Design Research

Qualitative Research, Visual Ethnography & Participatory Design

Sky Island Design Research LLC was founded by Dr. Ken Roark, a Tucson, AZ based medical anthropologist and design researcher.

We offer a full range of professional qualitative and design research services, consultations and collaborations.

Qualitative Research

We offer a full range of professional qualitative and design research services, including consultations and collaborations with research and design teams. Services include, but are not limited to

  • Collaborative Proposal Development, Community-Engaged Qualitative Research Design & Instrument Development

  • Stakeholder Engagement and Participant Recruitment

  • Semi-structured and Open-ended Interviews, Focus Groups, Cognitive and Intercept Interviews

  • Co-design, Futures and Participatory Design Workshops

  • Visual and Multi-modal inclusive Qualitative Data Analysis

  • Report and Manuscript Writing, Other Public and Scholarly Communication

  • Project and Grant Management, including Project Director and/or Primary Investigator level oversight.

Participatory Design

We specialize in participatory design for academic and community-led projects. We help engage stakeholders as co-designers through

  • Participatory Design Workshops

  • Design Charrettes

  • Rapid Prototyping

  • Cultural Probes

  • Collaborative Storyboarding

  • Human & Earth-centered Design

  • User Experience & Perception Studies.

Visual Ethnography

We have developed a visual ethnography toolkit for community engaged participatory research. We specialize in collaborative storytelling and science communication through

  • Counter Mapping Workshops

  • Qualitative Data Visualization

  • Cultural Probes

  • Collaborative Storyboarding

  • Ethnographic & Documentary Media Production and Editing.

Shared Decision making

We bring our full range of experience in qualitative research, visual ethnography and participatory design to the collaborative development of shared decision making tools such as

  • Patient Decision Aides

  • Educational Videos

  • Serious Games.