Research Management
This quote from science fiction author William Gibson is probably the most over-cited I can think of to describe the business of futures foresight, but in practice I find it to be a pretty good summary of the methodologies I’ve used in my career to project future states of the market and of evolving user need. For one it calls on us to be constantly vigilant in our sensing of emerging behaviors, techologies, and business practices and then connect these signals into observations of emerging trends. Second, it suggests we should be on the lookout for lead users whose specialized set of requirements might predict those of the broader market in the future. And just as NASA might set up a habitat in the desert to simulate the conditions of a future Mars mission, my team on occasion has developed analogs of future usage conditions to help understand possible future requirements. Below I have set our examples of all three types of work.
02 Location Services
Qualitative Global Lead User Research
Prior to the introduction of the iPhone, no one in mobile phone industry really understood the potential of location on phones outside of map directions. Intel had the opportunity to invest in new location technologies, and I was asked to identify latent consumer needs around location that would indicate a bigger market opportunity. I lead a team of ethnographic researchers in a global search for lead users/markets that predicted the boom just two years later in location-based applications.
03 Augmented Reality
Analogs and Simulation of Future UIs
In 2010, augmented reality was just starting to come out of research labs and be introduced in a limited form in mobile phones. Our mobile phone engineering team asked me to develop a point of view on interface-driven harware requirements for future augmented reality UIs. In this engagement, we had to construct how even to measure UX quality for virtual interfaces (as there was little understanding of this across the industry at the time) and then to simulate future applications to try to answer some foundational questions on performance requirements from engineering and product planning. I ended up presenting this work at the very first ARE (Augmented Reality Event) industry confernce in 2011.