DORIS in the News

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t love being called out on stuff like how to load the dishwasher properly so the dishes will “actually get cleaned” or why it’s so important to check all my mirrors when backing out of the garage (side note, as it turns out, that’s...

You don’t have to be a designer in order to behave in a designerly way. I think at its simplest form, being designerly can be broken down into three simple tenets.

It’s pretty interesting how often restrooms come up in our research projects even though they are generally not an area within the office for which we are actively seeking data. For example, we don’t measure how many people are in them or out of them in our quantitative data collection. However, that doesn’t keep people from bringing them up when we collect qualitative data through interviews: there are not enough of them, they’re in the wrong place, they’re just plain dirty.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in my office, listening to the cold November sleet on the roof. Through the miracle of modern day technology, I was conducting a face-to-face interview with one of our client’s employees. This particular organization was located in a state with a much more favorable climate in November. I started out by introducing myself, “Hi, I’m Sam, and I’m sitting in Indiana today!” She immediately said, “Yeah, I was wondering what that big scarf was about.” It was 75 degrees and sunny out there.

I moved to Indy in 2005 and attended my first Indy 500 race in May of 2006. I think the moment that first race began was the loudest moment I have ever experienced in my whole life. It was so loud I could feel it inside my body. We had to wear ear protection, and by the end of the race, I still had a little ringing in my ears but boy was I hooked. I became Indy’s newest month of May super fan.

Remember growing up as a kid and sharing your bedroom with your sister? Well, I didn’t have any sisters (thanks a lot, Mom and Dad), but I did have a lot of Full House reruns. Watching Full House, I learned how my idol, DJ Tanner, navigated the treacherous waters of sharing a room with her little sister, Stephanie. I specifically remember one episode where DJ came up with the brilliant plan to use a tape line on the floor to delineate her space from Stephanie’s space. Of course, once Stephanie was in her space, she had zero access to the door to exit the room and I think we all know that from there, hilarity ensued.

A question we are often asked by leadership teams is how people from different generations differ in their perspective on the workplace. And like the good researchers we are, we set out to see if we could find statistically based evidence to support the claim that major differences exist between boomers, Xers, millennials and now Generation Z.