Data IS part of the design process. As for Mechanical Turk, take a look at some of the papers Greg Little has published from MIT to get some creative ideas as

Data IS part of the design process. As for Mechanical Turk, take a look at some of the papers Greg Little has published from MIT to get some creative ideas as to how to use Mechanical Turk. If you're a Rails developer, take a look at my gem Turkee to easily integrate with Mechanical Turk ( http://github.com/aantix/turkee http://github.com/aantix/turkee ).