This repository brings together work the Department of Agriculture, Water, and the Environment had done internally since around 2017. We have used the 18F Methods that were generously added to the public domain by the US government to help inform our work, and we acknowledge and give thanks to our American public service collegues for their work in making this available in the public domain. The 18F Methods were created to describe how 18F puts human-centered design into practice. Both the 18F Methods and our departmental handbook was developed primarily as an internal resource, we hope it can help everyone adopt the methods of human-centered design. We hope also, that this helps to contribute to the global voice around research operations, the mechanisms and processes that set user research in motion. Incorporating research operations into the handbook is a deliberate act by the department as we work to utilise an emergent practice to help sclae the impact of the research we do. We hope surfacing the practice of research operations as a central part of the practice of human centred design will assist others as they seek to scale the impact of the work they do.
In order to function well within cross-functional teams, researchers and designers need to know a few things: which research methods they might choose from, why one particular method makes more sense than another at any given moment, and, once they’ve picked a method, how to actually execute it, including the operations of doing so. This handbook collects this essential information as a series of cards and a list of templates for expert users. In practice, we’ve found the Handbook can provide folks with a gateway into our work and build internal alignment around a shared vocabulary.
Specific to the Department of Agriculture, Water, and the Environment, specific to the federal government
It’s important to note that the Research + Operations Handbook is designed to account for two things that may not otherwise concern a more generic collection of design methods. First, this information directly reflects and supports the department's human-centered work. (They are also continuously updated in a human-centered way — how meta!) Second, the Research + Operations Handbook is designed to keep Australian Public Servants on the happy side of the law. This collection specifically includes helpful information on topics for which designers working in the federal government may need clarification, such as privacy, records management, and the various Acts that underpin research data management in government, such as the Privacy Act (1988) and the Public Service Act (1999.)
Reading the Research + Operations online You’re presently looking at the Research + Operations Handbook’ GitHub (code) repository. Please visit our homepage to read the Handbook online.
To print a copy of the Handbook for offline use, visit the Handbook print page. You may need to select file → print… from your web browser.
For more information on contributing to the Handbook (or even making a suggestion), see CONTRIBUTING.md. If you would like to suggest anything to be added to the collection, please follow the instructions here.
Learn more about our goals and the way we work in our Digital Handbook.
This repository is currently forked from the 18F Methods repo. Therefore the information to follow comes from the 18F Methods repo:
You will need Ruby ( > version 2.1.5 ). You may consider using a Ruby version manager such as rbenv or rvm to help ensure that Ruby version upgrades don’t mean all your gems will need to be rebuilt.
On OS X, you can use Homebrew to install Ruby in /usr/local/bin, which may require you to update your $PATH environment variable:
$ brew update
$ brew install rubyTo serve 18F Methods locally, using methods as the name of your new repository:
Run each of the following steps to get the site up and running.
$ git clone git@github.com:18F/methods
$ cd methods
$ bundle install
$ jekyll serveYou should be able to see the site at: http://localhost:4000/
- Brigette Metzler
- Helen Jones
- Stephen Dempsey
- Sally Garvie
- Bill Makin
- Magda Hribar
- Mariam Basaleus
This project will be the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:
This project will be in the public domain within Australia, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.
All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.