Designs from qualitative data

Smith & Nephew

• Successfully broke a data log jam
• New product and service opportunities

Smith and Nephew had collected an enormous amount of qualitative data about wound care; so much, in fact, that they were a little overwhelmed by it. They asked me to facilitate workshops to organise and analyse the data and extract some real value from it.

People often think that data collection is the hard part of ethnographic design research. It is hard, but it’s not usually the hardest part; analysing the data and extracting the value – insights, ideas and new paradigms – is nearly always really difficult. Over the years I have built up a number of techniques to do this and to allow others to do it for themselves.

The workshops, organised at short notice and held over a weekend, were successful in breaking the log jam and creating a number of new product and service opportunities.