June 2021: When Research Excludes – Reflecting on the research process and the black lives matter movement

The Black Lives Matter (#BLM) movement is raising awareness, conversation and reflection for many disciplines, including ours. Some organizations’ reactions have inspired serious changes and pledges, while others have made for social media fodder.

It is our collective responsibility to ask ourselves as researchers and designers where and how we can raise awareness and open conversation so that we steer away from deep-rooted biases. At twig+fish, we turned this lens inward on our own research practice and asked ourselves where we could improve. Too often as consultants, we are faced with organizations who are stringent with their research resources. In our continued reflections, we asked ourselves what has a “cost of not doing?” that directly relates to the #BLM movement?

Join Meena Kothandaraman, co-founder of twig+fish as she shares where resource-poor research processes are not only vulnerable to neglecting the Black voice, but more likely to completely exclude it.

As a woman of colour who has asked how she can support the BLM discourse, Meena incorporated learnings from this twig+fish study into the firm’s consulting work, as well as her graduate classroom at Bentley University.

Please join Meena for an open discussion!

About Meena

With over 30 years of experience, Meena has consulted to emphasize the strategic value and positioning of qualitative research in the design of product, space and service. Meena is fascinated by the complexity of human behavior, and applies a credible, structured and transparent approach to integrating human stories and anecdotes into mainstream processes. This ensures that research activities provide the best service to the organization, and that learning objectives are addressed to maximize potential.

Meena is a founding member of twig+fish, a research and strategy practice based in Boston, MA, that espouses these research beliefs, while maintaining a utopic work-life balance. She is also a key Lecturer in the Bentley University Human Factors and Information Design (HFID) graduate program. Over her 20+year tenure, her capstone qualitative research course has guided now-leading practitioners to integrating meaningful and successful research practices.

Note that this will be a live streaming event. For what I hope are obvious reasons we won’t be sitting together in a physical space!

Please register for this free event

June 17 2021
12:00pm ET
Live streamed to wherever you are!