Thank you for your comment about the interview with JooYoung – I’m glad you enjoyed it. I am not skeptical at all about design research, but I am glad that you read this into my approach; it confirms for me that I did my job.

I took a long time to decide the flow of the interview and I went through many drafts of the questions to ensure that the wording of the questions to JooYoung were pitched in a certain way. My questions to JooYoung were deliberate and very considered for a purpose.

As an outsider to design research, it seemed to me that design research and its associated terms are so fashionable a specialization and so bandied about, that anyone who mentions the term ‘ethnography’ can say they undertake design research. In that environment, it’s easy for anything to become bastardized, and it’s impact lost to poor, undeveloped practice.

I thought it might be of benefit to those of us who understand peripherally the principles of design research, but especially to any young graduates and students who read Design Droplets, to hear from a practitioner who is very experienced, and yet, still very accessible and forthcoming with her answers, about how it is done. So, I pretended that none of us had any former awareness of the design research process and I made use of JooYoung’s experience and expertise to answer questions that would inform us. Which she did, superbly.

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