On scoping design research.

Over the past few weeks, we have worked on a project exploring the “Workshop Experience of the Future“. More precisely, we set out to conceptualize how to really make a difference in the quality of workshop experiences.

Like for most projects, it was important for us to start off with a special focus on the quality of our research to generate deep insights on the experiences of all stakeholders that are usually involved in workshops: trainers, moderators, participants, hotels, companies, et cetera. However, after exploring the topic’s surface through qualitative, semi-structured interviews, we quickly learned that the complexity of things would be much greater than anticipated, and that we would need several iterations to get to the root of things. 

Since, at least from a relational-constructivist perspective, no entity can be understood separately from its constituent parts nor from the context it is linked to, flexibility and openness regarding the scope and directions we as researchers may want to explore must be inherently part of genuine design research. This may seem rather intuitive and logical, however, the reality of organizations oftentimes offers very little time and space for ‚going the extra mile’ - although we believe it to be crucial for meaningful innovation.