Researc.her —Irene Estrada
Irene was my prototype teacher, she taught me about the importance of narrative and storyboards, also about the whys behind prototyping.
She is professional and wise, from consultancy to product, you can learn a lot by talking with her.
Can you introduce yourself?
I’m Irene Estrada and I work as Service Designer in BBVA.
What is your background?
I studied Industrial design engineering but early on I understood that we were not designed in a right way: we were designed without understanding the origin of anything, without a methodology to understand the needs. At the university, we instinctively chose projects for quite complicated, almost extreme targets (blind, children with speech difficulties …), which pushed us to try to understand the behavior and needs from the user.
While I was working in very technical fields, I decided to start studying social anthropology. Then I started working in service design and design research, after joining in the h2i institute pilot course.
On the research field, which female professionals inspired you?
Tricia Wang. I saw her speaking in the Epic Conference in London some years ago, and I was fascinated by her ability to communicate, be insightful, provocative and at the same time rigorous.
Mercè Grael and Maritza Guaderrama were my teachers in design research and they open to me new worlds in my head. And nowadays I’m very inspired by my colleagues in my daily work, Cristina Salmerón and Beatriz Horcajo.
In your opinion, what is the value of design research?
Understanding correctly and at the proper level of depth, is not a simple task. I think we are doing more research every time, but sometimes I fear that agile, lean methodologies and sprints make it challenging to have a truly and deeply understanding
Even so, I believe that it is more and more necessary in this complex world full of constant conflicts.
What obstacles do you find in your daily work?
The bias. In my daily work, I am surrounded by people who know and verbalize all the time how customers and users are, without any doubts.Sometimes the opinions about the user’s behavior are too general, the diversity is not respected, and the biased opinion is more relevant than the research facts. It does not allow us to work more with questions than with answers.
They work more with evaluative research than exploratory research, especially because there are environments where it is believed that there is nothing more to investigate, we already know everything about the customers.
How do you see the future of research?
I hope and wish that design and design research will be more present in the future in areas that have not yet arrived in Spain, such as education, health, justice and social services.
Can you give some advice for someone that is starting now?
Try to be very close to someone with a lot of experience, to observe, copy, learn… and let him/her correct you and finally find your style of doing research.
When I started doing research, I was working with Jesús Carreras in Designit, and he was very generous, we shared the field work, and he evaluated me every time we did an interview, every time we were analyzing, every time we wrote the conclusions … I felt that he pushed me a little bit more each day and for me, it was one of the moments that I learned most in my life.
Please, recommend 3 books that you love about research.
“The Field Study Handbook” by Jan Chipchase. The last one book that I read in design research, a sign of this research times: transcultural research, international fieldwork, ephemeral studios…
“The Innocent Anthropologist” and “Not a Hazardous Sport” by Nigel Barley. They are clear examples for me when you think you understand something, but in reality, you have only made your interpretation to understand and survive, but deeply you never understood the whole.
“Frame Analysis” by Erving Goffman, a classic book in social & psychological research.
Do you also want to learn a lot from Irene? Find her on Linkedin.