Want to master something? Teach it.

I’ve spent years doing design studies and teaching others how to do them. A design study is a problem-driven research process in data visualization: you work with real stakeholders to understand their problems and needs, translate those into requirements, ideate and prototype solutions, move through iterative design and evaluation, and ultimately deliver something useful. In other words, it’s UX research and design in the world of data visualization.

I’ve conducted them, studied and refined the process, and guided hundreds of students through 100+ real-world projects with real stakeholders and real stakes. Along the way, I developed the award-winning Design Study “Lite” Methodology (DSLM), a framework designed to make something notoriously difficult possible within the constraints of a classroom: enabling novice students to conduct end-to-end design studies with real organizations.

Students weren’t practicing on hypothetical briefs. They worked with real stakeholders, navigated ambiguous needs and imperfect data, made research and design decisions, iterated on feedback, and delivered visualization solutions organizations could actually use. Many collaborators were nonprofits and community organizations that might otherwise have had limited access to this kind of visualization work.

The impact worked in both directions: organizations received no-cost visualization solutions supporting real needs, while students gained hands-on professional experience that is difficult to recreate inside a classroom.

What began as a research framework became a way to connect education, real-world practice, and social impact at scale.