Curio Research Quarterly Vol. 15

Hello Curio friends! I was supposed to be available again for new projects starting around mid-November but things never go as planned and now it looks like I won’t have availability until mid-January.

Business

Work

My 6-month commitment with Blink was coming to an end, but the project went sideways. Thankfully, Blink understood how the situation wasn’t ideal for me as a contractor and switched me to another project for a different client. I’ll be spending the next two months creating personas and journey maps for a tech company to better understand their 3rd party vendors. (Unless that one goes sideways too. You never know.)

The unexpected delay I experienced in September gave me enough downtime to work on something else. I was able to fill with a last-minute ethnographic project on street fashion for a video game company. We brought a slight guerilla ethos to the project. I recruited and scheduled three 1-hour interviews with local clothing store owners and hung out at skate parks with a big neon green sign offering gift cards in exchange for a conversation on what they were wearing and why. I brought in a friend/professional photographer to work with me on the project. He attended all the in-store and skate park interviews, supplying photos of the clothes and providing environmental context inside and outside the shops and skateparks we visited. The work I did here in Vancouver provided the benchmark for how the rest of the research will be conducted with local researchers in other cities such as New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Rio.

The project itself was fun and marked the first time I’ve done in-person research since before the pandemic. I wore a mask the whole time, both indoors and outside, to maintain safety. I talked to many different people, and I didn’t want to take any chances. It was also a departure from the typical work I do in the tech space talking to people about the software and devices they use. It was fun to discuss fashion trends and shopping habits. It’s always interesting to get people to think about and analyze the culture they experience regularly.

Leadership

Once again I was not elected to the QRCA board, but many of the board members made it clear that they intend to nominate me for a third time next year. I’ll keep accepting the nomination as long as they’ll have me.

I did achieve 3-star Thought Leadership status within the organization. Meaning I’m one of the few QRCA members who regularly speaks about and writes about the research for various conferences and publications.

They also awarded me Advanced Elevate status due to the number of professional development conferences, talks, and workshops I’ve attended this year. Clearly, I take learning seriously, and it shows.

I was also recently notified that my project partner, Cherri Christiansen from Breakthrough Research, and I have been named finalists for the QRCA Qually award. In past years, finalists were asked to create a response to a fake Request For Proposals (RFP) and pitch the proposal at the annual conference, with attendees voting on the winner. This year is different. We responded to an actual RFP from a non-profit organization. We put together a rough draft of how we wanted to approach the research objectives for the qualifying round. As finalists, we have to present a pitch deck to the non-profit at the annual conference. The winner will be selected by the non-profit to execute the work.

Public Speaking

I spoke at the QRCA’s first UX-focused conference at the request of one of the sponsors, Reduct. My presenting partner talked about a recent pro-bono project using the platform. My job was to speak about the process and benefits of qualitative analysis and embedding videos of the supporting quotes into reports. It was a lot of fun, and it was so lovely to see so many new people get introduced to the QRCA through the event.

My next speaking event will be at the User Centred Design Gathering based in London on November 18th. I’ll be giving the same talk I gave to Productized on research-informed decision making. It’s aimed at product owners and managers, but I hope anyone who attends gets value from it.

After that, I’ll be giving my talk on making research accessible to people with disabilities to The Research Society of Australia in early December or late November depending on where you are in the world.

I’ve also volunteered as a speaker mentor for the 2022 QRCA annual conference. My job is to support the speakers I’ve been paired with and make sure they meet the expectations we have for QRCA annual conference speakers. The speaker committee paired me with a team that will be discussing activity theory and how to apply it to product and design research. I’m excited to see how their presentation progresses and host their session at the online portion of the conference in January.

Writing

My International Journal of Market Research article is officially published. Research Live asked to write a shorter piece for their UK publication on the same topic - making research accessible to people with disabilities. The editor saw my IMJR article and thought it would be a good topic for their publication.

I also turned the essay I wrote on in-app surveys for Shopify to select quotes for their marketing materials into a blog post.

Personal

Home

The house is still coming along slowly. We have a bookshelf for my office, but we’re waiting for two more for the living area that are somewhere in shipping logistics limbo, as are many products manufactured or requiring materials from overseas these days. Once we have the bookshelves, I’ll finally be able to unpack all those boxes of books I’ve been keeping in the office closet and display them as intended (silently mocking me for not having the time or motivation to read them all).

Travel

We decided not to stray too far from home for our vacation. We canceled our east coast road trip plan in favor of a quiet few days in the island city of Victoria instead. My husband went ahead of me by a few days on his bike, and I took a shuttle bus and met him there with some extra luggage. While we were there, we met up with friends, visited Miniature World, enjoyed fancy high tea at the Empress Hotel, and drove up the island’s west coast to see some of its picturesque beaches, tide pools, and forgotten ruins.

Media

Squid Game. That is all. Just Squid Game. It’s very graphic and grotesque, but I found the indifference to human life to be the most disturbing aspect.

I also finally watched White Lotus. I enjoyed the biting satire examining class, race, and gender struggles. There was a lot of criticism over the ending, but that’s usually the point of a social satire. If you feel good about the conclusion, it probably missed the mark. The end of White Lotus is unsatisfying and uncomfortable, which is what people of privilege (namely white privilege) need to sit with and stop ignoring according to diversity, equity, and inclusion advocates. In this regard, White Lotus was brilliant.

Giving Back

I’ve been volunteering with the Stanley Park Ecology Society on weekends with good weather on removing invasive plant species from the park. It’s hard work. I always come back exhausted and sore from pulling out an entire clearing’s worth of English ivy and morning glories to give the native species the room to receive the light they need to grow from the forest floor.

I’m still working with BEST. At the moment, we’re in the middle of trying to find a new executive director to helm the organization. If you know anyone in the Vancouver area with managerial experience and who thinks broadly about sustainable transportation issues, please forward them the job description.

That’s all for now. Talk to you again in a few months.