Today my team The Bookworms gave our final presentation at the HPI School of Design Thinking, also known as the Potsdam d-school (sister of Stanford’s d.school). Judging from the crowd’s energy and cheers, I would say it was a success!
6 weeks (essentially 10 days, since we meet twice a week at the d-school), extensive research, many prototypes and brainstorming sessions later we developed Between The Pages, a TV show about books for the digital native generation. It was a whirl wind of a time and a great learning experience. Talking to young people about books on the streets of Berlin was especially illuminating.
Many thanks to our client Frank Elstner, the famous German TV host, and the d-school for this fantastic opportunity!
Here’s a little summary of our final prototype:
(click on the images for a close up)
After the presentations we received certificates listing the two major projects we worked on this summer, mine being: 1. Reconsidering Energy Consumption and 2. Book Recommendations.
(photograph courtesy of Martin Jordan)
And the traditional d-school pins:
(photograph courtesy of Martin Jordan)
The Potsdam d-school is expanding this next year- there will be 2 basic tracks and one advanced track. The new building, which will house the advanced track is gorgeous! The interior design incorporates what the d-school team has learned, after many iterations, about how to successfully facilitate teamwork and innovation.
If you’re interested in being a student, apply now! Applications for next Fall are due by the 31st of July, 2010.
I am currently conducting ethnographic research on highly active professional networkers here in Berlin for my MSc in Design Ethnography and with Swisscom. I recently put together a little summary of what I have done so far, including descriptions of my recruitment and field work stages.
Here’s the introduction from the summary slides pictured above:
“The use of social networking software by professionals is increasing dramatically. How it is used, whether it enhances or reduces productivity, and how enterprise-friendly design and use might evolve are open questions” (Skeels & Grudin, 2009)
As new communication technologies, specifically Social Networking Sites (SNS), emerge and gain popularity, their use is becoming increasingly common in the workplace. We are seeing the introduction of SNS tools into daily work life and with this the adaptation of SNS for professional goals. Thus the ‘workplace communication ecology’ is becoming ever more complex. Extensive research has been conducted on key SNS such as facebook and twitter for personal purposes, but little research has been aimed at specifically understanding the professional SNS ecology.
The aim of this project is to more fully understand how and why Lead Users (active professional social networkers) in Berlin use SNS for business purposes.
Source above:
Skeels, M. & Grudin, J. (2009). When Social Networks Cross Boundaries: A Case Study of Workplace Use of Facebook and LinkedIn. Proc. of GROUPS, 2009, 95-104.
DESIGNING FOR DIGITAL WELL-BEING
I have been thinking a lot about self-control and online time management lately, because in conducting my ethnographic study of active professional social networkers, I have found that:
Many of those who are at ease with their networking, have developed complex tactics to unplug and keep their behavior in check.
Being active on twitter, Xing, foursquare, Dopplr, facebook, LinkedIn, email, etc can be distracting, but ‘balanced’ active social networkers, in some form or another, learn to strategically regulate these distractions (usually over the course of time).
A recent post on the blog Cognitive Design titled “Top survival skill in the 21st century” discusses self-control and the topic of designing for easy self-regulation. I find this area to be incredibly interesting and increasingly important in this time of plenty. A while back, I brought up designing for well-being in the CHI2010 sustainable design course and asked- Could designing ‘non-use time’ of a software or service be just as important as designing use-time?
I’m curious what the future holds for this area!
Arduinos & Digital Intimacy
My boyfriend Owen and I have started on a new adventure- remote communication via arduinos. As he’s in the US and I’m in Berlin, we’ve been trying new things to stay happy and connected.
The adventure began when I received my arduino starter kit in the mail a few weeks ago. After some coding, both of our snazzy boards were hooked up to the interent via wifi shields. The next step was connecting to the online portal Pachube (pronounced patch bay), which allows sensor data to be routed around the world. Pachube was created by the designer Usman Haque- who was a speaker at CHI 2010 and who Owen met at the Insitute of Design’s DRC (Design Research Conference).
At the moment we have our arduinos set up to send light sensor data directly to Pachube and to the other person’s arduino. The light input data sent to pachube is displayed in a simple graph format and the data sent to the other arduino is desplayed in LEDs (1 LED= darkish, 2 LEDs= med bright, 3 LEDs= bright). This way, each of has a feel for the other person’s light rhythm (ie when the room is dark and the person is asleep, when the sun is bright, when dusk sets in, etc.). Maybe, just maybe, this will help us bridge the 7 hour time difference!
The plan for this next week is to try out a simple button mechanism, which would allow us to set off the other person’s LEDs more actively. We have also been using Fritzing, an amazing piece of software that allows you to create & share circuit drawings and pcb layouts for manufacturing. The graphic image at the top is courtesy of Fritzing.
Owen was super on it and wrote up a great post on our new project, so I’ll let him tell you a little about it:
Cora and I are using these technologies and experimenting with new ways of communicating with each other. Rather than having to send elaborate emails or spending hours video chatting, what would it be like to have a more subtle, albeit less detailed, means of connecting? What would it be like if we could digitally glance at each other? Or nudge one another? These are some of the questions that technology is allowing us to explore.
Interestingly, the very act of experimenting has become a means of connecting. We took screen shots as documentation of the process.
You can see the code and debugging screen for our arduinos, the Pachube feeds that we established with little graphs of the activity, the video chat between us as we get the hardware setup, some of the text chats we sent back and forth, as well as some assorted digital schmutz.
I recently came upon an article from the New York Times titled-The Brave New World of Digital Intimacy, which describes the fascinating concept of ‘digital intimacy’- when technology enables one to sense the rhythm of another’s life. I see our current arduino set-up as a prime example of this idea.
With digital intimacy it’s less about the details and more about the combined effect of signals/messages over time. Microblogging tools such as twitter or status updates enable this sort of intimacy, which might explain why they’re so popular… Over the course of time the acccumalation of little messages reveals something more than just what’s in the content. Clive Thompson writes:
“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.” Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.
If anything, these arduinos have opened up my eyes to the vast possibilities for remote communication. They’ve also made me realize how ‘unrich’ and ‘unsubtle’ our current communication tools are. So many levels & types of input/output signals remain completely untapped. Fortunately, designers are catching on and producing some work along these lines. I was particularly impressed by Pillow Talk, a recent project by Joanna Montgomery, a Dundee University interaction design student, because it makes use of subtle signals from our everyday routine to communicate something so human and so rich.
Future remote communication tools will definitely need to play into ‘digital intimacy’ and ‘signal richness’ if they are to be successful. I know I’ll be thinking of these things when Owen and I brainstorm about which input and output signals we want to explore next.
“When we have a really hard problem we naturally want experts to solve it- people on the inside, people closest to the problem, but that might be exactly the wrong thing” -Jonah Lehrer
Strategic Duality: Reflections on what design ethnography can offer
In researching the audience of Lieder, a niche classical music genre, for our client this last semester, I couldn’t help but ask myself-
What could we tell our client, a musicologist at the top of an arts organization, who conducts research and is herself an audience member, that she doesn’t already know?
With time and resource restraints in mind, it was hard to think that we, 3 design ethnography students with very little knowledge of classical music, could say anything new about the past, present and future of the Lieder audience to our incredibly knowledgeable client. But I came to realize that not being ‘incredibly knowledgeable’ was our advantage, as we offered an outsider’s perspective paired with a keen understanding of the insider’s perspective (thanks to our ethnography work).
Q: “Do you see the Lieder audience changing?”
A: “You see, I don’t really look at it from the outside a lot. I’m right in the middle of it” -Professor and scholar of Lieder
As argued in Jonah Lehrer’s PopTech video “Creative Insights” above, it seems that insiders, domain experts of the area under research, have a hard time stepping back and seeing things afresh. Thus, our outsider consultant position provides value in the form of a fresh pair of strategic eyes. However, it also became apparent that as an outsider, not privy to the nuances and dynamics of a problem space, one often lacks the insider knowledge, which would allow one to say anything substantial about the problem.
And that’s when it dawned on me:
As design ethnographers we combine both perspectives: strategically straddling the border between knowing too much and knowing too little.
Design, which refers to our understanding of the bigger applied picture and design thinking, provides us with ‘outsider intelligence’ and ethnography, which refers to our commitment to a deep understanding of people, provides us with ‘insider knowledge’. Our outsider position allows us to organize findings and connect them to the wider world, while the insider knowledge, gleaned from our immersive ethnographic methodology, allows us to establish rapport and understand fully.
Our client for the Lieder project differed from clients I had encountered thus far, in that she herself was a domain expert (ie a prime interviewee). In this respect, it seems that there are two types of clients- the ‘novice client’, who needs design ethnographers to explore an unfamiliar space, and the ‘expert client’, like our Lieder client, who needs design ethnographers to rethink a familiar space.
In previous experience I had found that for novice clients valuable insights came from connecting their broader position to details from the field. In contrast, I felt that for our Lieder client, many of our most valuable insights came from connecting details from the field to the bigger picture and to analogous spaces, such as our identification of distinct Lieder life stages with differing needs or our suggestion to think about Lieder in the context of the Slow movement or our recommendation to look to others doing similar work. In other words, for the novice client an emphasis on insider knowledge is most valuable, whereas for the expert client an emphasis on outsider intelligence is most valuable.
In thinking about expert clients, I realized that as design ethnographers our position of strategic duality enables us to impact two knowledge levels- we expand the existing outsider knowledge level and also deepen the existing insider knowledge level. In other words, we expand out and provide an overview at the same time that we dig deeply and provide details. Thus, as design ethnographers we can offer expert clients overarching frameworks to help them organize their own knowledge of the field, as well as details of their users that they themselves might not have access to or pay attention to.
In investigating more deeply what an outsider perspective can bring to an expert client I came upon Jonah Lehrer’s video, an exploration of “the power of outsider intelligence”, which speaks directly to this value of design ethnography. He argues that those on the inside of a problem space, can be “shackled by the familiar” and that “distance [from the problem] loosens the chains of cognition making it easier to see something new in the old”.
Lehrer is not alone in his argument that tackling a problem from the outside is valuable. The Heath brothers, known for their book Made To Stick, wrote, in an article titled “A Problem-solver’s guide to Copycatting”, “The biggest barrier to the idea hunt, in fact, may be you. It may never occur to you to start searching because we all commonly keep our thinking penned up within our company or industry”.
The Heath brothers go on to write that problem solving is “about pattern matching. Ask yourself who might have solved a problem similar to yours”. Although I am certain that many expert clients are capable of looking to analogous solutions, I see design ethnographers, with this position of strategic duality, as natural “pattern matchers”- able to see further and with a fresh pair of eyes, while still understanding fully the pattern to be matched.
In his video Jonah mentions three types of outsiders: the “geographical outsider”, the “cultural outsider” and the “intellectual outsider”. As design ethnographers tend to be avid travelers, natural skeptics, curious outsiders, and to believe that everything is a matter of interpretation, I see them as prime examples of all three outsider positions. However, it was the last outsider group, the “intellectual outsider”, which best reflects this strategic duality I have been discussing. Lehrer provides the example of innocentive.com, a website on which Fortune 500 companies post unsolved problems, and explains that most of the problems that do get solved are solved by people “just on the outside of the domain”. Problems weren’t solved by just anyone, rather they were solved by individuals who were knowledgeable enough to understand the space, but also ‘fresh’ enough to see it from a new insightful angle.
This brings me back full circle to this realization that skilled design ethnographers are valuable in that they combine the right mix of outsider intelligence and insider knowledge to see the problem from the most effective angle, or as Lehrer describes it, “from slightly askance”. Here’s to establishing ourselves as strategically placed problem solvers.
References:
Heath, C. & Heath, D. (Nov 1st 2009). Chip Heath A problem-solver’s guide to copycatting. Fast Company, Issue 140.
Last week I had the privilege (thank you Daniela!) of attending CHI2010, a conference on human factors in computing systems in Atlanta, as a Student Volunteer. It was an amazing and insightful experience! I especially enjoyed being an SV as it provided an immediate community and allowed me to start building a network of fellow researchers from across the globe. The first morning left me feeling rather confused about my place at CHI- I ended up in a number of very technical paper presentations, each one speaking at length about the statistical significance of their research. But then I discovered alt.chi + a community of researchers promoting HCI for all and new/interpretive methodology. Fun stuff! I suddenly felt very much at home and soon realized that CHI has something for everyone. The remaining 3 days proved exhilirating- I met attendee after attendee working on compelling research. It was so refreshing to move beyond the Dundee sphere; it definitely tested and advanced my own thoughts on design ethnography. I attended a particularly captivating alt.chi discussion titled, “Can we all stand under our umbrella? The arts and design research in HCI” led by Gilbert Cockton, Shaowen Bardzell (author of this year’s award winning paper “Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design”), Blythe Mark and Jeffrey Bardzell (all of whom you should check out!) I also had the pleasure of attending 2 excellent courses: 1. Steve Portigal’s course titled “So We’ve Done All This Research Now What?”, which proved very illuminating. Portigal broke down his process into comprehensible and distinct stages and even showed us excerpts of his field notes! We essentially went through all of the stages in the course. What Portigal does is very much in line with what we do in our design ethnography program- enough rigor to provide a “thick description” and inspire design while still considering industry’s monetary and time constraints. For example, he emphasized the need for quality fieldnotes and the separation of descriptive/interpretive notes but also noted that his ‘coding’ doesn’t always resemble traditional academic coding. He’s more interested in the themes and the provocative bits. Also! get this- Portigal Consulting sends their audio and video to a transcription service. Ah, the joys! Portigal spoke about a lot of good stuff, but I especially liked his idea of breaking strategies into either a Support or Challenge model- He presented an example question- How can we improve the experience of students who smoke? A support strategy embraces the finding: provide them with a protected environment whereas a challenge strategy challenges the finding and attempts to change the behavior: eliminate smoking. Portigal also suggests getting clients involved in the work as early as possible, so that they can start thinking about the ideas and build up ‘muscle memory/neural pathways’ which make integrating and embracing the new concepts easier. Repeated exposure to the ideas is key! 2. Daniela Busse and Eli Blevis‘ two part course titled “Research & Design for Sustainability” (in the broader sense of social, environmental, organizational etc sustainability) highlighted just how complex the issue of sustainability is and achieved a high level of discussion on the topic. I was thrilled to have such inspirational and informative instructors and course mates. The course is hard to sum up because we covered a lot of ground and were discussing for a large portion of the time. But some key take-aways: 1) The HCI community only started publishing papers on HCI + sustainability recently (around 2006/7), but more and more papers are coming out each year, including a fantastic award winning paper this year- “Mapping the Landscape of Sustainable HCI“, which maps the research thus far into distinct categories. 2) Eli Blevis’ research, including his award winning paper “Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse” (one of the first papers on sustainability in relation to HCI), in which he presents a rubric for “understanding the material effects of particular interaction design” and “several principles to guide SID” (pg 1) is not to be missed! Furthermore, the research on ‘live performance’, which my team conducted this last semester, identified a desire for ‘off-time’ (time not spent checking emails, etc), which I thought related so well to sustainable HCI. Here are some notes from our discussion summing up those thoughts: I see ‘respecting off-time’ as relating to the idea of considering the non-use time as well as the use time of a product. My question is- Can deliberately providing users with non-use time/designing non-use time enhance use time? Thoughts? (Paul Dourish and Christine Satchell’s paper “Beyond The User: Use And Non-Use in HCI“ (2009), in which they write, “Here, we focus on not using computers – ways not to use them, aspects of not using them, what not using them might mean, and what we might learn by examining non-use as seriously as we examine use” (page 1) gets at some of this) Speaking of Paul Dourish- I am a big fan of his current student Lilly Irani who presented some great papers at CHI2010, including: “Postcolonial Computing: A Lens on Design and Development” and “There’s Methodology in the Madness: Toward Critical HCI Ethnography”. Keep an eye out for her work! And last but definitely not least! I invited Daniela Busse, SAP user experience and sustainability extraordinaire, to come and eat lunch with us SVs as a CHI rockstar. Daniela, an external evaluator of our course, is the reason I could attend CHI (she nominated me to be an SV). CHI rockstar lunches allow SVs to get to know industry folk on a more personal level. What a great idea! Phew! I know that was long and believe me- that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what was discussed and presented at CHI. I haven’t even touched on Genevieve Bell’s fantastic plenary speech highlighting the gap in HCI research on technology + religion, sex and sports, or any of the amazing technical advancements presented at the conference. Here’s to hoping all of us design ethnographers get the opportunity to attend CHI sometime in the future!
Michael Wesch’s anthropology of youtube is a must watch! All I can say is wow! What a comprehensive and oh so relevant ethnography.
In watching Wesch’s video, I was reminded of a great essay I read last semester on digital ethnography. In the last ten years especially, with globalization and the wide spread of the internet, the notion of the ethnographic ‘fieldsite’ has come up for debate.
Andres Wittel in his article titled “Ethnography on the Move: From Field to Net to Internet” writes, “like the objects of ethnographic inquiry—people—ethnography itself is on the move”. He believes that ethnography is moving away from geographically defined and physical fieldsites towards “socio-political locations, networks, multi-sited approaches,…and digital spaces” .
This also relates back to the idea of ‘culture’ or community being defined by activity rather than by geographic location- something that I remember Alicia Dudek, a classmate of mine, bringing up earlier in relationship to her project with Kate Saunderson on blogging.
He goes on to write that, “Whereas a century ago fieldwork in the natural habitat of communities had the immense advantage of integrating context, a dogmatisation of the same practice in contemporary ethnography seems to achieve the opposite. It rather excludes the context of the people under observation”. In other words, by leaving out the virtual space, which people occupy, we are essentially regressing back to ‘armchair anthropology’- piecing together a story using insufficient context. By including the virtual space in an ethnography, we are thus including the context essential for the modern day equivalent of a “thick description”, which Geertz advocated.
So, the question is then- How do we most effectively capture the virtual context?
This topic is incredibly interesting and relevant to the research all of us are doing this semester. My team is currently undertaking a study of niche classical music audiences for BADSK (The Bavarian Academy of Fine Art). We have been employing a variety of new techniques- recruiting participants via twitter, posting discussion topics on facebook group pages (as a sort of virtual focus group), constructing basic social network models using following patterns on youtube, etc, in an attempt to construct a more accurate picture of classical music enthusiasts today.
As design ethnographers we are always scrambling to keep up with rapidly transforming technologies in order to understand those we are interested in more completely. There is no seminal piece of writing to guide us, so it’s all quite new and exciting!
Here’s to more adventures in new territories!
Yesterday we presented our working prototype of the Microsoft Surface Zest-it application to the NCR jury. Unfortunately, I was flying back from Berlin in the morning and missed the dragon’s den. Fortunately, I made it just in time for the awards ceremony!
And the winner is…….. Team Zest-it! The jury felt that our team’s simple yet highly collaborative and innovative design should take the first prize. They especially liked seeing the new gestures we had incorporated, the thoughtfulness of the features, and the interdisciplinary mix of the team.
We walked away a happy bunch- with 1000 pounds and certificates in hand!
I will post some footage of the prototype soon.
Could Zest-it be the future of post-it noting?! We shall see.
Check out Kate Saunderson’s blog post on the making Zest-it.
I recently applied for the HPI d-school in Potsdam, Germany. The application entailed filling out a ‘T-Profile’, with your specialization in the vertical bar and your broad interests/skills in the horizontal bar. I found the exercise to be a fun challenge! Would be curious to see how my classmates fill theirs out, and if they’ve been keeping any special talents secret. :)
My current design ethnography project on the future of the classical music audience has left me thinking a lot about how to map a person’s journey to becoming a classical music enthusiast, specifically a Lieder enthusiast. For the final product of my research, I would like to capture a few key journeys in a visually compelling way. An effective journey map will be: succinct, clear, engaging, and have multiple layers of meaning.
Here are two simple mock-ups: one of multiple summarized journeys and one of an expanded individual journey. The green dot is an accelerator and the red dot is a barrier.
What do you think?
Kate Saunderson, another design ethnographer, and I came together with Paul Gault, a PhD student from the school of computing, and Stuart Birse, a computing student, for the NCR Microsoft Surface competition. Here is the extended version of our concept video within the context of the design ethnography program.
Enjoy!
Last week, I started reading Kim Baer’s Information Design Workbook, a comprehensive and insightful guide to effective information design with valuable case studies.
I thought I would share an excerpt from page 16:
Information Overload: Not Just Hype.
Did you know:
—Globally, there are more than 3,000 books published daily.
—There are 540,000 words in the English language today, more than five times as many as during Shakespeare’s time.
—It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.
No wonder we’re all having trouble keeping on top of the latest and greatest. With access to so much everyday, filtering information to get to pertinent and quality content, is an arduous task. Whether it’s via search algorithms or friends’ recommendations, we need all the help we can get to cope with information overload.
Luckily, I still see information gathering as a treasure hunt, where the stumble-upon adventure is part of the fun! But let’s see how I feel when I’m expected to find a very specific nugget of information in a finite amount of time. Not as fun?
