presentations attract butterflies too

Tomorrow is the big day, we are presenting our final research findings in Timkin Hall to fellow students, professors and a panel of judges. Although we are more than prepared, and have practiced many times, I am nervous! I am worried that I will forget my lines (though we do have Keynote presenter notes for backup), or that I will be stiff and awkward. I need to remember to breathe, and trust that I will be just fine. The audience is my friend, they want to hear what I have to say, and I am prepared. But those butterflies!

I am so very proud of our team. We have worked very hard to polish our presentation, and the findings are solid. I think that even if there are little slip ups, the underlying content will shine through. Above all, I believe in our findings – the “client” does have a huge opportunity to create a unique offering in the urban gardening market by providing educational experiences that create excitement and inspiration in current and future gardeners. I hope that our presentation expresses the fundamental role that gardens have in our lives, especially in the city where green space is at a premium. I have learned so much about gardening through this project, it has made me think about how I want to create my own green space and garden of food to eat and share.

Wish me luck!

mary13 cca, design research, thoughts 0

storytelling and pecha kucha

I haven’t been to a live Pecha Kucha event. Not yet. Which is surprising, considering how popular it is. Thousands of people all over the world gather in darkened theaters to hear presenters talk about an experience, a practice, or a phenomena that is important to them. The format, to show 20 slides, each for 20 seconds, guarantees that no one talks for too long. This format keeps it digestible. Apparently, San Francisco is the top Pecha Kucka city next to Tokyo, where it was founded. I am going to keep my eyes open for the next event so I can experience it first hand.

Browsing through the presentation archives, it seemed easiest to search by popularity rating. I was drawn to the simple title “Failure”, and this is indeed a moving and provocative presentation. Bob Berkebile is a principle at the award-winning architecture firm BNIM, and their core mission is to “… deliver beautiful, integrated, living environments that inspire change and enhance the human condition.” Berkebile crafts an engaging, intimately personal story about a fatal accident in a building that his firm built, and how it pushed him to recreate his approach to architecture. But Berkebile isn’t just relating this event in his life to tell his own personal history and the trajectory of his career; he tells this story to compel the audience to think about our own cycle of consumption, and how we may transform this consumptive relationship with the planet into something that is regenerative and renewing.

Berkebile starts his talk with several provocative questions about the presence and effect of failure in human life. He instantly brings an interactive spirit to the presentation, because as a viewer, I am suddenly engaged to answer these questions, to bring my own meaning to his inquiries. Berkebile is not just talking to the audience, he is engaging with us. As Peter Gruber describes in The Four Truths of a Storyteller, “you want to tell your story in an interactive fashion, so people will feel they’ve participated in shaping the story experience. This requires a willingness to surrender ownership of the story. The storyteller must recognize that the story is bigger than she is and must enlist her audience’s help.” Berkebile has no idea how we will answer these questions, or if we will even agree with the underlying sentiment. But in the asking, he gives the audience the opportunity to form our own opinions. He continues to ask questions throughout the presentation, questions that he has asked himself over the years.

What story is Bob Berkebile telling us? It is the story of his influences, important people that we recognize, either as archetypical figures in our own lives (The Mother and The Father), or famous teachers, such as Buckminster Fuller and Leon Shenandoah, people that helped him find meaning and direction, especially in that time of his greatest failure. It is the story of events — Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, and the fatal Hyatt Hotel accident — and how these events effected his choices and motivations. You have to admire Berkebile for being vulnerable, it would be incredibly difficult to share these deeply personal feelings of guilt and failure. However, as Gruber says “by willingly exposing anxieties, fears and shortcomings, the storyteller allows the audience to identify with her and therefore brings listeners to a place of understanding and catharsis, and ultimately spurs action.” Berkebile could have easily talked about the building failure without discussing his feelings, but by doing so, he give the audience the opportunity to empathize, to draw on times when we too may have felt the same. Fortunately, he also provides some levity by weaving in moments of humor. He is tackling a heavy subject, and such intensity could also distance the audience. He wants us to pay attention, because he is telling a much larger, more important story that we first think.

Bob Berkebile has asked himself some very hard questions through the course of his career, questions about why and where the culture of consumption appeared, what its result will be, and how as a creator he can change that paradigm. He wants us to ask ourselves these same questions, because he is really telling the story of the possible demise of the planet, and he knows that we will have to radically change our behavior to stop this from happening. So he lays himself on the line, exposes his failings and vulnerabilities, hoping to create a compassionate connection that will compel action. His mission is to enlighten us, and as Gruber says, “everything he does must serve that mission.” He ends his talk with a challenge to the audience, ending as he began, acknowledging us as thinking beings with our own answers to this very complex problem.

mary13 cca, design research, thoughts 0

mode mapping and personas

Whew! My research team has finally completed our interviews for the urban gardening project. It has been a big effort to organize and conduct the interviews, and we have gathered an amazing amount of information on our subject. I have a few hours of organizing the notes ahead of me, in preparation of the synthesis work we need to do for the next phase of the project. The process of taking the disparate data and finding patterns feels onerous, I will admit. I have already found some preliminary findings and patterns, but I know that I need to got though the synthesis phase to confirm my assumptions, and discover other, perhaps more subtle, connections I haven’t seen yet.

I love the article on Mode Mapping by Ron Pierce at Karten Design, he is so honest about the challenges designers and researchers face in communicating research findings. A slide deck of bullet points, however enticing and intriguing the statements, is not the best method for communicating to any stakeholder, be it a C-level executive or a junior interaction designer. ModeMapping is a visual structure that depicts human behavior in visual story lines, highlighting time/place/opportunity patterns for possible innovations. I love the visual nature of the maps, because I can quickly get an overview of time span, major activities, priorities and state of mind for a persona, and then compare these elements across personas. This would be very difficult to do through writing, and it literally shows the research in an objective manner, which can then be synthesized through comparison. I think the time span we will look at will be different than a daily snapshot, as urban gardening has a different rhythm, more seasonal.

I’m also looking forward to creating personas from the notes we have gathered. It will be easier to distill the 15 people we interviewed into 3 or 4 archetypes than try to work with all 15 simultaneously. And creating personas is fun! Snitker & Co. created a great 10-step process to creating personas that will be very helpful. What I like about their approach is that it is very methodical. I have only created completely fictional personas before, so it will be nice to have some guidelines and a process for culling notes to create personas based on research. I found doing the research to be a profoundly human experience, and it would be a shame to lose that empathetic quality moving into the synthesis. I think personas will help us keep the people we interviewed top of mind.

mary13 cca, design research, thoughts 0

understanding through collage and guided story-telling

We debated using a few different methods for our design research, including straight-forward interviews, shadowing our participants while shopping for gardening supplies, and requesting our participants draw a map of their garden to bring to the interview. We were concerned, however, with time: a straight-forward interview could feel long and arduous, the fall is not necessarily the time when people shop for gardening supplies, and drawing a map can be a time-consuming endeavor.

We decided to use the following framework to research our subject: collage homework, one-on-one interview and a garden tour. The homework is designed to prime our participants for the interview. We will give them a collage toolkit that contains various gardening imagery, including tools, materials and plants. The participant will be asked to choose one image for each category that answers the question “what would make your garden perfect?” During the interview, we will review and discuss the chosen images. We felt it was really important to give homework that wasn’t too labor intensive, but also would be fun for the participant. We are aware that we will have to carefully and thoughtfully choose images for this toolkit, so that we get meaningful responses.

After the interview, we will have the participant take us on a tour of their garden. We will use the guided story-telling technique to draw out attitudes and beliefs of the participants towards gardening. When walking around the garden, it should feel very natural for the gardener to tell us about successes and challenges they have had in their garden. We would also like to do task analysis of common garden activities, such as soil amendment and pest control, by asking the participant about how they care for their favorite plants. We believe that these will be natural and familiar methods for the participants to share information with us.

mary13 cca, design research, thoughts 0

assumptions & research

It’s hard not to have biases and assumptions when setting out to plan and execute design research, especially when the subject you are studying is one of great interest. I am currently planning to research urban gardening, a subject with which I have some experience and in which I greatly believe. Reading through this article on Research Bias, I realize there are several things I need to be careful about: selecting subjects that will generate desired results; omitting certain groups from the sample; and including groups that are convenient to recruit.

There are a lot of experimental urban farming initiatives in San Francisco, which is great as this means there are plenty of fringe activities to study. However, this also means that we could stack the research sample with hyper eco-conscious individuals that could skew the behaviors and beliefs we uncover. To ensure we get a wider representation in our sample, we made a specific list of the types of people with which we want to connect, and a specific quantity of each type. We are hoping that sticking to these guidelines, we will canvas a larger audience. We have also specified that we would like to research people with no experience and/or no interest in gardening. We hope this will help us gather different types of responses to the questions we are seeking to answer.

I also find I am a little nervous about finding representatives from the Latino or Asian communities to research, and that I am drawn to recruit participants that are easy to find. These ethic groups make up a significant percentage of the population of San Francisco, and to not research their behaviors, beliefs and attitudes would leave a significant gap in our project. However, the challenge is that I have just moved here, and I don’t know anyone in my immediate social circles from these ethnic groups. I will have to challenge myself to find appropriate participants, and this will mean approaching strangers. It occurs to me, however, that there are many ways to find people beyond walking up to someone on the street or cold calling. A quick search for Latino Community Center in San Francisco shows there are many community groups to connect with to find possible participants. Another search for Asian Community Center in San Francisco also results in a great list of resources. I would like to push myself to try to recruit this way, as I think that relying on friend networks may not be as fruitful.

mary13 cca, design research, thoughts 0

ethnography and design research

I can’t see how we could design useful, meaningful artifacts for people without doing some sort of ethnographic research. A designed solution should include considerations for the particular behaviors, beliefs, and environments of that specific audience. Without doing some level of interviewing or observation, on what would the designer base their decisions?

Ethnography is defined in the video “Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer” as a philosophical orientation that strives to represent the meaning of things from the perspectives of the group being studied. The video quickly shows through the inquiry into purchasing denim that the range of perspectives is varied, even among the thin representative group of middle-class Americans. Imagine how more diverse the responses would be if the representative sample crossed over economic or geographic boundaries. It is these insights that can help a designer determine the exact situation of the audience group for which they are designing, and make appropriate choices for the solution they are designing. For instance, if an overwhelming number of people stated that fit was more important than price point when choosing jeans, the designer could design a premium, well-wrought garment. If a lower price point was more important, the designer’s parameters suddenly shift.

Tim Plowman‘s chapter “Ethnography and Critical Design Practice” in Design Research: Methods and Perspectives highlights a deeper issue in design practice than simply delivering the right product to people. He discusses how ethnographic practices and methodologies have been pulled from anthropology, leaving social context theory to the side. Plowman states that the inclusion of social theory would provide alternative ideologies on which to craft design solutions other than the consumption model. I believe we are starting to see this in application solutions such as Action Method, a task management solution designed for creative people. The Behance team that designed Action Method not only steeped themselves in the most current thinking on motivational theory, they also studied the most effective, successful creative people in their own environments and learned about the tools they use to get things done.

It is examples such as Action Method that also prove that ethnographic studies are an efficient, effective method for gaining insight into an intended audience. When used correctly, they are an efficient means to understand a specific situation. Moreover, they help to create the necessary empathy for an intended audience group. By getting to know someone, you start to care about that person. When you care about them, you want to help them. As designers, we can combine our skills to manifest with our empathy to create the most helpful, useful solutions, specific to people’s needs and to society at large.

mary13 cca, design research, thoughts 0

the magic of teams

I have had some of the most gratifying creative experiences working within a team. Although I do enjoy the solitary pursuit of a creative endeavor, there is always a time when the work I do, either before, during or after my process, is improved upon by the input of other people. Moreover, there are many projects that I have worked on that just wouldn’t have been possible without the collaboration of a team. The results that we achieved were produced by many minds and many skills coming together to produce a response to a particular situation. As I like to say, we built peaks among our collective knowledge.

What kind of team member are you?
I have found that working in a team can be an organic process, and that being adaptable can be very helpful. Being able to pick up new skills, adjust to changing schedules or new deliverables, and work with sometimes unfamiliar processes is key in keeping the flow going in a team environment. The less friction I create by being adaptable, the more energy the team will have to get on with the creative process.

A supportive nature is also very helpful. Each team member will encounter unique challenges in their daily tasks, and being there to lend a hand, an ear or another point of view, can really help someone when they are stuck or feeling overwhelmed. I find that kind of energy is circular, in that if you are willing to give it, it will come back to you when you need it too.

I am also a very motivated team member, especially when a common purpose and objectives have been determined. I strive to do the very best I can, to move the project forward, and to maintain momentum to get a project completed. Sometimes motivation is lost, and it’s difficult to get back once it’s gone. It’s magic when every other team member has the same verve.

Finally, I am very reliable. I will fulfill my responsibilities to the best of my abilities, and hit those deadlines that are so necessary for project completion. It is a wonderful feeling to know that you can rely on your team members to have their work completed, it builds an incredible amount of trust, which is necessary for team synergy.

What types of contributions can you make to a design research team?
I have had a lot of experience in the design research realm, which translated into many skills and lessons learned. From sticky noting to script writing, interviewing and documentation, I can hit the ground running in a research project. Of course, there is so much more to learn! But the experiences I have had come with a nice amount of mistakes made (!), an understanding of how much time something may take, and multiple approaches with people that can help solve any foreseen risks. This experience also helps if things start to go sideways, a calm team member can go a long way to keep things on an even keel until the project is back on track.

I’m a very curious person. I am fascinated by a design problem space, and I want to know as much as I can about the situation as I can know. I like to get inside the situation so I can understand and develop the needed empathy to truly design something meaningful. I think my curiosity also leads me to seek out resources and tools that could augment our inquiries. I love to find relevant books in other disciplines that could provide insight, or software that can help us do our jobs easier, faster and better.

Through the few experiences I have had, I have collected a nice amount of materials that can be used for design research. I have a massive collection of sharpie pens and sticky notes in a rainbow of colours. I have a great archive of templates, such as personas, experience maps, and report and presentation formats, that we can use to riff on to present our findings. I also have a nice collection of software for creating maps, as well as some good reference books and websites that illustrate some excellent methods for research.

mary13 cca, design research, thoughts 0

design research

I’m starting a new adventure, my MFA in Interaction Design. It’s so exciting to be taking the time to hone my craft. I have been a user experience designer for a few years now, and although I have experience in many of the classes I will be taking, it seemed I never had the time in projects to really polish the deliverables for clients. As you may relate, when you are on the clock, there’s often only enough time to get the damn thing done, and then move into the next phase of the project. And as you may also relate, design research is one of those areas that often gets short shrift, due to budgets and timelines. That said, I have been able to do a bit of research on a few projects, and it was not only informative, but a great deal of fun.

Bostonpizza.com
I worked on bostonpizza.com with Habanero Consulting Group. Amongst other activities, we conducted generative research in the restaurant with diners. Armed with gift cards, we approached diners just after they placed their orders, and requested their participation. We asked a series of questions, such as:

• How often do you come to this restaurant?
• Have you been to the website?
• Why would you visit the website, and what would you expect to find there?
• Have you ever tried online ordering? Why or why not?

From this process, we were able to define a few personas: families, sports teams, and “the regulars”. We also gathered valuable feedback on the main content diners were looking for: menus, locations and promotions. We heard some interesting anecdotes about ordering food online, which mostly revolved around trust and accuracy. All of the information gathered was invaluable when making design decisions for content later in the process, especially when working with client stakeholders.

MyHealth.Alberta.ca
I worked on MyHealth.Alberta.ca with nonlinear creations last summer. We were responsible for phase one, to aggregate three sources of information into one search interface. Design research, in this process, was more evaluative in nature, as we had to test how well existing information sources could provide information for three particular audiences: the general public, clinicians and caregivers. We worked with a recruitment agency to find appropriate people, and then developed a test script to review a medical database, existing AHS websites, and best-in-class examples, such as the NHS in Great Britain, with the participants. Through usability testing, we were able to discover what worked, but more importantly, what didn’t work. It was important to see how one participant struggled to find information about breast cancer, and then imagine how this struggle could amplify the stress of someone who may be seriously ill. In the design phase, we acted on this knowledge to improve the parts that were broken.

Design research provides an opportunity to connect with the people that will eventually use your designs. I have been lucky to have some experience in this realm, but I am looking forward to trying other techniques, such as participatory design, as a way to understand the situation and possible responses. I am also extremely curious about research synthesis, and am hoping for a bit more space and time in school for this part of the process.

mary13 cca, design research, thoughts 0