User participation

A basic occurrence of user participation, taking the form of a rough message that indicates this stamps machine is broken. User-generated content if I may use this term.

This sort of activity has been taken as potentially transferable to digital interfaces. Think, for instance, about GPS devices that allow people to send over some updates concerning traffic jams and constructions (and sometimes send fake information about non-existing constructions only to prevent other persons to use certain routes). A topic I address yesterday on the french radio “France Culture” (podcast here, french only, sorry about that).

Causes and symptoms of failures

My interest in failures (as attested by my Lift09 speech) led my peruse “Anatomy of a Failure: How We Knew When Our Design Went Wrong, and What We Learned From It” (by William Gaver, John Bowers, Tobie Kerridge, Andy Boucher, Nadine Jarvis) with attention.

The article is a case study that examines the appropriation (or the wrong appropriation I should say) of an home health monitor device. The authors identify what they call ‘symptoms of failure’ that touches 4 themes: engagement, reference, accommodation, and surprise and insight. They discuss theses reasons of failures by looking at three different angles: (1) problems particular to the specific design hypothesis they had, (2) problems relevant for mapping input to output more generally, and (3) problems in the design process they employed in developing the system.

An interesting aspect in the paper is the must-have definition of what constitutes a failure:

“Approaches to evaluating interpretive systems such as the sort we describe here tend to focus on how to go about gathering suitable material for assessment, but avoid discussing how success or failure might be determined. For instance, Höök et al. based their evaluation of a system on analysing the conversations that groups of people had on encountering it. Others seek alternatives to verbalised judgements to capture more intuitive and sensual aesthetic and emotional responses. Finally, others advocate gathering multiple forms of evaluation from a variety of perspectives, including those of ‘cultural commentators’ such as journalists or filmmakers. Opening out evaluation to multiple voices and new forms of expression in these ways reflects the multiple interpretations afforded by the class of systems in which we are interested. On the other hand, these approaches can invite a kind of relativism from which it is difficult to draw firm conclusions.
(…)
we propose features of user engagement as being reliably symptomatic of success or failure, (…) we describe the symptoms of success and failure that emerge from a comparison of the
unsatisfactory experiences observed in this field study with more rewarding deployments of other systems in the past.“

The authors then go on with a description of their system (the “Home Health Monitor”) with an account of early field trials that serve as a sort of baseline against which they compare the results from a field study. What is important to my research here is the description of how the system failed in conjunction with certain behavioral indicators they did not find:

• Engagement: Beyond any explicit declaration of liking, we take as evidence such things as an enthusiasm about discussing the design and their experience with it; persistence in use and interpretation over time; suggestions for new enhancements that reflect our original design intentions, showing the prototype to friends.
• Reference: the tendency for volunteers to discuss successful prototypes through reference to other technologies or experiences that they like.
• Accommodation: the degree to which people accommodate successful designs to their existing domestic activities and rhythms
• Surprise and Insight: successful systems are those which continue to occasion new surprises and new insights over the course of encounters with them. For instance, new content might appear, or unfamiliar, potentially rare, behaviours might be observed, and this might give rise to new perceptions of the system or the things it indicates. Equally, people may find new meanings for relatively rich but unchanging experiences. Of course, surprise and insight are neither properties of the system per se nor of the people who use it, but instead characterise the relationship between the two.

These were the symptoms of failures, which should no be confused with potential reasons of failure. The authors also contrast early trials results to the field study to get a grip on the causes that are quite specific to their design.

Why do I blog this? pursuing my work about failures here, gathering material about design issues with regards to failures for publication ideas. This piece is highly interesting as it shows how field research may help to uncover symptoms and causes of failures. Surely some good content to add to my lists.

Telescope to see leaves

This huge tube that looks like a medieval bull horn is one of the installation from the Lausanne Jardins project (Lausanne garden), which is a series of devices located here and there in the city that aims at renewing the relationship to nature.

The piece above is called “Dentelles” (‘lace’ in english) and it has been designed by Aline Juon, Florine Wescher. It’s made of 3 telescopes that target a nearby forest (yes, in Lausanne) which used to be much closer to the city in the past. These devices have been created as a invitation for passers-by to observe the detailed elements of trees, and eventually notice this
fragile urbanization boundary as a “lace”.

Why do I blog this? the gigantic size of the devices struck me as fascinating when I came past. Observing the trees through the lense is intriguing as it leads to a very detailed representation of leaves, as if you were close to nature (like it used to be in the past in this neighborhood). Unlike lots of devices which are meant to make visible phenomena that are invisible, this piece aims at bringing things closer, which is also an interesting goal.

It looks like a sort of macroscope (big size of the device) but it’s closer to a microscope.

Nametagged

This name-tagged hooded that I ran across yesterday morning reminded me of Aram Bartholl’s WoW project. The fact that this kid walked around with his first name written on his clothe seems to be a curious phenomenon; although, it’s perhaps not his name (is there a brand called “Alex”? or is it some sort of movie star I am not aware?).

Assuming that’s this is the teenager’s name, displaying one’s name publicly like this denotes a shift in identity and privacy perception that is very well addressed in Bartholl’s WoW project:

“[in World of Warcraft] Each player is represented by an individual avatar, which is given an unalterable name that by no means corresponds to the real name of the player but serves as a clear means of identification in the online world. This so-called nickname floats above the avatar’s head and is constantly visible by all other players. There is no anonymity for the avatars themselves

The WoW project takes this mode of publicizing players’ names that’s typical of online 3D worlds and transfers it into the physical domain of everyday life. Participants of the WoW-workshop will be able to construct their own name out of cardboard and then parade around in public with it hovering above their head. What happens when a person’s customary anonymity in the public sphere is obliterated by the principles operative in virtual worlds online?“

Why do I blog this? A street encounter like this led me to get back to Bartholl’s project and wonder about the display and projection of identity in physical space. I did not want to mean that there is a direction relationship between the kid’s hooded and online habits. However, I found intriguing to see how this sort of MMO interface can echo with existing physical artifacts’ design: there are already some instances of people wearing and displaying their identity in the material space. Of course, the “conference badge” and name tags is a common one but the hooded example here is even more curious as it’s a more opened (and less formal) context.

Another instance of such observed in Montreux this afternoon:

Count on something else happening

The observation of this sidewalk game (three card monte) the other day in Geneva 5 minutes after starting a book by Howard Becker lead me to acknowledge the full veracity of the following quote:

“We can always count on something else happening, another glancing experience, another half-witnessed event. What we can’t count on is that we will have something useful to say about it when it does. We are in no danger of running out of reality; we are in constant danger of running out of signs, or at least of having the old ones die on us.“

Geertz, C. (1995), After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist, Harvard University Press.

Why do I blog this? this should be at the roots of scouting for insights and elements for design research. An interesting quote to be re-used in one my course.

White Glove Tracking

The never-ending discussions about MJ in various contexts sometimes leads you to talk about pop culture in conjunction with concepts such as “crowd sourcing” and “social web”. This is what happened yesterday when I brought back the White Glove Tracking project in a social web meeting. It was a crowd sourcing experiment form 2007 created by Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth that asked an online community to help track Michael Jackson’s white glove from a televised performance, in 10’600 frames. It took then 72 hours to go from the txt files to user-generated visualizations of the data collected using Processing. Some of the results can be found in the white glove gallery.

Why do I blog this? beyond the MJ thing, I find this crowdsourcing instance quite curious (among others like the Nasa Clickworkers project) and some hilarious examples (like the big white glove that fits quite well with the Billie Jean bass line). A sort of testbed for distributed visual data analysis where human eyeballs are quite efficient.

What I also find intriguing here is the social dynamic around it, see for instance both the different categories in the gallery (“the winners”) and the sort of “rankings” of participants (see below). I am always amazed by pervasive rankings even, perhaps they play a role in crowdsourcing experiments:

(ranking)

Energy production feedback – saved CO2

Encountered in Paris yesterday when visiting Aldebaran Robotics.

Yet another weird toilet interface

(Out)

(In)

This toilet door encountered in a french train yesterday struck me as fascinating. On both side of the door (in and out the toilet), you have a remnant of the past (a door handle that has its highly efficient affordance) and a set of button (open/close). As you can imagine, most the passers-by start by turning the door handle, which fails to open the door, they then froze and realize they can press a button. The next step is that they come in and realize that a similar masquerade happens inside. What is intriguing is that when outside of the toilet, the button set is close to the door handle, which is not the case inside (hence the presence of weird yellow arrow-shaped stickers).

What happened here? The combination of two interaction styles (buttons + door handle) is stunning and detrimental to this basic interaction (opening and closing a door uh!). What’s the design rational here? maybe that it’s less physically demanding to press a button and wait that the door automatically closes/opens. However, and you may expect, people IN the toilet are generally anxious about how to close this god damn door. Some even try to grasp and push the handle, which does not allow to lock the door.

Let’s have a look closer:

Besides, the button set is perhaps not the best way to interact but the presence of both is even more confusing. Weird arrows, red circles for emergency opening, what a mess!

Why do I blog this? observing how everyday basic interactions can be transformed into complex encounters with objects. And yes, I always bring my camera when I go to ANY toilets, it’s an interesting place to analyze weird technological innovations.

Micro/Macro Mobility

Different forms of mobility means, spotted this week-end in Geneva. Both need an energy source (electricity or gas).

3 pieces about ethnography and design

Some pieces I ran across recently about the role of ethnographically-inspired approaches in design:

Fewer Engineers, More Anthropologists (by Navi Radjou) highlights a so-called new R&D model based on interdisciplinarity. The authors describes to what extent “anthropologists” (or people who have skills related to anthropology) can help companies to “tailor their business models and offerings to match users’ socio-economic and cultural context“. What is weird here, as described by near future laboratory fellow Julian Bleecker is that this is definitely not really new (“2.0″). For example, Julian points to earlier work by Lucy Suchman at PARC (described in here book). What I find surprising here is that the notion that users should be taken care of in the design/R&D process is not new as well. Of course it was not called “design-based ethnography” in the past and “co-design” wasn’t employed either. Perhaps the HBR has lowered his standards or forgot to ask an historian of science and technologies.

How to Turn Research into Innovation Gold (by Jessie Scanlon, Business Week) is a bit more mature as it do not highlight the originality of such approach. With such title, the assumption is clear: data from the field can be turned into gold. It basically points out with a problem field researchers have with the huge quantity of material they collect: what to do out of it? how to turn it into something that is fruitful for other stakeholders (such as designers, strategy people or engineers). What the article describes as “how to tease useful insights out of all of this disparate data“. The author takes the example of a Steelcase case (I always like to make weird phrase like this, using two times the same word):

“With all of the research materials gathered in a room, the group convened for what they call a “big share”—a two-day event that included marketers, engineers, industrial designers, and other stakeholders. The field team began by telling stories and sharing observations. (Researchers record the latter in formal documents that include the observation, its origin, its significance, and other details.)

With their thinking primed by the stories, the group went through all of the research photos, organizing them into related themes—a patient’s need for privacy, for instance—and taping those clusters on the wall. As they began to see common problems or workarounds, they added observations written on Post-It notes to the wall. “The goal is to take the knowledge gained from the research and make it explicit,” says Bromberg.“

They then apply a 100 to 50 to 12 insights “that could guide the design and development phases to come” in a sort of reduction process. The article also gives some ideas about the process itself (take time to look back at the data, look for patterns) which seems like the outline of a thick manual of ethnography.

In the last issue of Ambidextrous, there is an interview of a designer and an anthropologist who addresses the general issues raised by the role of field research in design. They discuss the existence of such approach for sometimes (it goes beyond the HBR piece for that matter) and focuses on the added value: the uncovering of “unmet needs or ‘opportunity spaces’”, “get business people a little closer to real people, to customers”. Doing so is achieved through high-level goals: “understand people in their own terms”, “through simplified models, a set of key stories or quotes”, “eliciting the cultural constructs people have while keeping your mind on two places at once, both the native model [of the user] and your own analytical model [as an ethnographer]“.

Some general comments about these pieces:

1. The first aspect that strikes me is the vocabulary. The general use of terms such as “ethnography” and “anthropology” sounds like they reference to established and well-respected academic disciplines and practices. It’s a sort of indicator of their validity, relevance or maybe seriousness. However, what is generally meant is “field research” with a strong focus on “data” and data collection techniques. The absence of theories and theoretical constructs is quite astonishing. Of course, there are different schools of thoughts in anthropology, and some of them employ less theories than others, but still they argue about the reasons for that. That being said, I tend to prefer using the term “field research” (or scouting) since it’s more humble and less anchored in a specific discipline (don’t want rain on anyone’s parade).
2. The focus on a utilitarian model is also important in these pieces. The point of using ethnography is to find “unmnet needs” with their obvious counterparts: business opportunities (or in engineering circle: opportunities to turn a technology into something that can be employed by peeps). Surprisingly, there’s never a discussion about what is a “need” (isn’t it a theoretical construct?) and the fact that this term is used with a very broad meaning do not account for the complexity of what it encompasses. Recently I was in a round-table with engineers and they were eager to find a “need” that could justify their developments. I find it intriguing but my interest vanished when I realized they stayed at an highly general level: a need for a mobile service could be “sharing content” or “communicating with one’s tribe”. It was really hard for me to make them understand that these needs are only broad categories and that it’s important to go to finer-grained levels. Like… what is important for [a certain category of] people when they do X and Y, at certain moments in time/their life, etc.
3. The quantitative rhetoric grounded in temporal perspectives is also fascinating in these articles. See for example: “To effectively carry out their global R&D 2.0 strategy, CEOs of multinationals must give themselves a target of staffing at least 40% of their R&D labs in emerging markets with sociologists and micro-economists by 2015” in the HBR piece. Or: “the group had generated close to 100 insights (…) they “collapsed” these to 50 and then further.” in the BW document“. Maybe, it’s a side-effect of the corporate world that desperately need indicators and quant stuff but the emphasis on such parameters is curious from an external viewpoint.

Why do I blog this? preparing material for my “Field research for designers” course for next semester, I try to find an alternative model to what already exist. I am particularly interested in the use of ethnographical techniques in a context where one do not try to jump on the “uncover needs” bandwagon. My assumption is that there are still some possibilities to employ methodologies and theories coming from ethnography in a meaningful and subtle ways to inform/constraint/inspire/question/help design and the different stakeholders of design-based projects.

(an interesting encounter from last week-end, a giraffe-shaped game in a public parc in Geneva, which nurtured some interesting reflections about public space and “how do people do what they do” discussions).

This topis is well present in the discussion I have with Julian, about how to go beyond the instrumental and explore fringes (the places where the unevenly distributed glimpses form the future may be located) for crafting weird near future explorations.