frog is a global design and strategy firm. Over their 40 years of work, frog has worked with the world's leading brand and institutions, from Apple to Louis Vuitton to UNICEF. They approach design as "problem-solving through making," because their clients turn them to solve the toughest challenges they can't solve in-house. Turi McKinley helps lead frog's design research practice. McKinley and her colleagues start their research process in an "immersion" phase to understand how their client operates today. Then they broaden their investigation in the "discover" phase. That's when they talk to clients, users, and experts, when they go into the field, and when they figure out what they don't even know they need to think about. Today, frog's research process is so robust, they often think of themselves as a research firm, McKinley explains: "We have to stay ahead of the market. We have to be able to foresee where things are going. Because we need to be able to push and lead our clients."Sometimes when people think of the term design, they think of a physical object or something that's on a screen. We think of it as problem solving. It's problem solving through making. My name is Turi McKinley, I'm one of the leads of our design research practice at Frog. We are hired by clients who have tough questions that they need to solve. It might be what is the future of the bank branch? It might be how do we help a company like GE transform from thinking of hardware to thinking of software?

So if we're designing the future of a bank, our teams are going into the bank and we're talking with banking patrons. We're talking with the people who work at the bank. All that information gets synthesized into a set of opportunity areas for our client. And that becomes the base for concept generation. We use GLG when a team is diving into a new industry; it helps us figure out what questions to ask next.

Understanding how people think about it today is crucial for a team that's going out and trying to understand what's not talked about.