @IXDA #Interaction20.
How do we unlock the power of community already around us? What are the tools, spaces and structures that we can equip ourselves with to grow and make new meaning together?
In November 2018, the ResearchOps community set out to map the unknown: to create a framework for the skills & career growth of UX, User, and Design Researchers. We lack a picture of what it means to be a researcher, or a designer who does research, and it should be built by the people who are doing the work. To collect data, we brought together local communities with a workshop toolkit that allowed new community organizers to step up and create discussion and community locally.
Since then, over 60 organizers have conducted the workshop in 30 cities—with 500 researchers and designers. At the end of 2019 we worked through all of this data and published the first draft of the ‘Researcher Skills Framework’, a new tool for the career- and skills-growth of researchers and designers who do research.
In this talk, we’ll cover two major themes:
The arc of designing, distributing, and operating a “workshop in a box” through the ResearchOps Community—activating our online members for events in “real life”
Discoveries and reflections about how to engage local community, looking at what it takes to bring new voices into the fold, and hearing a few of the stories from our organizers
We’ll close with a quick look at the Researcher Skills Framework itself, the artifact produced as a result of this distributed effort.
About the speakers
Dave Hora
I am fascinated by how teams work together—and what it is that makes our work work in that context. I've been a designer and a six-time “first researcher” helping establish UX/Design research within the organization. I worked in-house and at a consultancy in the Bay Area for ~9 years, consulted independently as Dave’s Research Company, Ltd. for ~1 year, and have recently moved to Berlin where I lead the research function at ResearchGate.
Tomomi Sasaki
I’m a designer and partner at AQ, an independent design consultancy. I bring product strategy, design research and facilitation skills to challenges like organizational culture change and improving the customer experience.
In the past few years, I've been exploring the idea of learning as a social activity, the nature of unfolding conversations, and building organizational capabilities for design and research. I'm a member of the board for the global ResearchOps Community, where we discuss the people, mechanisms, and strategies that organizations use to scale their design and user research practice. Here, I co-lead the Researcher Skills Framework project and orchestrate different modes of interaction between our 3,000+ members. I also co-founded Design Research Tokyo, to produce events that accelerate knowledge exchange within the nascent practitioner community in Tokyo.
I lived in Tokyo for almost two decades before moving to Paris in late 2014.