Tent Talks Featuring Meena Kothandaraman - There is More to Research Than Asking A Question

On Wednesday, January 25th, 2023 at 5:00pm Central, Meena Kothandaramn joined us for a live Q&A session called “There is More to Research than Asking a Question.”

With 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.

She holds an M.S. in Information Resources Management from Syracuse University and a B.Com . in MIS from the University of Ottawa, Canada. Meena is always inspired in her work by her other passions, namely performing as a South-Indian Classical Violinist, pursuing culinary arts through a cooking show, and staying up to date with her two teenager interests!

For more, keep up with Meena on Twitter as @meena_ko.

Chicago Camps hosts irregularly scheduled Tent Talks with people from all across the User Experience Design community, and beyond. Who really likes limits, anyway--If it's a cool idea, we'd love to hear about it and share it!

What is a Tent Talk? That's a great question, we'd love to tell you.

Tent Talks are short-form in nature, generally lasting from 10-20 minutes (ish) in a recorded format--we like to think of them as "S'mores-sized content" because that's pretty on-brand. Tent Talks can be a presentation on a topic, a live Q&A session about the work we do, or the work around the work we do, or really just about anything--we don't want to limit ourselves, or you.

You should send along an idea or topic of your own so we can learn from you, as well! You don't have to be a published author or a professional speaker on a circuit to be good at your job, so please, put yourself forward, and let's have some fun, talk, and share your experience with others!