At Live|work, we use design research extensively as a way of taking risk out of decision-making and as inspiration for our projects. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, I’m not saying that design research guarantees 0 risk. I’m arguing the opposite, that dealing with the future carries no guarantees, only ways of understanding the environment you’re taking risks in.

Risk management usually involves both tactical and strategic research. This duality is one of the joys of design work, but it can cause a lot of confusion. Clients can brief for the one when they want the other and it’s all too easy to get the balance wrong when you’re flipping back and forth between the two.

So what I’d like to suggest is that design research would benefit from a kind of ‘string’ theory - a grand unifying discourse that clears up some of the differences without building walls between different practices.

I’m going to lift some concepts I’ve found useful from French philosophy to do this. I don’t claim to be an expert in these concepts and if post-structuralism is your thing, I’m pretty sure that you could tell me that I’ve gotten it all wrong!

Social life of ideas

One of the insights we can take from the humanities is that ideas have a social life outside of their technical details. Edison famously didn’t have the best technology for electric lightbulbs and distribution, but the guy burnt the candle at both ends selling a social vision of an electrically lit society and this activity carried the day. The key point is that any artefact is an embodiment of a certain set of ideas and social practices that won out over another set of ideas.

Archaelogy

We can use the idea of archaeology to trace these histories. Instead of digging objects out of the ground, with each layer of sediment marking a thousand years of human history, we can dig up the the social environment that ideas & artefacts were created in. Every designed artefact we see today can be traced back in time like this, it’s past discerned as a network of competing ideas. Each turning point represents a node in this network. New ideas grow over old ideas, spark off in new directions or simply die out.

Rhizome

This model of ideas growing organically, with winners and losers, is remarkably similar to the metaphor of a rhizome. Biologically speaking, a rhizome is a type of plant that grows in fits and starts from roots and offshoots, often underground. Their growth is unpatterned and opportunistic.They simply abandon dead ends and build on successes . These features have led to them being used abundantly as a metaphor for loosely defined networks as opposed to rigid, hierarchical tree structures.

Tying it all together

So how do these ideas fit together to help us understand tactical and strategic design.

We could see the relationship as linear. Here we see the simple development of ideas into artefacts. We might have a number of ‘strategic’ ideas such as location, group shopping or universal healthcare that lead to materialised artefacts in the form of services such as Foursquare, Groupon or the NHS.

I’m not entirely satisfied with this though. I think it implies a 1:1 relationship between ideas and artefacts. I think we need something less linear, more nuanced, to avoid creating a distinction between thinkers and doers. I don’t aspire to be the one without the other.

Time

What if we go back to our rhizome, a network of competing ideas, and the archaeology of those ideas? If we draw a line through this model called TODAY, we introduce TIME as the key differentiating factor.

This implies that below this line lies the past, and above it lies the future. If we can conduct an archaeology of the ideas and artefacts of the past, and they all connect to TODAY at some point, they must also all have some kind of trajectory into the future and we can see design research as a type of archaeology of the future.

Clearly, ideas that have moved into the past have a highly pragmatic measure of their success. They either sold 3 million widgets or they didn’t.

On the other end of the spectrum, scenario-based far future design research involves imagining some point in the future where the environment has a particular shape and then working backwards to TODAY to understand which nodes shaped that future.

Connected, near future design research is about looking at the social environment available to us TODAY and trying to grasp through their embryonic social impacts which of the current ideas carry the most value for people. We want clues about the most promising nodes for the given environment.

Finally, when we encounter ground level, all of these abstract ideas and social factors can be stabilised. Competing ideas become artefacts with firm properties, things get pragmatic and tactical. You can hold Node A or Node B in your hand and ask which actually works. At this point you can start dealing with measured data, such as did you sell 10 widgets or 1000 widgets.

And that makes selling 3 million widgets pretty much guaranteed, right?

Summing up

To sum up, here’s what I like about this model.

1. A physical object is just a highly stable form of idea.

2. There’s no hierarchy between methods. What kind of design research you apply depends entirely on what you’re looking for and when you’re looking for it.

3. It’s unified. One model can accommodate different types of design research whilst still offering some clarity about differences.

A further complication is that a discussion guide has different uses. Obviously it maps out the space of an interview for those participating, but it often also serves to map out what an interview will cover for clients and other stakeholders. This diversity of audiences tends to exaggerate the definition/flexibility fault line.

I believe that the interview should be the primary focus of a discussion guide. It should be seen as a tool designed for the intense needs of practitioners who need to quickly scan for prompts and act as a checklist that necessary topics have been addressed. And it should do this without forcing a stilted structure on conversation. In other words, it needs to be able to be used in a non-linear way. Respondents can and will steer conversations in often productive directions that could not be anticipated prior to the conversation and a tool that hinders this is unlikely to be able to be successfully used in an interview setting.

However creating some structure with which to frame each interview in a project can be immensely productive once analysis begins. Having a data grid to populate for each case allows for easy comparison and allows data to be filtered to the most relevant points. Useful when analysis time is in short supply.

So what can we do to craft a practical and functional document that meets as many of these competing needs as possible? I’d like to set out several tricks that I’ve learnt or seen other people practice as a way of fostering a discussion. Please jump in in the comments with things that you’ve tried and found to work well.

In the past, I have tried using a small (A5) sheet of paper with simple topics printed on it. This acts as a constant checklist to what needs discussing - it’s easy to scan in the middle of a conversation without breaking the flow of conversation. However making sure that you have enough material for each topic relies on quite agile interviewing and makes it difficult to highlight specific data points that must be collected.

More common is a list of questions in verbose format, for example: “Are there particular times that are more difficult during your journey to work?” The danger of this is that either you follow the list slavishly, losing productive spontaneity, or you lose track of what’s in the guide, since it’s difficult to scan and formulate agile prompts when the guide is dense and pre-formatted in a way that the respondent may not follow.

I want to suggest some ways that we can bring these two impulses (structure/flexibility) together for the best of both worlds.

When it comes to the practicality of conducting qualitative interviews, I can’t recommend Grant McCracken’s The Long Interview highly enough. It’s pragmatic yet thoughtful and best of all short and to the point. A key idea I’ve taken from this book is the idea of floating and prompted questions.

McCracken advocates the use of non-directive, “grand-tour” questions that prompt the respondent to frame the question in their own terms and take you on a “grand tour” of the way they understand the topic. These are the short section titles I used in my A5 topic guide example, framed in verbose question format for the benefit of casual readers. McCracken explains that these questions can be elongated with minimal direction from the interviewer through the use of “floating prompts”, raised eyebrows to indicate interest or confusion, repeating phrases used by the respondent for clarification and such like.

The openness of these questions is important, it’s the reason for the impulse to conduct interviews without questionnaires. How a respondent prioritises their response, whilst not immediately available as gospel truth, is an important guide to what they consider valuable even when it’s what they think the interviewer wants to hear.

This strategy may produce discussion of all the topics required of the interview, in which case the remainder of the topic guide can function as our checklist above - no need to repeat questions that have been answered in the same phrasing as the topic guide. Time is better used for probing and exploring in more depth the most interesting aspects of what a respondent has said and obtaining some early validation of what we understand about what they’ve said.

However the discussion can also veer wildly off course, or run it’s own course without fully exploring what we need to explore. In this situation, McCracken says we need to turn to planned prompts that tease out further aspects of the topic. These could be contrast questions such as “How does x relate to y?”, categorical questions defining key characteristics of topics, example questions in which the respondent is asked to describe an incident related to the topic or stimulus questions in which the respondent is given some activity or material with which to frame their response. All these tactics should be used once “grand tour” testimony has produced as much as it is able to. Remember that how a respondent tells their story is data too. Every prompt tactic we use comes at the expense of understanding more about their story so we should be careful how we use them.

So how to put these ideas into practice?

I have taken to framing each topic as a “grand-tour” question with instructions to the interviewer to use floating prompts. There is a single such question per topic area, followed by several short planned prompts. Breaking up the floating/planned prompt dynamic per topic gives a better opportunity to actually use the topic guide as an active tool in the interview itself.

I tend to assign a rough time guide to each section so that I can keep track of the amount of time I’ve devoted to a particular topic and make sure we can cover everything in the allotted time. Interview length tends to depend on the topic and the amount of time the respondent can devote to it. Paradoxically, topics that you might think would be more difficult for the respondent are often the ones that they can comfortably discuss for long periods. I’ve known difficult health related interviews to run for over 3 hours because the respondent appreciated the chance to reflect on a situation that had a big impact on their lives. Conversely, a dry and technical subject may cover all the required topics in less than an hour. All depends on the amount of understanding required around each topic before you are able to move on.

An interesting idea I’ve been trying out recently came from my colleague Leeor Levy. I noticed her preparing for an interview by highlighting the key idea in each verbose question - effectively filtering the amount of information requiring visual processing during a scan of the topic guide during discussion. This is a fantastic way of keeping the guide active and relevant - the flexibility impulse - and I’ve taken to rewriting verbose questions to make this key idea compact and concise and then pre-highlighting them. For example the question, “Are there particular times that are more difficult during your journey to work?” can just as easily be written “Are there any particularly difficult times during your journey to work?” With this phrasing, it’s easy to highlight “particularly difficult times”. The rest of the verbose question gives helpful context when it’s needed but can easily fall away. These highlights make for a useful, visual checklist that can be used in the interview context - my key criteria.

I hope some of these ideas can help the next time you need to plan a qualitative interview. The advantages of some element of structure, particularly when analysis time is short and topics need to be addressed succinctly, are manifold, however should not come at the expense of creating a useful tool for the messy process of co-creating a purposeful conversation with a person whose own way of seeing and interacting with the world is, in the end, why we have come to speak to them.

What are your tricks and tactics for writing topic guides? Please contribute your experiences and discuss in the comments!

Andrew Adonis (I’m from the colonies, I just can’t do the lords thing) arguing for an incremental approach to public service innovation.

He points out 6 key strategies for successful reforms.

  1. follow failed attempts at reform, and learn from their mistakes
  2. are incremental and do not try to achieve ‘whole-system’ transformation
  3. are based on existing best-practice, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel
  4. require huge political drive
  5. require considerable support from stakeholders, even if this support is not made public
  6. create a new consensus in the general public.

The last point is especially interesting - how do you move the culture of what is expected forward so that success governments are less partial to partisan destruction of successful policies. It seems to me from this speech that he thinks the coalition has not rejected as much as they’d like us to think.

The other point that this approach raises is that if innovation consists of small cultural changes that then take their time to propagate, how do they argue their case in a 24-hour news-cycle/press release political mechanism.

http://www.ippr.org.uk/events/?id=4190

I haven’t posted here in ages, and I still haven’t got anything amazingly insightful to contribute due to an incredible work schedule, but I thought I’d give some props to a little tool that I’ve been making a lot of use of.

One of the big dilemmas with every design research project is balancing the design and the research. Yes, coding up all the research and analysing it in depth is the best way to get the most out of it, but often there isn’t enough time or resources and the best use is getting the designers up to speed and moving on.

And so post-it note or debrief analysis has become the modus operandi in design research. This has it’s drawbacks though. You need a bit of space to do the analysis, and you need to transfer the final results to a computer to write it up.

So, searching for something to make the most of my notes immediately post-interview, I came across Mind Node. This is a pretty simple little piece of software for making mind maps with. What I realised is that the key functions of mind mapping are pretty similar to what we’re doing with post-it notes. Capture points and then re-organise them to make sense of it all.

This software does that. You make a bunch of tree diagrams of concepts and then re-organise them to your heart’s content to make sense of it all.

Best of all, there’s an iPhone app, so you can easily capture all your notes on the train immediately post a fieldwork encounter and then simply sync to your desktop for fully digitised, legible, printable, shareable, editable fieldwork notes in what’s pretty close to a post-it note format. Whilst post-its are great for working in groups, they’re not that great if you need things to be constantly edited and worked on to get to a final result.

Like all the best tools, it’s really simple and just does one thing well. Give it a go if you find you’re needing the flexibility of post-its with the legibility and ease of digital.

It’s high time that the interview got a little love. I’ll come right out and say it, the interview is the mainstay of my practice and I’d be willing to bet that of most others if they looked their toolkit straight in the eye.

Let’s get the semantics out of the way first. What most proponents of ‘what users do’ assume is that straight observation somehow gets you an unmediated direct line to the truth, as opposed to the scratchy, broken telephone that is discussion. Whilst my tone may let on that I take issue with this assumption, positioning itself as it does at one of the extreme poles of the participant/observer gradient, I want to make an argument for interviews, not simply against observation. One hundred percent observation is often the most appropriate method, particularly where straight forward empirical evidence is required. It’s the mantra that I take issue with.

If observation lies at one pole, what’s at the other? That would be one hundred percent participation, or “going native” in somewhat unhelpful old skool. Just as observation is often entirely appropriate, I’m one of those who feels that one hundred percent participation can also be a valid, helpful, and entirely human approach, even without the extra label of scientific.

So you’re not scared of a little subjectivity then? Good, because it can help out a lot when you settle down somewhere in the middle of the gradient. That easy middle ground where we’re sipping the Kool Aid but not drinking it all down in one gulp. Here’s where we can start to communicate. This is the bit the observation advocates forget. If you’re speaking to someone, it’s become an interview, even if you keep a video camera shoved in their face. They’re not ‘doing’, they’re subjectively engaging, just as you are. And admitting that goes a long way to establishing the rapport that means what people are saying to you is close to how they represent themselves in their “normal surroundings”. It’s not “truth” folks, I thought that one got laid to rest already.

Ok, ok, I hear the ‘real’ ethnographers squirming in the back there. Spending long periods of time with people and in settings will help you validate your theory and develop context. No 2 hour interview will let you do that. True, but that’s apples and orchards. ‘Real’ ethnography in my book is a program, not a method. It’s talking with people and participating in their lives, building context over time. Talking to people is a basic unit of both. Straight observation is something else entirely.

That’s why, resources being what they are, I’d rather do an interview for 2 hours than 2 hours of observation in most cases. And I’d guess that’s the reality of the situation for most jobbing design researchers. Hands up if you’ve found a magic formula for selling long term ethnographic projects to your clients, I’d love to hear how you do it! And if you think two days is an improvement on two hours, well, yeah, I’ll give you that, but not by much.

Finally, there’s what I consider the most compelling reason to give the interview the respect it deserves. Comparing what people say they do with what they do is apples and oranges. I’m not arguing that what people say they do is literal truth for interviewers anymore than what they do is for observers. What I’m saying is that what people say is interesting and useful, whether it’s true or not. What people say, how they articulate their representation, even where this isn’t strictly accurate, gives insight into a range of important issues such as values and identity.

Interviews aren’t just raw data, they’re resources for examining how people interact with the issues you’re interested in. And if you hold a gun (with the words Commercial Reality engraved on the handle) to my head and say “you’ve got 2 hours to figure out what’s interesting to your client in this person’s world,” 8 times out of 10 I’m gonna want to chat.

Of course I reserve the right to use the most appropriate method. I never rule out drinking the Kool Aid or just hanging out and seeing what goes down. I’m just saying, ease up on the tenuous ethno-mantra and give chat a chance!

I want to start with a note of dissent. Part of the reason for what I see as an extreme fragmentation of the service design concept is that it was never that clearly articulated to start with. Many practices and viewpoints coalesced under the banner of service as a differentiation from product. The early arguments about the validity of service design largely took the form of a reaction to product design. Within that reactionary normalisation, the word service became a catchall for a number of streams of thought and the differences between those streams weren’t always clearly articulated.

So if we are to take advantage of this moment of bifurcation to strengthen the service design concept, we need to define some of those streams. Service designers may practice one or more of these strands, even within a single project, and I’d by no means say that my definitions were comprehensive or conclusive.

The first I’d identify is the traditional service industry strand. This stream synchronises neatly with experience design and customer service to create a discourse around improving the performative aspects of services. Typical clients in this space include hotels, museums, airlines, retail environments, call centres.

The second stream is represented by what appears to be coalescing as a ‘design thinking’ movement. This movement argues that the embodied skills of the designer offer a unique set of tools for instigating and managing change. By applying these skills to organisational challenges, design can give individuals within service organisations the ability to imagine and effect change. Typical clients for this strand are change management teams in large organisations such as the NHS, banks and telecomms.

The third stream as I see it is the propositional strand. In this discourse, service is best placed to effect strategic innovation due to it’s holistic perspective and freedom from material constraints. Typical clients are innovation teams looking for game changing proposition development. I consider the word service most problematic in this domain however, because it’s precise meanings distort much of the holistic power that is promised by the abstract form. This is also the strand that I am going to concentrate on for the remainder of this article. This is primarily because it’s the strand I most commonly practice in, but also because I believe the reaction against product in this strand creates an internal contradiction with precisely the ecology of product and service that I consider service design’s most compelling feature.

With that groundwork laid, I want to argue for looking at service as a complicated and not entirely satisfactory word describing the relationship between a producer and a consumer. In this abstracted definition, service doesn’t sound a million miles away from brand in it’s most abstract sense. However brand carries plenty of ambiguous weight of it’s own, and the implications of this proposed merger need tentative exploration. What does the service concept offer that brand doesn’t?

Brand as a static concept may not shed much light on service. However, brands are increasingly not static. Service applications such as Nike Plus create an active relationship between consumers and brands. They form complex ecologies involving brand, service AND product. Here the brand becomes more than abstract, it becomes useful. With use, brand evolves into what I call active brand. Note the distinction between this and the concept of branded utility. It’s semantic I know, but the implication of slapping a logo on a function seems to do the concept a disservice.

Active brand is important, because it represents a concrete relation between producer and consumer. Each is tied to the other as long as that activity continues and must continue to contribute to that relationship. The passive brand represented by the creation, production, delivery and yes, use, of a product is replaced by a relationship that may last over numerous product lifecycles.

This ecology perspective, present from the start in service design discourse, is one that needs developing. It needs definition, clarity and focused practice. It’s the most powerful strand precisely because it effectively resolves the reaction against product within service design and establishes the grounds for a merger with brand. Service design can be seen as the creation of active brand. This confusing word Service represents an infrastructure for active brands.

Digital services have a special place in this ecology. They are a powerful platform for the creation of active brand for a number of reasons. They stretch easily over time. They are analogous to the data layer that materially constitutes the relationship between the producer and the consumer. They are easily available, both materially and financially. And they allow compelling and clear definition at the propositional level.

I’ve argued that service design is best thought of as 3 distinct strands, articulated here as Experience, Change and Proposition. The third is the least clearly defined precisely because it attempts to define itself holistically, crossing boundaries with brand. However the evolution of brand into active brand presents the opportunity for merger between service as proposition and brand.

Resolving some of the ambiguous boundary disputes with the larger brand discourse, in a way that retains an important role for service as the platform for use, can help the practice of designing services emerge from this moment of bifurcation stronger and with a clearer message of the value that it can deliver, whether it is called service design or not.

“Design doesn’t have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn’t have to be good, but it has to be new.”

I really like this essay on design and research by Paul Graham. It’s an exploration of what’s different between design and what he describes as an active, exploratory form of research.

He’s talking here about the design of a programming language, but what I like is the ease with which he introduces and argues for some of the core principles of design research: starting with needs, prototyping, iteration. He also pushs some buttons with the argument that design (decision) by committee is necessarily a bad thing.

I love the idea that these methods are so cross-disciplinary, so much just a skill set like reading and writing, owned by everyone, not just one group of technicians. Graham elegantly captures the spirit of that idea here.

Fred’s central argument is that design thinking faces an internal threat from the normative desire to codify itself. As a new domain seeks to establish itself, it begins to construct expert knowledge that is arcane to non-practitioners. This codification plays an important social role in legitimising the expert knowledge, and not insignificantly creates a barrier to entry.

Fred argues that this drive to codification in systems thinking led ultimately to an unwieldiness that prevented mainstream acceptance. He warns that design thinking should seek to avoid this trap by “building an arsenal” rather than codifying a single set of principles.

This argument makes some sense to me. The codification of expert knowledge creates an unwieldiness and defensiveness that I think is the anti-thesis of what design thinking should be. If this movement were to emerge as simply a successor to the previous management fad, it would be an immense failure of a singular opportunity to introduce a level of ambiguity and flexibility into our toolkit.

The drive to codification appears to make sense, it seems that what’s needed is to talk the same language, to agree and to build a single edifice. However, in doing that we’d be creating that edifice on the grave of what design thinking can represent, which is the capacity for creativity that rationalism would seek to deny.

What I’d argue we need is to re-validate something of a black box, one that is considerably smaller, de-centralised and democratised, but a blackbox none the less. If design thinking represents anything for me, it’s the power of imagination, hope and inspiration. The ability to consider the future as flexible. Beyond that central thought, codification is a threat to flexibility, and flexibility is the central value that design thinking offers to our toolkits.

“Traditional paternalistic relationships between patients and doctors are being undermined in much the same way as the religious Reformation of the 16th century empowered the laity and threatened the 1,000-year-old hierarchy of the Catholic church in Europe.”

Joanne Shaw

Importantly, the article focuses attention not simply on technical innovations such as Google Health or Patients Like Me, but on the social role of an involved and informed ‘citizen patient’.

I’ve argued before that it is this side of the movement which holds the most promise. Specific tools are great news for savvy users, the kind who already get pretty good treatment from the health service. It is the socialisation of empowerment that offers real opportunity for improving the service as a whole.

For the record, I’m not suggesting ditching the bodies of knowledge, just the labels.

There’s been so much attempting to bolster the results of exploratory research with the gloss of method in the search of answers that I think we’ve started to dismiss the value of questions. More theoretically oriented researchers have seen these attempts as diminishing the value of their more robust work. I don’t think these turf wars are necessary or helpful.

What I’m arguing for is more transparency and reflexivity about what we are doing. The velocity of client innovation work often means that exploratory work is all that’s being funded. By moving the argument about robustness to a resource issue, we can clear the way for light and productive exploratory work that is of value in grounding emerging project-specific theory.

With velocity as a factor, I find disposable project-specific theory more productive than canned theory that I haven’t had time to adapt to the purpose. That’s my preference for working based on my (lack of) ability to process ideas quickly, it’s not a prescription for anyone else!

Has the pendulum swung, is it time to stop selling exploratory research as truth and have a bit of self-confidence in it’s value on it’s own merits?

He has some strange examples to back up his argument. He cites some traditional technical R&D from Intel as an example of research that makes a difference. He also cites Apple’s shutting down of Apple Research Labs in 1997 as evidence that corporations don’t need fundamental research. These examples ignore non-technical research by Intel and the undoubted relocation of research activity by Apple.

He does raise an interesting point about the social life of research and the “personality” of research in different organisations. How important is the model of innovation adopted by an organisation in influencing the impact of research on the organisation? Is innovation in organisations nature or nurture?

“If one thing matters, everything matters”

Wolfgang Tillmans

The embrace of participant observation by the design community has provided a source of tension between the disciplines that traditionally engaged in it and the new disciplines adapting it to their uses.

These tensions often confuse method with quality. I want to think about how the merger of these two activities can be re-conceptualised as an emerging third entity and avoid some of the disciplinary wars.

For anthropologists, the surge of interest in ethnography is both a boon and a worry. Interest in grounding innovation (and I’ll leave it at that for the moment) has meant increasing opportunity for the application of methods of engaging with people. If we step beyond the often rhetorical commitment to the needs of people, the simple situation is that capital has recognised the efficiency of grounded and iterative innovation and has increasingly looked to the humanities for methods of doing so.

The design industry has been well placed to respond to this need and they have enlisted the help of the social sciences under the banner of making capitalism serve people better. However the social sciences have a deep seated discomfort with the service of industry (not without reason) and my argument is that it’s this discomfort which lies beneath much of the argument over method in this debate.

However… Once we move into the service of industry, we accept some of the logic of capital by default, whether we like it or not. And part of that logic is efficiency. We must learn to do more with less. This may not apply to all of us. Some of us are fortunate enough to be blessed with long running projects and clients that want the fruits of the academy. For most jobbing design researchers however, we need to coax quality out of often sparse budgets and we need to apply our thinking directly to the practice of design.

Fortunately, this is not and should not be a hopeless quest. In 2003, the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans exhibited at the Tate Britain a show titled, “If one thing matters, everything matters.” This title can and should be a call to arms for those interested in the social and in the ongoing design of what the social will be in the future. Design, art and commerce are engaged in a fundamental re-organisation of the future around the notion of the local and there is simply too much local for the resource intensive model of academic ethnography to catch up. We need new models that are aimed at continuous response. We need to rethink our place in this model.

The idea of the field as a bounded and geographic location is long-contested. We need to abandon the notion that our role as design researchers is to report from one location to another. It’s not reportage, it’s merger. Our role is to exist simultaneously in multiple fields. The ethnography is the entire project and we need to make the most of each instance of understanding and insight that we are able to bring to bear. The arguments that interviews are not ethnography, workshops are not ethnography, only ethnography is ethnography often miss the point that the goal is not ethnography, but engagement and understanding. Frankly, I’m quite happy to just drop the use of the word ethnography altogether, just as I’ve happily dropped the use of anthropology or sociology. These are increasingly market orientated terms and get away from the goal, which is to discern understanding of the past in the service of the future. Maybe what we are engaged in is “designography” and our completed work, our theory is the design itself.

It’s both the understanding and the application of that understanding which is the marker of quality design research, not the deployment of particular methods or theories. I’m not arguing for the return of the heroic designer. But I am arguing that the designer has a role to play, we don’t escape from the role of the designer with the role of the heroic researcher. If everything matters, then each small thing matters too, each thing is a local field and matters and if a designer is able to craft quality from that small instance then that matters.

Quality is the success of what we create out of what we have available, it’s craft and it’s care and it’s passion. It’s not a formula. Research is in the business of answers and despite the philosophical difficulties of that position still appears determined to stay in that business. Design research or whatever this role grows up to be is a different thing and should be in the business of questions. We’re in the business of the future and that’s always a question, we shouldn’t forget it. Answers may be easier to sell, but they have a bad habit of arguing that they are only game in town. If everything matters, then every thing matters and every route to finding that thing matters. Keep finding ways to engage more deeply with the local through whatever means available, following the spirit, not the law, of whatever inspirations you have brought with you thus far. Design research should be art as much as science.

She writes about the impact of a number of technological innovations on patient empowerment, specifically health-focused social networks, deeper individual health understanding through genetic profiling and self-knowledge through quantified measuring.

The paper provides a good overview of these technologies, including a useful pyramid categorisation of social networking behaviours in the health context: Emotional support and information sharing; Physician Q&A; Quantified self-tracking and Clinical trials access.

She celebrates these technologies as drivers of patient-empowerment. This is where the paper ends and it leaves many problems unanswered.

The principle of my argument is that the technologies she refers to are best thought of as the tools of already empowered ‘patients’, rather than agents of empowerment themselves.

There is promise in these and other technologies. It is important that people are able to take ownership of their health and their interactions with health services. However we can’t afford to assume that technology will automatically provide empowerment. There needs to be an appropriate level of service that actively engages people with lower levels of technical and organisational literacy.

The real key to empowered health is the quest for health literacy. This campaigning and democratic element was missing from this paper. These are early days for people-driven health and although there is plenty to celebrate in technology, we need agents of change as well as tools.

Access the full PDF here

“Our job as anthropologists is to understand the perspective of one tribe, consumers, and communicate it to another, the people at Intel.”

Ken Anderson

Read the full article

Rob Tannen on Designing for Humans, has blogged some notes about designing interactions with imaginary objects - inspired by Bruce Sterling’s imaginary gadgets series.

I particularly liked his intuition that the Wii controller was in some way inspired by the lightsabre!

The image is a much-blogged one from the showreel of Mark Coleran, one of the most prolific designers of imaginary interfaces for the film industry.

The thing I like most about the imaginary gadget concept is precisely what Sterling talks about in his second installment, The Brazen Head. The unrealised object is capable of fulfilling imaginary needs without the messy business of actually building the technology to do so. The freedom that this introduces to think about what unconstrained needs might be is liberating and productive.

This is exactly what a prototype does, turning imaginary needs into living, breathings ones. The technology can follow.