Ovetta Sampson

Type in “empathy,” into a search engine and you get more than 117 million results. That’s a lot, no matter who is counting. But after years of being in the enterprise world of technology I am pretty sure that a lot of those results are due to folks bastardizing the Design Thinking methodology. I could write volumes about the many distortions that corporate America is doing to the methodology that is Design Thinking.

I was on a panel tonight discussing Ethics in Design Research. I’m on a lot of panels about design and ethics because I’ve worked in AI design most of my career. Right before the panel, I read an article by a friend George Aye, who runs an amazing design firm called Design for Social Good, in my hometown of Chicago. Aye’s article redefined the definition of “good design.” It’s a great article that took Dieter Rams’ principles of good design and rewrote them.

Idea in Brief Research professionals are often looking for ways to engage decision makers in research to get buy-in on research outcomes. Here are some tips on how to achieve that: Decision makers should be involved in the research process as much as possible to have full context over who was spoken to and what was learnt during a study. Prioritise decision makers attending as many research sessions as possible to avoid bias from only a small number of sessions.