Senior Design Researcher, Ford Motor Company
Lauren Purkhiser is a seasoned researcher with a talent for uncovering insights related to people, places, things, and systems. She transforms business objectives into strategic research plans to strengthen the design process. Gleaming structure from qualitative chaos to shape meaningful insights and their application. For the last eight years, Lauren has studied the experiences that surround everything from autonomous vehicles to surgical devices to canned whipped cream graphics.
Knowledge Makes Things Happen
To make things happen, designers must have various knowledge bases—of materials, manufacturing processes and even more importantly, of their users. Aside from discovering the obvious issues, how does one gather a more holistic understanding of the product-user relationship to innovate beyond incremental fixes?
These kinds of insights have the ability to drive significant improvements of products, interfaces, and systems. Even on occasion this knowledge built from information provided by users can revolutionize industries.
These innovation techniques will be brought to life through a presentation of co-creation environments, qualitative research methodologies and personal experiences—as Lauren Purkhiser, IDSA, and Mackenzie King, IDSA, of Lextant push designers to question the research they are using and the problems they are solving—while framing the relevancy of true insights that act as a guiding light for designers who are out to disrupt, revitalize and revolutionize industries.
In the Field
What does it take to plan, conduct and discover insights for global design research projects? Lauren Purkhiser will discuss industry practices and share her experiences surrounding fieldwork to describe what it really means to be a design researcher in the field.
