Research-Based Design

Design influences behaviors. The fascination with this thread has taken me on a journey that has shaped my strategic practice deeply anchored in research and human centered design to tackle complex urban systems problem. Design influences behaviors. The fascination with this thread has taken me on a journey that has shaped my strategic practice blending deep research with human-centered design to address complex urban systems problems.

Design Transforms. The objects in our lives are actors in our lives. They contribute to our social network differently but sometimes as poignantly as people can. I’m interested in designing things that transform these networks in a particular way. I want the things that I help design to encourage equity, creative drive and personal growth within the worlds that use them without negatively affecting the networks that don’t.

Giving form to ideas. To ‘design’ is to give form to ideas, which serve larger collective objectives that are part social, part cultural and part commercial. Objects of ‘design’ are material expressions of who we are and what we know as a culture. In turn, who we are and what we know is defined through reflection, collaboration and research.

Discoveries. The ideas that we give form to are partial renditions of research findings. They are data transformed in careful, calculated ways. This entails starting from a process of discovery driven by scientific and creative research. I’m interested to deploy complementary research systems to enhance my understanding of human behavior and social networks. This constant thirst to solve mysteries, to discover the right questions to ask and then answer them, allows me to strive as a design researcher stubbornly seeking to uncover actionable insights via non-verbal, verbal, spatial and behavioral data.

Actionable Insights. In design, the most valuable insights are the ones we can act upon. For me, this means identifying those discoveries able to shape the literal form of an idea because there is validity to them, and also because the insights can be translated into design guidelines. This requires a mix of creative, reflexive and analytical processing.

This Portfolio explores what these interlocking themes mean to me in theory and in practice. It showcases how I’ve walked my own path that has shaped my views on design and the role of data within it.

Design Transforms

Reading Bruno Latour changed everything for me. Or a lot anyway. I’ve always been fascinated by how the material world and human behavior affect each other, a fascination that initially drew me to city planning as a field engaged with shaping the literal backdrop of our lives. Latour helped me understand how things can be actors in our social network, how objects condition behavior and vice-versa. He makes this point in a piece subtitled ‘The Sociology of a Door-Closer’ where he shows how understanding social relations without including nonhumans would be impossible. Writing in his distinctive voice that blends humor with theory, he describes how door-closers are ‘actants’ in the script of our life in that they do things that shape us, humans.

Taking Latour to the field, I began writing a masters’ thesis on the potential role of urban design for the reconstruction of Beirut after the civil war. Layering theories from different fields, I tried to make sense of the stakes at play from cultural, spatial and behavioral perspectives. I came across the work of a social psychologist named Gordon Allport who was studying prejudices nearly half a century before I was born. This seemed like a good starting point as the conflict was mostly a religious one. Allport shows that certain types of socio-spatial conditions can quite successfully reprogram people’s preconceived views with views derived from personal experiences. Thinking through his work, I searched for ways that we could identify or even create spaces in Beirut where these cross-cultural encounters could happen. These would have to be neutral spaces and the encounters meaningful, in that the people would need to share more than just physical space but also a struggle, a victory, an important human condition of some sort. One such space could be the portico of public buildings where men often gathered to smoke. I thought, if we can create an encounter there, where people living or working in the same shabby building, ostensibly with the same kind of job and children of the same age staying in the same neighborhood, maybe this would be a good place to nudge people into conversation. Something as simple as a digital board announcing the score of soccer games might even do the trick; anything that might help people explore their commonalities instead of their differences.

As I started to recognize the effects that something as banal as a door-closer or a purposefully located scoreboard could have on social universes, a whole world of possibilities opened up that suddenly seemed to make my passion for affecting human change through things a little more palpable.

Design transforms, and some types of transformation are more interesting to me than others. Like the most transformative of scoreboards, I’m driven by projects that open possibilities. My goal as a designer is to foster better human experiences, and by better, I mean equitable, transformative and creative. I aim to do this by thinking analytically about the intended and collateral impacts of anything I help design; by creating actors that strengthen collectives that use them without negatively impacting those that don’t.

Giving Form to Ideas

Design means giving forms to ideas. These forms are material representation of who we are and what we know; they are expressions of our creativity, culture, knowledge and desires.

Design is a projective practice. We imagine and bring to life actors that can affect change for the better.

Design is to create with a particular purpose. The way we define this purpose changes with each person’s ethos.

Design entails technique, some learnt and some innate. As the neo-futuristic architect Peter Cook explains, it takes incredible abilities to masterfully translate concepts into drawing as the ‘imagined notion has no real precedent in familiar imagery.’

Design is a research-informed process. First and foremost it mirrors our collective state of knowledge as the bodies we give ideas to need to be technologically feasible and humanly desirable.

Design is a team sport. It merges interdisciplinary mindsets and skillsets that reflect a breath of ideas informed by aesthetics, human sciences, ergonomics, technology, market forces and more. I am most passionate about contributing through the design process via human-centered research. For me, this means helping teams develop and refine ideas that we should give form to, and then studying their impacts on people.

Discoveries

How do we generate ideas to shape into designs? For me, this starts with research. I interpret ‘design research’ as a mixed method that seeks to gather insights through qualitative, quantitative and creative explorations. Since finishing my PhD in 2015, I’ve become more and more passionate about elevating my skills in quantitative research to match my abilities in qualitative and experimental research.

I feel most in my element working with human-centered methods like ethnography, participatory research, spatial analysis, interviews and community workshops. By intermeshing discovery sciences like design ethnography with experimental approaches like action research and methods focused on hypothesis testing, we’re able discover valuable insights into people, their context, how they think, behave, act from and rationalize. We do this by considering all kinds of valuable data, including verbal, non-verbal, quantitative and behavioral. I like to keep up with different fields as I’m interested to address problems from new angles, seeing and working through a multidisciplinary lens that is better suited to reflect the conditions of our lives than mere academic departmentalization.

Coupling this type of human-centered investigation with statistical methods like A/B testing allows me to unpack insights, ideate prototypes and test them out with carefully selected audiences. Ultimately, I’m chasing actionable insights and remain receptive to any path that leads us there.

Actionable Insights

Design is fueled by actionable insights. Defining what these are requires research to uncover data, analysis to interpret it, and critical thinking to establish which insights should be acted upon.

Each of these steps could be unpacked further and further as we distill the design process. For example, the initial step of data collection entails particular research methods, each with their own strengths and drawbacks that should be recognized. At a more primal level, it also means differentiating between significant and insignificant data, between anecdotal evidence and views held by more than one person, between comments and behaviors, reliable secondary evidence and ones resulting from leading questions or biased sampling, and so forth.

This process also means having the ability to imagine how an insight could inform a design decision. With a background in design, I have a distinct advantage of being immersed in a field so intimately involved with the speculative, with attributing new forms to abstract ideas. I have been trained to critically mine, interpret and analyze data, and imagine its impact on design problems. With design hands and feet, I can quickly translate actionable insights into a design prototype–a model, a sketch, a lo-fi mock-up–that I can deploy and study again in situ. This iterative process allows me to figure out what ideas are worth spending more time on and which ones to let go.