British Broadcasting Corporation
Design Research Mentor
Audience Toolkit

I've known people in the Audiences and Creativity department for several years and recently they asked me to help them develop their skills in what has become known as "design research". This is the bricollage of techniques and approaches that we developed at IDEO, which were collated and sold as their Method Deck.

So I was retained to teach some of the techniques and coach project managers in their use. I ran a series of project clinics to make this advice more targeted and immediately useful.

I organised a 3-day workshop on the use of ethnographic techniques in design, this was lead by Nina Wakeford of Goldsmiths College. In this we all participated in proper ethnographic fieldwork (the first time in my life) and looked again at how this powerful discipline can inform and inspire creativity.

Audience Toolkit

I led two projects for the BBC: one was a master class in IDEO's design research process for the heads of news and TV and senior managers.

The toolkit shown here arose from that work. It became a set of cards that could be given to any BBC employee engaged in creative work - clearly the majority. I designed it to provoke and support user research activities whilst being sensitive to the BBC's development process and unique creative culture. Several hundred of these were distributed and are still in use.

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