Design Research at the U of T Innovation Hub

The Innovation Hub does design research for U of T Student Life, which in practice means finding out what people actually need before anyone builds anything for them.

I spent the summer interviewing educators across Ontario and synthesizing what came back into insights the team could act on. The work is unglamorous. You talk to someone for forty minutes, you get one sentence that reframes the whole problem, and then you have to convince other people that the one sentence matters.

The highlight was simply being in those conversations. Talking to teachers across Ontario and understanding what they’re going through surfaced problems I would never have guessed at from a desk, and that’s the whole argument for doing research instead of assuming.

It’s also where I stopped thinking of research as a phase before the real work and started thinking of it as the part that decides whether the real work is worth doing.