I tailor any research and design effort to the goals, needs, time constraints, and resources of a given project. But in general, I prefer to follow the high-level strategy shown here.

Fortunately, it is a common approach that is easy to adapt to many work projects and environments. In essence, it just means finding out what users need, designing solutions to meet those needs, testing those solutions along the way, and learning from those tests.

You can see this process at work in a few select examples included here. They include:

• the prototype for a risk assessment system

• a tool for dynamic scheduling of ship refueling

• a mapping of the coffee ecosystem

• a mobile game

• a command-and-control system.