“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.
