Boston’s Meena Kothandaraman Returns to CanUX in 2025

 WORKSHOP T1: Building Connection: Enhancing Research Engagement Through Creative Protocols
} Oct 2, 2025   9:00am – 12:30pm

Traditional research often relies on direct questioning, but what if we could elicit deeper insights through creative engagement? This interactive workshop focuses on activity-based protocols that enhance participant engagement.
Discussion guides can feel like interrogations, limiting reflection. This workshop reimagines research as an immersive, creative process using playful prompts, tactile activities, and reflective exercises to foster meaningful insights.

Through hands-on exercises, attendees will:
• Shape engagement by defining the engagement arc
• Challenge the notion of the “right” question and reframe inquiries
• Integrate activity-based protocols into research methods
• Test creative engagement techniques
• Enhance note-taking, analysis, and insight generation

This approach creates a natural, immersive exchange where insights emerge organically. Ideal for researchers, designers, and facilitators—no artistic experience required, just curiosity!

 Speaker Bio: Meena Kothandaraman
 UX Research

With 35 years of experience, Meena has consulted to emphasize the strategic value and positioning of qualitative research in the design of product, space and service. Meena is fascinated by the complexity of human behavior, and applies a credible, structured and transparent approach to integrating human stories and anecdotes into mainstream processes. This ensures that research activities provide the best service to organizations, and that learning objectives are addressed to maximize potential.

Meena is co-founder of twig+fish, a research and strategy practice based in Boston, MA, that espouses these research beliefs, while maintaining a utopic work-life balance. She is also a founding Lecturer of the Bentley University Human Factors and Information Design (HFID) graduate program. Over her 25-year tenure, her qualitative research course has guided now-leading practitioners to integrating meaningful and successful research practices in major organizations. She has openly shared her experience as a WOC as part of the curriculum she has designed. She actively constructs workshops for diverse teens to be introduced to the world of research as a career path, hoping to broaden those who hear the story and contribute to the products being created in the marketplace.

She holds an M.S. in Information Resources Management from Syracuse University and a B.Com. in MIS from the University of Ottawa, Canada. Meena is a proud Canadian Bostonian and keeps her interest diverse to stay curious: she has authored a children’s book, has hosted a vegetarian cooking show and is an accomplished South Indian classical violinist.

For more info, you can follow Meena on LinkedIn

Prior Presentations:

DETHRONING RESEARCH METHODS: REFLECTIVE ALTERNATIVES TO STUDY DESIGN (CanUX 2017)
Nov 4, 2017 2:20pm / 40 min

WORKSHOP W2: DESIGNING (N)CREDIBLE RESEARCH STUDIES (CanUX 2017)
Nov 3, 2017 9:00am / Full Day

DESIGNING (N)CREDIBLE RESEARCH STUDIES (CanUX 2016)
Nov 12, 2016 3:40pm / 30 min /  Slide deck (PDF) / i Sketchnotes

*Image credit: Meena Kothandaraman