What is Design Research? Of course, you need to do some research in coming up with designs, but this particular field is all about focusing research on learning about the target audience of the design. You want to glean and understand their patterns of behavior, and this can be done through iterative hypothesis and experimentation.

Why should you be motivated to conduct Design Research?

1. You don’t have the mindset and experience of your customers. To develop a design that works, you need to get into your target audience’s heads.
2. You should have insight instead of assumptions. Guesswork isn’t reliable; make sure you base your decisions on actual observations.
3. You should be able to explain irrational behavior. Observing people will reveal their irrationality. This must be explored to understand what leads to it, so that you can factor that in making designs.
4. You will find it rewarding to derive insight from your research. You’ll enjoy it even more when you apply your findings into your design and successfully make it more effective.

The Debate over Future Killer Robots

As we enter into the era of Artificial Intelligence, experts take on opposing views regarding the danger of a future robot apocalypse. Facebook’s AI guru, Yann LeCun, argues that there’s no need to anticipate the dawn of killer robots for the following reasons:

• You can turn a machine off.
• Designers would add safeguard terms in the machine’s objective.
• They would include a mechanism for new terms to be added to the objective lest unforeseen bad behavior arises.
• Physics limit a machine’s power.
• A second machine created to defeat an earlier evil one will always win.

AI expert Stuart Russell has a different view of the picture. For him, originally harmless systems can give way to existential threats, as what happened with climate change. With proper protocols, however, such potential problems can be avoided.

How to Do Contest Marketing Right

Many will discourage you from doing contest marketing since it can be spammy, ineffective, and, for some people, just plain obsolete. There are good reasons, however, why you should still make the effort. In a nutshell, contests can still achieve you whatever marketing goal you may have. It’s just a matter of doing things correctly. This article will teach you the following processes:

• Contest creation for the purpose of building your email list.
• Targeted email address collection.
• Unspammy social media leveraging.
• Contest promotion for maximum ROI.
• Emails to sales conversion, post-contest.