RSF at Interaction 2020

Organized by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), Interaction is an annual conference that brings together design practitioners from around the world to advance the field of interaction design. The 2020 edition was held in Milan, Italy from February 2nd to 7th under the theme "A New Dawn", exploring the meaning and evolution of our practice and approaches.

Dave and I had the honor of sharing the story of this project in a talk titled "Tools for the trek: Equipping community to explore uncharted space". You can see the slides here.

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Tools for the trek: Equipping community to explore uncharted space

How do you engage community to explore the unknown together? Over 60 organizers hosted workshops with 500 researchers & designers around the world to chart the edges of a growing design discipline. Learn how—and hear their stories—in ‘Tools for the trek’ at @IXDA #Interaction20.

How do we unlock the power of community already around us? What are the tools, spaces and structures that we can equip ourselves with to grow and make new meaning together?

In November 2018, the ResearchOps community set out to map the unknown: to create a framework for the skills & career growth of UX, User, and Design Researchers. We lack a picture of what it means to be a researcher, or a designer who does research, and it should be built by the people who are doing the work. To collect data, we brought together local communities with a workshop toolkit that allowed new community organizers to step up and create discussion and community locally.

Since then, over 60 organizers have conducted the workshop in 30 cities—with 500 researchers and designers. At the end of 2019 we worked through all of this data and published the first draft of the ‘Researcher Skills Framework’, a new tool for the career- and skills-growth of researchers and designers who do research.

In this talk, we’ll cover two major themes:

• The arc of designing, distributing, and operating a “workshop in a box” through the ResearchOps Community—activating our online members for events in “real life”
• Discoveries and reflections about how to engage local community, looking at what it takes to bring new voices into the fold, and hearing a few of the stories from our organizers

We’ll close with a quick look at the Researcher Skills Framework itself, the artifact produced as a result of this distributed effort.

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