Successfully completed a focus groups study in the Milano area as the Italian partner of Idean (Finland), involving end-users, employees and customers of a global manufacturer with a local site; the study was about a new product key feature at the prototype stage and was part of a bigger international research plan. All the details are strictly confidential.
Performed activities included:
- recruiting of two end-user groups according to specified criteria;
- conduction of four focus groups;
- video-recording of all the sessions;
- raw material analysis and results reporting.
The study has been successfully completed in an extremely short timeframe, taking advantage of recruiting quality and parallel streams of work. Adriano Solidoro of Università Bicocca cooperated with me on the assignment.
As part of the SPICE project, successfully completed an initial socio-economic analysis on the potential impact of the technologies reseearched and developed in that same project (in short, a mobile service creation and execution platform, with a set of context-awareness, service roaming and content delivery distinctive capabilities).
I conducted the study combining the results of a project internal workshop (held in Budapest with participants from Telenor and NTNU) and an external online video and email-based questionnaire addressed to experts in the field.
I managed the workshop as a structured brainstorming, eliciting feedback in discussion rounds based on a review of the key usage scenarios; then I analyzed the results extracting pros, cons and mixed reactions.
The questionnaire consisted in a simple set of open questions related to four short videos made available online; I selected a number of academics and research manager with relevant expertise from various locations (Germany, The Netherlands, Finland, Israel, among others) and got them to provide their comments.
The task was part of the revised business modelling analysis, coordinated by NTNU and conducted in cooperation with VUB (Brussels), Telenor, Telefonica and Telecom Italia; it has been also my last major effort in Spice, in which I have been working right since the kick-off in Paris, in January 2006 (and before that a bit at the proposal stage too).
Started the course on Design Methodology / Philosophy of Design for the undergraduate Media Design program at NABA, fine arts academy in Milano. This is the fourth time; it began back in 2003, when the issue of methodology in design to me was the point where some very practical professional concerns (I was a middle manager in a then 300 people Web design and digital marketing agency) met the discovery of J.C. Jones seminal books.
This is also the year in which I managed to write a short paper about the course and get it through in a scientific conference (HCIed 2008; see the publications page for download).
I copied below some text from an early version of my contribution, dropped out in the revision process. The studies director mentioned at the beginning is Francesco Monico.
“Four years ago the studies director of the undergraduate media
design program at NABA-Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, a
design school and fine arts academy in Milano, Italy, questioned
around the possible shape of a foundational course on design
methodology. The need was to propose something different and
beyond the specific methodologies already covered by other
foundational courses in various design disciplines. As the media
have largely overcome their traditional boundaries to spread over
a vast range of contexts and industries, with design challenges that
cut across the domains of creative production, science and
technology, it seemed sensible trying to nurture the ability to think
about the possible ways to structure the act and process of
designing, in broad and radical terms.
The immediate and slightly provocative reaction of the author was
to urge whoever was put in charge to go straight back to the very
heart of the word and the concept of method, starting perhaps with
some pages of a classic like Descartes Discourse on Method,
and ending maybe with the harsh but sophisticate criticism of any
methodology in often cited (but lesser known) Paul K. Feyerabend
Against Method. To the author initial surprise, the provocation
was not turned over; for three years on (and with the fourth
coming soon), students have been engaged in a detour from early
modern philosophy to contemporary epistemology, to be followed
then by a proper investigation of the design process along the
lines of a standard book on design methodology, John C. Jones
Design Methods. The insisted questioning on the meaning
and nature of method is also played out in two practical ways: one
is role playing and collaborative dynamics in group games, the
other is nonfictional writing”
