Irina Dimitriade

Irina Dimitriade

Director, Cultural Strategy (Amsterdam)

Irina joined Crowd DNA after a client-side stint with Just Eat Takeaway in Amsterdam, where she immersed herself in slow culture, unearthing people’s food rituals, habits and unmet needs. A career highlight during that time was being nominated for the MRS Cultural Insights Award for a landscaping piece of cultural research on gaming conducted together with… Crowd DNA! Irina has a soft spot for storytelling, and loves crafting strategic narratives that are rooted in people’s stories and lived experiences. When not working, you can find Irina bird watching in the woods, sweating it out in a hot yoga studio or hanging out in one of Amsterdam’s super gezellig brown cafes.

  • Narrated Galleries

    We love films, but narrated galleries – fusing showreels of still images and audio of participant commentary – creates outputs that allow for high levels of reflection and audience empathy. Ideal for user experience work, in other words

  • Crowd Communities

    We’ve a wealth of experience at setting up and managing communities for clients, with learnings on how best to engage audiences and a full box of tricks for maximising what we get out of the work – including geo tagging, streaming in social media data and a mobile optimised platform

  • Pinterest

    We’ve used Pinterest to really good effect on a number of projects recently, helping us to explore differences and commonalities among different typologies in areas such as fashion and style, home, holidays and entertainment. Engagement levels with participants always rank high, and clients love the vividness and clarity of the findings.

  • Citizen Journalism

    Citizen journalism works on the principle of making reporters of our participants, briefing them to capture what’s happening in the lives of their friends and family via video dispatches and blogging. It gets us places where we can’t otherwise get. It bypasses the bias of having a researcher in attendance. People are often more accurate reporters on those around them than on themselves, so that’s another bias circumnavigated.

  • Network Audits

    If you want to really understand how people interact with those around them, it’s logical to research interconnected groups of friends, family and work colleagues. First developed as part of our award winning word of mouth research for Guardian News & Media, and since then refined and reconfigured across a range of global projects, our network audit approach helps us understand who’s influencing who as authentically as possible.