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漏 2026 Fryderyk Pryjma. All rights reserved.
Privacy PolicyLast weeks and months have been quite intense for me. I started my Industrial PhD, at 's doctoral school, while still running my UX studio - . Luckily my dissertation topic is straongly overlapping with my daily work - "AI supported learning process in IT services organizations". However, the environment to which I come was a completely new system.
For starters I needed to understand the way the Polish educational system works. I was surprised by many aspects of it. For example it puts a lot of emphasis on earning points for publishing in specific journals and newspapers.
On top of that there is a lot of noise in that environment. For example with publications connected to conference proceedings. They sometimes seem like a marketing tool to get people to join the conference. They do not offer real value for researchers.
So I spent a lot of time just understanding:
For someone coming from the industry, this whole points logic and academic ecosystem felt different. It felt complex and over-complicated.
At the same time I was trying to understand what exactly I want to research. I know the general space (information technology services background) very well from practice.
The analysis of what I was reading, mixed with my daily experiences in projects, led me to a few clear affirmations about my focus. I am primarily interested in how IT organizations share and learn knowledge, and especially how this plays out during the discovery phase of design in product creation.
This is the space where user research, stakeholder input and design decisions meet, and where a lot of knowledge is created, transformed or lost. Until now I did not really have an academic structure for looking at it, so at this stage I am working on my first systematic literature reviews to build a solid theoretical backbone for these questions.
I want to start with Nonaka and Takeuchi and their publication on knowledge creation in organizations. Then cover knowledge transfer and learning processes. And lastly move to work on open innovation to build a strong theoretical background.
Next step for me will be to summarise the existing work in the design field and understand what is considered best practice for efficient design management and for the participation of design teams in IT projects.
I am especially interested in how user research and design discovery are organised as learning processes, and how knowledge moves between different stakeholders over the course of a project.
When I read Nonaka I immediately thought about Toyota and the whole story of Japanese innovation in management, lean product systems and continuous improvement. It was interesting to see how many of these ideas come from similar years and similar way of thinking. This constant drive for excellence, for improving processes step by step, for making knowledge explicit and then using it again, is very close to what we try to do in good UX and product design work.
So it is not only some abstract theory of management. I already see clear connections to how we work every day, how we learn, how we record insights, and how we forget them sometimes.
In my research I want to go deeper into the different touchpoints between stakeholders in IT projects and see how their input is brought into the project. Product owners, business stakeholders, UX designers, developers, customer support, end users, all have different pieces of knowledge.
The question is how this knowledge transfer is organized during discovery and design. What is lost, what is transformed, what is misunderstood. And of course how to make it better so that project outcomes improve and we make more informed decisions.
For me this is directly a UX topic and at the same time a management topic. It is about structures, rituals, tools and culture that support learning, user research, and design decisions.
From the perspective of Effdde, the first personal takeaway from this reading and thinking was to put even more emphasis on the phase of gathering requirements and asking questions. I want us to really understand the specific needs of each client and the context of their business instead of assuming we already know.
This means slowing down at the beginning, listening more, asking sometimes very basic questions. And then tuning our offering to the concrete users and the concrete business KPIs.
It seems simple, but in reality, it is easy to jump to conclusions. This can lead to starting wireframes and workshops too quickly while not being fully aligned on business needs and strategy.
For me quality in UX and design is not about how pretty a screen looks. Quality means adequateness to the business. It means that what we design actually fulfills business KPIs and brings real effect.
Another big lesson for me recently was a very practical one. I realized that our services are in a way standardized for typical custom projects.
We do our best work when we serve non standardized, custom IT projects that cannot be quickly created with ready made open source or very standardized tools.
When there are highly standardized tools, there are usually companies that specialize in them and have higher efficiency. In those cases it is more honest to say that we are maybe not the best partner.
It is not always comfortable to say that we are not the one vendor for everything, but this honesty is also a kind of knowledge management and expectation management. It protects quality and long term relationships.
All of this connects for me. On one side I am reading about knowledge transfer, learning, open innovation, Japanese management, and academic models of how organizations learn. On the other side I see very concrete questions in UX and IT projects.
How do we capture user research insights so they do not disappear after one workshop. How do we make sure management, dev and design teams share the same understanding of the problem. My PhD is a way to put more structure around these questions and then bring back better tools and practices to our design work.
Recently, I also started to be more active with public speaking. Last week I participated in the IOF open meeting in technology, and now I will represent Effdde on WSB University premises during the Week of Entrepreneurship.
So this is where I am now. Deep in the discovery of the academic world, trying to navigate points and publications, learning from Nonaka and others about knowledge creation and transfer, and in parallel testing these ideas in real projects in Effdde and in Silk Software House.
My hope is that over time this combination of PhD work, design practice, user research and management experience will give me a very strong base to propose better ways of working in IT projects.
And of course I want to keep sharing this journey openly, because talking about it is already a form of knowledge transfer and learning.