Design research 21st century style

I quote what Tom Murray, a senior designer with Black & Decker said on his blog here:

I happened to somehow stumble onto the idea of searching for Black and Decker stuff on Twitter and found a ton of info on our products, which may or may not have been undiscovered. It’s 2010 now. I can update my website via text message , find a date with a few key strokes, or order pizza with the my pinky and see it arrive via satellite on a map.

Welcome to the digital age.

So I also stumbled onto the Iphone and it’s almost endless string of apps that feed me more information that I can feasibly handle. This is a screenshot of Tweetdeck, just one of many of the dozens of tools that you can search Twitter on to find content in what subject interests you. If you look below you can see that am searching for industrial design and fixie’s. Two of my favorite subjects

So if you have watched any news in the last year you might hear the word Twitter. Don’t scoff just because you are over the age of 40. Twitter won’t hurt you. It is nice like a kitten. To sum up, it is just a text message database of billions of text messages to Twitter. They just happened to be cataloging and making them searchable.

So to summarize again. People who have cell phones. If they set up a Twitter account, they can text message to a secret number their “tweet”. Their tweet is now searchable and indexable and ther Twitter username now followable.

So to summarize the title, design research can be just a question into Twitter about a specific product. Maybe you have to develop a hashtag to follow your design subject. Maybe you can just search for your specifc product in twitter just to see see what people say. There can be many more ways to search for information. I am just point out the obvious. It’s kinda up to you to evolve it. This post will probably be obsolete by the time you read it. But keeping searching for information, its probably there.



Posted a comment, shall put this on my blogs too:

Identified this additional source for research thouygh I wouldn't say
twitter is a way of research due to the authencity of information as well as the credibility of certain sources.Not all info are accurate. But I like
twitter. Its indexing method is very effective as a very useful
directory. With instant access to millions of people, it is a formidable
research tool though not exactly exclusive. You can also interact with
different people from various disciplines. Call this live research in
real time, I value the tacit knowledge that we could all use. Very neat
access to a lot of info !

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