Outside of academia, it is often hard for researchers to find the opportunity to continue our scholarship. As graduate students and PHD fellows, we spent years creating and testing our hypotheses, designing new methods, approaches and technologies and we are anxious to ascertain if our theories can survive in the real world.
How does a lone researcher engage the business community and convince them to test and use new cutting-edge research methods? The flipside is also true, you are a corporate researcher who would like to engage new methods and approaches to advance learnings, but you have limited resources and a business that demands results. How can you trust new methods and engage in new approaches while minimizing risk and exposure? The authors will give a 50,000-foot view of a new design research methodology, The FlashDraw, and how it can be complimentary alongside traditional research methods. An overview and example of the research process will be illustrated. The poster will also explore the challenges and successes of the partnership between two researchers, a recent graduate student and a corporate researcher, and their on-going journey to explore and establish best practices for researching on the “edge of the new”.