Contextual research is a research method to explore the everyday realities of people in order to understand how things relate within a given context and provide information for the creation of design solutions. To make sense of the interconnectedness of the culture we researched, we honed our skills of observation in the field and the collection, organization, and analysis of data in a way that was shared with others easily, learning to withhold judgment and evaluation while we interacted with the subjects of our research. Only after sufficient information has been gathered and filtered did we begin to make conclusions and offer ideas for possible innovations.
By John Colon, Siqi Hu, Kathleen Kaiser, & Samantha Teyhen
