Why is synthesis so hard? I’ve heard from many students, clients and, friends that synthesis can be a real slug. Your physical walls or Miro boards are overloaded with post-its of inspiring quotes, expert takes, team ideas, and too many persona ideas and keys to win. It’s time to share your findings beyond your team and make a compelling argument for why your research justifies a next phase or how to inform the evolution of a design — but you feel overwhelmed and stuck with how to surface what’s most critical and weave it into a seamless story. Here are a few tactics and tools you can try out to move away from a state of conundrum and closer to clarity.

As a researcher by trade, educator at SVA, and community builder at 3x3, I meet many folx questioning how to do design research in ways that center people. And I want to support your journeys! So I’ve synthesized a slew of stuff scattered from Slack messages to client deliverables on what design research is and how to do it well. I hope it’s helpful to you wherever you are in your journey :)

Analytics research — What’s the best time of day to send promotional emails about donuts?

Design research — How have donuts served as a source of everyday comfort during the pandemic?

Human-centered design — How might we enable people to find the donut flavors they will enjoy the most?

User research — How can we design a more seamless experience for first-time donut purchasers?

Market research — How many people will buy gluten-free donuts this year?

Product marketing research — How much do consumers expect to pay for this rebranded pack of donuts?

Shelf test research — How do our donuts perform against our competitors at 10 feet, 6 feet, 3 feet, and 1 foot?

A graduate design student recently reached out for advice on her project to enhance a public space in northern Brooklyn. She was curious about how she could center peoples’ voices in her design processes and expressed frustration that when she tried to interview folks, they didn’t want to engage. I listened as she shared the interview questions she had prepared, her observations on the lack of seating options, and her conclusion that the space needed more benches.

Artist and educator, Kay Liang, talks about squashing “Zoom Gloom” with dog bands, friendly robbers, and disco breaks.

It was April 6th and my six-year-old son, Rui, had his first Zoom meeting. He was both anxious and annoyed that he had to do something he neither fully understood nor signed up for. These were the early days of lockdown and as a parent, I was pretty desperate for ways he could stay engaged with his friends and teachers (and also give me time to answer emails, eat a sandwich, and cry in the shower all at the same time). One of his teachers, Kay Liang, a recent RISD grad in printmaking and computation, decided she would venture at staging a remote version of Gem Land, her after-school art class. Rather than transpose the same play pattern and collective crafting activities onto Zoom, she created an entirely new, multi-player experience using a simple story arc, a lot of PNGs, and a locally-hosted web page. The premise was both dramatic and relatable: the children of Tiny Town had suddenly woken up to the news that they were not allowed to leave their house. They didn’t know why or for how long, and there were no grownups around to provide answers. Sound familiar?

Cities are products of design. In the last century, the urban planning and design fields often prioritized the mobility of cars over people, and efficiency over community (think: Robert Moses and the post-war demolition of New York City neighborhoods in favor of highways). To address this legacy of a top-down gaze and framework, we need street-level, people-centered perspectives that inform how our cities are designed. This is where human-centered design, equity design, and ethical technologies can be harnessed to champion urbanism in service of people — not cars, politicians, or planners. An example of how street-level data is shaking up the power dynamics of urban planning is Numina — a standalone sensing platform to measure all kinds of curb-level activity anonymously and in aggregate. Working with city agencies, urban planners, and mobility companies, Numina provides dynamic volume counts, paths, and traffic behaviors that disrupts traditionally costly, cumbersome ways cities collect data. I spoke with co-founder and CEO, Tara Pham, on her approach to applying agile, street-level insights towards equity, access, and inclusion in the context of the current public health crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement.

How can we continue to study our streets, talk to people, and test prototypes during a public health crisis? How can we identify opportunities to design for more inclusion, equity, and even joy in the everyday life of our cities? And how can we share these new research and design methods with others?

Last month, the Openbox design team had the opportunity to lead a one-week studio course for CIID’s Interaction Design Programme in San José, Costa Rica. It coincided with the moment that COVID-19 cases surged across the country and CIID’s facilities, including the maker space, digital lab, and biological research station, were closed to students. Students now worked together remotely, or masked and physically distanced in person. As the Openbox team was also working remotely in various parts of New York, Marquise Stillwell, Amy Wang, Vinay Kumar Mysore, and I used a combination of Zoom, Slack, Miro, and Notion to convene 27 designers from around the world on the topic of designing for community.

I knew something was up when I met with an urban tech recruiter and she asked me if I had heard of ‘Slice.’ We were in the glass conference room of her midtown office snacking on a take-out spread of Korean tacos and flavored sparkling water. I had just finished explaining my training in city design and social science, my work on inclusive housing and street-trade policies for immigrant and refugee communities, and my desire to get back to urban policy and design issues — all the while trying to not come off as too academic or political (I needed a job after all!). After a few hmms, she chimed in excitedly with, “Oh, wait! Do you know Slice? It’s an app for ordering pizza. It’s gonna be big. It’s about empowering local businesses to compete with big chains.” In my mind, I was like wait, it’s Seamless, but just for pizza — I don’t get what that has to do with urbanism. I wrote it down, politely pretending to pursue this lead.

Data driven. Evidence based. Numbers focused. There are many corporate catchphrases to tout one’s analytical aplomb. On the civic side, we’ve seen how governments also aspire to incorporate data science and analysis to improve efficiencies and innovate. But we’ve also seen how a reliance on data and algorithms alone have wreaked havoc by wrongly disqualifying people from social services or unfairly targeting communities for policing. To dig into how data can be responsibly integrated in both the public and private sectors, we sat down to chat with Jean-Baptiste Bouzige, who leads the NYC expansion of Ekimetrics — a global data science consultancy that solves problems using a combination of data science and design thinking. Here, Jean-Baptiste shares his views on the founding ethos of his practice and the importance of balancing quantitative analysis with qualitative thinking.

Break, innovate, disrupt, repeat. Startup cultures often celebrate fast, audacious experimentation without consideration for long-term consequences. This attitude is particularly precarious when the market to be disrupted is the very place we live. With the emergence of “smart city” platforms and products, this hubris casts cities as real-time testing labs for new technologies (Think: companies introducing rideshare or dockless services into cities without gaining the necessary city approvals). As a human-centered designer and researcher, I prefer to pursue innovation through collaboration and co-creation. That’s why I was excited to read Ben Green’s new book that synthesizes the shortcomings of taking a tech-centric approach to urban development. I had the chance to chat with Ben and dig into his refreshing perspective on how cities can put their people and problems first, and not get distracted by the promises of untested technologies.

When cars are driven by programs not people, how will people on the street communicate with cars? At CES 2019, leading mobility manufacturers like Ford shared advancements in Vehicle-to-Everything platforms that use electronic pings from pedestrians’ smart devices to help guide autonomous vehicles (AV). But solutions like these are too narrow and don’t respect the autonomy of individuals—not everyone has a smart device or wishes to be involuntarily or constantly connected to everything. We should be cautious of any framework that re-enforces cars at the top of the transportation hierarchy and fails to take a more comprehensive view of our future streets.

While our world becomes increasingly urbanized, it also needs to become more responsive. There are currently 68.5 million forcibly displaced people globally, more than six times the number of displaced in the wake of World War II (UNHCR 2018). For the 25.4 million forced to leave their home countries as refugees, 70% live in private residences within urban areas (UNHCR 2012). Refugee camps are also becoming more urbanized, as conflicts endure and people re-create sophisticated urban economies from their home towns and cities (UNHCR 2018).

Often unplanned and unauthorized, Detroit’s murals have emerged like an alternative public record of community ideas and aspirations. They mark history, honor community figures, and share personal dreams. Viranel Clerard, age 24, is a Detroit native who sees the murals as a public treasure. Viranel is a community art advocate and educator who also works as an Uber driver and at Trader Joe’s. Since 2015, he has optimized his nimble movements throughout the city to document over 500 public murals. He created The Detroit Mural Project as an online archive to catalogue each mural by artist, location, and when possible, origin story.

Drift through the city guided only by your feelings. Use the map of London to navigate Berlin. Remix a public advertising image to relay a political message. These playful acts of resistance were some of the tools invented by the Situationist International, a political and art collective formed in 1957 and dissolved in the early 70s. (Think: Surrealism meets the city.)

I love cities for what they are! Layered, uneven, and storied places of connection and exchange. As an urban design researcher, I never expect cities themselves to become simpler entities with simpler problems to solve.

Unfortunately, being honest about the realities of urban life is not a universal value in the city-software space. I recently attended a panel discussion titled “The Future of Cities” with speakers including venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs interested in using software to improve urban life. The conversation circled around greenfields (an area without any building history) and new condo developments as ideal locations for new smart surveillance and property management technologies. I felt that the emphasis on contained, exclusive, and simplified terrains — free of history and diversity — ran counter to what a city really is. And I left the event thinking: how could these software solutions serve real cities, if they’re focused on such un-urban environments?

Every day, cities are out there measuring. Traffic jams, school performance, greenhouse gases, bike lanes, babies born, new businesses. They capture millions of data points to help determine what’s going on and how infrastructure and services can best support our collective urban life.

As architect and human-scale design champion Jan Gehl reminds us, “We measure what we care about.” While there are standard metrics for many parts of urban life — from parking spots to building permits — how do we begin to quantify the quality of urban life itself? In other words, how do we capture the “small data” of everyday life that doesn’t always have a clear intention or outcome, yet is critical to our happiness?