17-01-2007 by Fabio Sergio

Interviews: Laurent Haug and Nicolas Nova.

Convivio’s interviews feature interesting voices from the multi-disciplinary field of Human-Centered Design.

Our guests this time are Laurent Haug and Nicolas Nova. Laurent and Nicolas are two of the organizers of LIFT 07, a conference held in Geneva 7-9 February 2007, focused on the “challenges and opportunities of technology in our society“.

I had the pleasure of attending the first instance of the conference in 2006, and it offered a streamlined sequence of very interesting contributions from well-known speakers, coupled with ample unstructured opportunities to meet interesting people, the very speakers included.
I also thoroughly enjoyed the balance between high-level, “conceptual” contributions and more detail-oriented “hands-on” examples of work done where human culture intersects and intermingles with technology.

This year the list of speakers features again an impressive line-up, and the organizers have added even more opportunities for attendees to act like active contributors rather than passive recipients of somebody else’s messages.

Hello Laurent and Nicolas, thanks for taking the time to take part in this interview.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves and how and when you decided to organize an event such as LIFT?

Laurent:
I am an entrepreneur and consultant working in the web industry since 1994. I have been involved in start-ups, consulting (Arthur Andersen) and banks (Pictet).
The idea of LIFT came after I attended the Reboot conference in Copenhagen in may 2005. I felt like something was happening and we needed to bring it to Geneva too.

Nicolas:
I am a researcher working at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and a user experience consultant in the video game industry. Since I am based in Geneva and given that Switzerland is a small country I quickly had the chance to meet Laurent through friends in the IT industry. One year and a half ago he started discussing the relevance of a conference in the region with like-minded people, in a sort-of “think tank” spirit to gather and talk about how technologies impact our lives, our practices an the impact on our society. I quite liked the idea and joined him to help bootstrapping the process.

How would you describe LIFT? What are the key motivations and inspirations that led you to the current format?

Laurent:
LIFT is an excuse for an amazing community to gather and brainstorm. We chose a few topics, a few speakers, then we created a cool event around that to facilitate networking and new ideas. The philosophy is basically that creativity and ideas can change your life, so we will try to make this happen for attendees. And I believe there are a few values in there. For example, we try to keep the conference accessible so that anybody can have a chance to participate, we build the conference with everybody (we ask a lot of questions before and after the event to make it better), we try to be accessible, low profile and creative.
The motivation is to make this place a bit more aware of the big changes that are upon us, to maybe help make it more successful.

Nicolas:
Another motivation is to bring together both local people (lake Geneva area) and people from elsewhere to have a mixture of relevant contributors from different field.
In addition, our point is to go beyond current IT conferences and talk less about technology and more about how people experience it in various contexts. Europe is full of interesting voices that think, research, design and talk about these aspects, but sometimes it’s less known than in North America. So we believe there was room for this kind of event in Europe.
Finally, we also felt that there was a tremendous lack of awareness of what people were doing, even in the same region or even in a country as small as Switzerland: LIFT is then additionally meant to show who’s doing what.

I am not sure the term really makes sense in this context, but after experiencing LIFT 06 I’d be tempted to say that you applied a Human-Centered approach to the design of the conference last year, and all seems to hint you’re doing it again this year. Is this impression in any way correct?
Was it intentional? Did you actually tackle the complex task of organizing such a large event with HCD methodologies in mind or is it more of a “conference I’d like to attend” mindset that is at work in the end?

Nicolas:
Even though the human-centered approach nicely reflect what happened, it was actually not that intentional and this mindset emerged from how we thought a conference should be organized and from the type of event we would have liked to attend in the first place. Besides, when you start building a conference from scratch, you don’t have all the needed expertise so you do it with others.

Laurent:
Actually, I feel LIFT06 was deeply human centered, but that was not really intentional, nor did I follow a method or something. It was more me trying to see how I could best accommodate the constraint I had: small budget (LIFT is auto-financed), short notice, small team, no previous experience in organizing events. So we tried to get help from the community as much as we could, as LIFT is a gathering more than anything else.
We asked people to help us with some decisions and suggestions, outsourced a few things to the attendees, and after the event gathered precious feedback via a survey. This helped us prepare for LIFT07, and this year we went even further in creating a human centered event: we tried to replicate people’s rhythms (1 day to meet people, 1 day to meet ideas, 1 day to connect the dots), create self-organizing events so that anybody could have a chance to step on the big stage (that’s a big problem for conference like ours - reboot, le web 3, etc. - people in the room deserve to be on stage as much as the speakers sometimes).

In a world that is more and more interconnected, with people often engaged in a constant exchange of information with their peers, the very nature of conferences is being challenged.
Possibly and arguably as a result of this fact organizers have been recently looking at creating “un-conferences” that are more about sociality and conversation than about lectures and audiences. LIFT seems to fall into this category to a certain extent.
What is your view?

Laurent:
I think we have a good balance this year. Nothing is perfect, neither the traditional model, nor the un-conference model. In Europe, un-conferences have one big issue: the communities are not as strong a in the US, so if you gather 100 people from a local city you won’t get people like Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington in the room.

Nicolas:
In my humble opinion the “un-conference” is one model among other ones to create new sorts of events: more interactive, creative and open to discussion.
However, we were more in favor of a mixed approach, having both Open Stage (through a voting process, more structure than last year) and invited speakers.
Why inviting speaker? We felt it was a good way to establish the LIFT conference and found the process interesting to create conversations about specific topics.

Laurent:
Conferences don’t always leverage the power of the community they gather, so that’s the bad side of this model.
This year we tried to do something in between: the official program brings people from all over the world (this year we have Chinese, Korean and Indian speakers for example), which in return, gather an even more diverse and interesting crowd. Then with initiatives like the Workshops and the Open Stage, we take tools from the un-conference playbook to put anybody who deserves it on stage. The system is simple: people propose talks, and the ones that are most requested happen.

This seems to reflect the widespread notion that people are increasingly abandoning passive roles when it comes to “the activity once known as consumption of media”.
When it comes to conferences, former “attendees” expect more and more to act as true “participants”, even just by sharing photos on Flickr or commenting about their experience on weblogs.
If this is true what “tools” will you be offering participants to enhance this part experience? What are lessons learnt from last year?

Laurent:
We will definitely propose a lot of new tools this year. As I previously explained, the biggest step was probably to open our stage to the participants. In terms of tools, we are discussing with a partner to bring live file sharing and chat. such a thing would definitely a plus.

Nicolas:
I would take it the other way around, my point that LIFT should be seen as a tool by itself, to “bootstrap the conversation” between people who shape the discourse about technology.
Last year, people were active because they felt engaged and empowered by the discussion and not because there were blogs/Flickr and glued streams all over the place. That’s the main lesson to me. And personally, I was really happy to see that the tools we brought all had unexpected consequences. Who thought that the notepad given by one of our sponsor gave birth to super nice Flickr picture about each presentation?

LIFT is about the “challenges of technologies in our society”. What is your view on this matter? How does technology play a role in the conference itself?
How can a conference such as LIFT actually help in pointing, or even shaping, some of the many paths technology offers for exploration?

Laurent:
I think technology is now intimately embedded in our society. Like it or not, you have a mobile phone in your pocket. So technology is changing you, offering you new possibilities and changing the way you live. LIFT is a conference about all these changes we are witnessing (I heard there would be more changes in the next 8 year than in the past 20), intended for those who want to be part of what is coming. We try to identify strong trends and bring a set of speakers around them, with the idea to start a conversation in the community. We don’t pretend to be exhaustive, but that’s why this year we added Open Stage and Workshops.

LIFT06 was undoubtedly a success both in terms of attendance and of attendees’ satisfaction.
How do you plan to up the ante this year?

Laurent & Nicolas:
We have more days, a much better concepts, and huge innovations like the one I think is the most important: LIFT+. We think that you can not sit for 10 hours and listen to new ideas and people, and keep your mind fresh. people need to move, play, talk, so we created an event that will happen right outside the conference rooms. LIFT+ will be a set of installations by artists and designers, intended to make you play, create, share, and ultimately meet new people.
In terms of attendees, we will raise the number of people in the room from last year, but not much. Part of the LIFT concept is to give people a chance to meet, and I don’t think it happens in a 10.000 people event. So we decided to limit the entries to 500 participants, and you better save your seat very soon.

Last year the conference offered plenary sessions alternated with parallel speaking tracks targeted to smaller audiences.
Will this basically be the same structure for 2007 or will you be changing it radically? If that is the case how and why?

Laurent & Nicolas:
We fine-tuned everything a bit. Check the program and you will get the idea. Wednesday is for workshops, Thursday is for short, 20-minutes presentations of new ideas. and after you have been active and met new people on Wednesday, after you met new ideas on Thursday, Friday will be a day to sit back and connect the dots. we will give you time to enjoy your new ideas and friends, with only 4 panels and the open stage sessions.

Any word of advice for people considering attending LIFT in February? What to expect? What to bring? What to leave behind?

Nicolas:
First I’d say that I hope you’ll be surprised. Then, try to have a look at the current list of participants and check their affiliation to experience the diversity of background and jobs. This will eventually lead to a different angle than the one offered in other events. And, possibly, try to leave behind the idea that technology is about tools, processes and systems, it’s rather about usage and human creativity.

Laurent:
I think all you need is a fresh mind. Come with a lot of ideas and energy to go toward others, then try to get out of your comfort zone. Go and see the presentation that covers something you are not doing on a daily basis, go to people who are around you, don’t stay with your friend at the coffee breaks!

Thanks Nicolas and Laurent for your time and insights.

For anyone interested in attending LIFT 07 online registration is available here.
Hurry up, there are still a few places left, but something tells me they won’t last long. I’ve already reserved mine, and look forward to a second serving after last year’s feast.

Posted in Conferences, Interviews | 2 Comments »

25-11-2006 by Fabio Sergio

Interview: Adam Greenfield.

Convivio’s interviews feature leading voices from the multi-disciplinary field of Human-Centered Design.

This time we caught up with critical futurist Adam Greenfield.
Adam is the principal of New York-based Studies & Observations, and author of “Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing“, a must-read book about the rise of ambient informatics.

Hello Adam, thanks for taking time off your busy schedule to participate to this interview.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you would describe your current interest in Human-Centered Design disciplines?

It’s my pleasure! I’m delighted to have the opportunity to talk with you today.

You know, I’m never quite sure how to answer questions about myself, because I have a riotously uneven background, and most of it’s not all that interesting to anyone who doesn’t know me. But I can certainly tell you how my current interest in thinking about the relationship between people and the ubiquitous informatics they’re exposed to got started.

Sometime in early 2002 I was sitting at my desk in Tokyo - at the time, I was the head of the information architecture department for Razorfish there - and I realized that my heart simply wasn’t in cranking out yet another enterprise-scale Web site.

I had already worked on so many, and the challenges were always the same. The same battles had to be fought with every new client engagement, and it had just about exhausted whatever reservoirs of energy or inspiration I had to devote to my job. On top of that ordinary ennui, I was suffering to some degree from an acute, post-September 11th crisis of relevance: “Does my work really matter to anyone? Do I make a difference in any meaningful way?”

I wanted to do something decisive, something that would contribute to people’s sense of self-empowerment and engagement with the world. And if I was going to be at all honest with myself, there was no way that the kind of work I was doing on the Web was going to satisfy these ambitions.

At the same time, it was becoming clear to me that information technologies were well-along in the process of colonizing everyday life. Even after the dot.com crash, you didn’t have to be any kind of a visionary to see the eventual convergence of Web services and mobile phones and “smart” environments. So I began poking around, asking my friends and colleagues what they saw coming over the horizon technologically, how they thought it would be presented to users, what kinds of design interventions would be required.

A great many of my friends pointed me at mobile development - this was Tokyo, of course, to begin with, and most of my non-Japanese friends there were Europeans. So it was entirely natural that they’d think of the mobile phone as a platform for this sort of activity. But, you know, I’m an American, and I’ll confess that I’ve never been really big on mobiles; they’ve always been sort of an afterthought to me.

By contrast, though, my friend Anne Galloway told me about a conference that was going to be held in Sweden in a few months’ time, a conference dedicated to an entire field I’d never heard of: ” Ubiquitous Computing“,” or “Ubicomp.” It sounded fascinating, and as I began to do more research on the field I realized that this was exactly what I had been looking for.

The potential range of situations and scenarios implicated in Ubicomp was tremendous, with deployments being proposed at the broadest possible scale. At the same time, though - as I knew all too well from my work on the Web - the user’s experience of informatic systems is frequently wretched. And the enormous dissonance between the total ambition of some of the systems being proposed and the actual quality of life they’d be likely to engender seemed like a very natural and very productive place for me to devote my efforts.

Could you briefly explain the core concepts behind “Everyware”?
How do they differ, if at all, from more widespread notions of Ubiquitous Computing?

“Everyware” is an umbrella term that I’ve introduced precisely because the term “Ubiquitous Computing” is problematic, in a few different ways.

It’s contentious, for starters: it’s strongly and properly identified with Mark Weiser and his work at Xerox PARC, and may not adequately describe the work of other people and institutions. It apparently refers - in educational circles, at least - also to ideas around using laptops in the classroom and so forth, and is understood in this context at least often enough to confuse some of the people I first turned to when I started to research my book.

And above all, it’s a mouthful. I couldn’t imagine it being used by the very people who would be most affected by this class of technologies - the ordinary, nonspecialist people, the people without any particular interest in informatics or user interfaces.

So “Everyware” is just a term that supposed to capture the important aspect of what’s going on when information processing is everywhere around us, and do so in such a way so as to be understood and comfortably used by the people around you on the subway or in the grocery store.

How does the term Everyware relate to other ones recently coined to describe apparently similar concepts, such as Bruce Sterling’s “Spime” or Julian Bleecker’s “Blogject“?
Are these terms actually fighting for the same meme-space or do you see them as complementary?

I think they refer to things at different levels of abstraction.

As Bruce explains it, in principle a “Spime” is a self-identifying, networked object that has been endowed with the ability to locate itself in space and time. In a sense, a mobile phone is a protospime: when you query it, it can tell you where it is now, where it was the last time it connected to the cellular network.

And as I understand it, Julian’s “Blogject” is an object with highly similar properties, the primary difference being that by definition it publishes the data it generates to the Web - the Web as it already exists and as we use it today. If your mobile phone had a dedicated Web page on which it would automatically publish its location and use history, it’d be a Blogject. Perhaps, then, you’d use the word to describe a Spime with a public and globally-accessible record.

Both of these are instances or cases of Everyware, “information processing embedded in the objects and surfaces of everyday life,” that “gives rise to a regime of ambient informatics.”

The thing I appreciated most about your book is that it introduces an ethical dimension to the design of ambient informatics.
How do you realistically see those currently busy turning these visions into our future accept the responsibilities mentioned in your book?
Does history testify to the ability of humankind to wisely and responsibly choose the forces that will shape its future(s)?

Well, I’m genuinely and deeply grateful that you appreciate the discussion of it in the book, but I think it’s critical to point out that an ethical dimension has always been present in the design of informatic systems. A technical system - anything designed, for that matter - always encodes the designer’s valuations and beliefs about the world they live in, on some level, and those valuations very frequently wind up conditioning the experience of use. The Northern Californian originators of the PC, for example, very explicitly held decentralized access to information processing to be a fundamental good, and a main driver of their efforts.

I think the reason the discussion looks relatively novel in Everyware is simply that such valuations are almost invariably obscured in the design and marketing and discourse aroud informatic technology. And if this hasn’t much mattered so far, as informatic systems reach every further into everyday life, their structuration begins to have very real influence on the choices we’re offered. These arguments at the level of architecture, as Lawrence Lessig might put it, constrain use in a way that is going to be inaccessible to recourse not merely in real time, but, for the great preponderance of users, ever.

These issues are only occasionally raised by designers - though there are certainly splendid countervailing examples, from Bucky Fuller to Dunne and Raby - and they’re not something that engineers and developers tend to be at all comfortable talking about.
In 1947, Norbert Wiener, the so-called “father of cybernetics,” confessed as much. This is what he said:

“Those of us who have contributed to the new science of cybernetics thus stand in a moral position which is, to say the least, not very comfortable. We have contributed to the initiation of a new science which…embraces technical developments with great possibilities for good and for evil. We can only hand it into the world that exists about us, and this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima. We do not even have the choice of suppressing these technical developments. They belong to the age. […] The best we can do is to see that a large public understands the trend and the bearing of the present work, and to confine our personal efforts to those fields…most remote from war and exploitation.”

He also felt compelled to admit that he saw only “a very slight hope” that the systems he imagined and helped develop would be used wisely, and, to answer your question, I think history bears his skepticism out.

What gives me my own sense of slight hope is the idea - latent in Wiener’s comments about a “large public,” as well as in Mark Weiser’s call to “tell the world at large” that ubiquitous computing is “something dangerous” - that ordinary people can learn to recognize the trade-offs implicit in these systems, can demand that Everyware respond to their prerogatives, and can above all reject products and services that they do not recognize as doing so. But that’s a conversation that’s just getting started.

At the very beginning of your book you basically state that most, if not all, Everyware scenarios are based on the assumption that the current techno-fueled evolution of western societies is sustainable, but that you don’t necessarily think that is the case.
Could you elaborate a bit on this point?

Sure, I’m happy to - although I should say that my take on this isn’t particularly cheery.

At their root, across the board, all of the more elaborate visions of networked interactivity worked into the texture of everyday life make certain implicit assumptions about the context in which that life will be unfolding.

One of these assumptions is that society is going to go on more or less the way it is now, only more so: that we will continue to enjoy a relatively clement set of climatological circumstances, that energy will continue to be easily accessible and cheaply available, and that mobility and interconnectedness will continue to increase. And anyone paying attention has good reason to believe that this is an untenable assumption - that among other things, the atmosphere is now warmer than it’s been for the past few million years, that the overall salinity of ocean water is changing due to melting glaciers and ice caps, that worldwide we are running out of oil.

These are facts and observed measurements. They’re surely open to interpretation to some degree, but they’re not fundamentally open to question. And taken together they pose a considerable challenge to the idea that the status quo is going to kind of continue to unfold all placidly and uneventfully. So, as someone deeply interested in the human future, I have to reckon with the idea that there’s a nonzero chance that our civilization on this planet will be so profoundly disrupted by these developments and their consequences that any talk of a seamless, effortless everyday life built on a computational substrate is irrelevant fatuity. (In particular, I very strongly do not believe that some computational “singularity” or transcendence event is likely, and not only in the near future.)

I simply didn’t think it was responsible to release a book that in part concerned the near future without saying at least one or two words about what I thought some of the most likely outcomes were.

If nothing else, I was told last year (by someone in a position to know) that 10% of the planetary annual energy consumption is already devoted to powering computation. Already, with our current technology - all those servers and routers that we rely on to bring us the experience we recognize as the World Wide Web don’t turn out to run on good will and smiles after all.

Now imagine that even part of what the more enthusiastic advocates of computational ubiquity are imagining comes true, is deployed more or less as they would want it to be. Processing devices in every sweater, every doorknob and bicycle and kitchen sink, and all of them intercommunicating with each other. How long is that going to be sustainable, if it doubles or triples the energy requirement of the network infrastructure behind it all, and that in turn is ever harder and more expensive to maintain?

Along those lines certain visions of Everyware see objects part of the so-called “Internet of Things” becoming active contributors to conversations among human beings.
Could these objects thus play an active role in helping us better understand where we’re heading? Could they end up informing the very decisions we’ll have to make about them?

I think, among other things, that this was very much Bruce’s intention, in wanting to define a class of networked, self-describing, self-reporting objects. Certainly, if you read his book “Shaping Things“, you can’t escape the idea that the whole point of “spiming” objects is to help us do a better job of being aware of our energy and resource utilization footprint, and a better job of recycling them when their service lifetime is over.

So, yes, absolutely I think it’s possible that our ideas about the world and where we stand in it will increasingly be shaped by the objects we share it with. I have to say, though, that I’m not as sanguine as Bruce is. Like Norbert Wiener, I think it’s more likely that in the absence of any strong constituency for more responsive design, networked objects will be used to track and understand us that we may be better marketed to and better policed, and otherwise either constrain the array of choices we have available, or offer us choices that are no choice at all. That’s why I think it’s so important that we understand what these technologies imply, and demand that their design respond to our needs.

Scenarios depicted in Everyware implicitly raise by several orders of magnitude the complexity of designing experiences for such interconnected contexts.
Will brand new tools and techniques be required or do you see the current ones evolving to face these new challenges?
Who do you see “naturally” stepping up to pick up those very challenges?

I’ve historically seen the community of user-experience practitioners as being best situated to respond to these new requirements, given the appropriateness of both the UX conceptual toolkit and the general orientation toward the needs of a human user. In particular, I saw it as a fairly natural fit for my former colleagues in information architecture, always having believed (and acted as if) information architecture was a discipline suited to the structural design of all kinds of human transactions with informatic systems, not merely Web sites.

I have to admit, though, that I’m not seeing the kind of widespread interest in the ubiquitous domain that would support such a belief.
Maybe it’s simply too early.

At the moment, what I can say is this: the successful design of humane and ethical everyware is - depending on the specific instantiation in question - going to call on so many discrete skills from across the fields of architecture, industrial design, interaction design, fashion, materials research and user ethnography that anyone with a specialty in these domains is going to have plenty to sink their teeth into.

In this sense then what would be a few “words of advice” for designers-at-large keen on getting their “hands dirty” with Everyware?

One part of me wants to say “start taking Korean lessons,” since that’s where so much of the enthusiasm for everyware is right now, in Korea and other parts of East Asia.

More seriously, I’d advise people to learn everything they can about RFID and about Near-Field Communication, and what possibilities these might bring to conventional objects or spaces - what might be enabled by adding NFC capabilities to a mobile phone, for example. This seems like it’s going to be one of the major lines along which the broader ubiquitous discourse will advance.

If that doesn’t turn you on, I’d imagine that getting comfortable with user observation and ethnography, contextual inquiry, and other techniques for the qualitative understanding of the experience of use will stand you in good stead. And if neither of these two suggestions appeal, about all I can say is sit just where you are - because it seems fairly likely to me that some kind of Everyware will come to you.

As someone who has read your book and throughly enjoyed it I can only agree with your last statement.
Thank you Adam for your time and insights.

Posted in Ubiquitous Computing, Interviews | 2 Comments »

19-10-2006 by Fabio Sergio

Interview: Jan Chipchase.

Starting this month Convivio will publish interviews with leading voices in the field of Human-Centered Design, focusing each time on one of the various areas of expertise that contribute to HCD’s multi-disciplinary milieu.
Interviews will feature people from all over the world, but with an emphasis on European voices.

The discipline under the spotlight this month is Research, and the first guest is Jan Chipchase, Principal Researcher at Nokia, whose personal insights can be found on Future Perfect, Jan’s wonderful photo-intensive weblog. As he says: “… if I do my job right you’ll be using it 3 to 15 years from now.”

Hello Jan, thanks for taking the time from your busy schedule to participate… and for being the first one too.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found your current professional path?

I’m a member of the Mobile HCI Group in Nokia Research and have been living in and working from Tokyo for the last 5 and half years.

Soon after graduating I joined a team developing teaching software and pretty swiftly realized the limits of my design skills. That prompted me to sign up for a Masters in User Interface Design at London Guildhall University which led to a UI development job at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology before joining Nokia’s Usability Group and from there to my current position.
About 50% of my time is spent on field study related activities and 50% is spent on concept development.
Along the way there have been stints living in London, Berlin, Brighton and Bristol, a fair bit of travel and managing a small design company.
The general direction has been influenced by Guenter Wallraff, Weegee and Larry Clark.

A common experience with User Researchers is that they seem to be “always on”, detecting patterns and/or documenting all they see to fit it into existing research domains… or creating new ones on the go. If Future Perfect, your blog, is any indication you seem to confirm this impression.
Is this a natural trait needed for any effective (and passionate) researcher, or is it one of those “professional compulsory habits”?

This work certainly benefits from an element of continuous observation and assessment, but I don’t think being “always on” is particularly unique.
It’s common to meet researchers that are passionate about what they do, that don’t stop thinking about an issue just because they’re not sitting at a desk or in the lab.
I imagine you’d get a similar answer from an architect or fiction writer.

But if the opposite of being “always on” is “switching off”, how important is it to take time off? To understand and design for life it helps to have one yourself.

I do have a habit of trying new things to experience the experience - having my ears cleaned in a Hue barber’s shop springs to mind. Sitting in the chair mentally breaking down the composite parts of the experience – the tools he used including a customized razor blade and a miner-style head torch, the background chatter, Vietnamese pop music on the radio, the sound of motorbike engines passing by plus his running commentary of what was happening.
Breaking things down into composite parts is simply how I make sense of the world around me.

One of my assumptions during interviews as well as more ad-hoc conversations is that everyone has something interesting to say you just need to figure out what it is. More often than not the listener enters a conversation assuming the opposite, doesn’t take the time to properly hear what’s actually being said, or quite simply the listener doesn’t have the skills or cultural context to appreciate the subtleties of what is communicated.
Everyone can reflect on their life experiences but that most people don’t choose to, and only a few choose to do so in a public forum. The issue is not whether we are ‘always on’, but what we are always on to.
What is it that is noticed? How much time is spent in absorbing, or in reflection, or in applying what is learned?

The context to me replying to this email interview is a fairly typical example of the kind of moments that support reflection. (I’m sitting in a Tokyo cafe waiting for vaccination clinic across the road to).
Thirty-five minutes filled by reviewing and writing.

To follow your question to its source one of the more amusing aspects of posting material to Future Perfect and using sites such as Flickr are the extrapolation that readers make based on what is posted to the site.
People tend to take personal sites (blogs) as a constant flow of information, and the default design elements of tools such as Movable Type support this, but what ends up being documented is pretty trivial compared to the richness of everyday life.
Take one year’s worth of photos posted to Future Perfect as an example: collectively the 500+ photos probably took less than a minute of exposure time to capture (and that minute includes one 30 second exposure).
How much does that “photographer’s minute” and the text that accompanies it communicate about the year and contexts in which the photos were captured?
More importantly what is missing and why?

You have been living in Tokyo for a long time, and travel constantly to other countries: how has this affected your work and insights?

Perspective, it provides perspective.
However, the cliché that “travel teaches you as much about yourself and your own culture as it does about others” is only partially true.
Travel is an opportunity to learn but it’s not the same as the ability or willingness to learn.

Do you think that “immersing” oneself in another culture is helpful or even essential to fuel the research process?

By “immersing” I’ll assume you mean being in context for extended periods of time combined with a degree of acceptance from the community or individuals that you are immersed with.

Yes, thank you for phrasing it much better than I ever could.

One of the assumptions of contextual design processes is that two weeks, two days or even two hours spent in the context of whatever or whomever we are researching is better than none.
A degree of immersion is certainly useful (and it’s certainly driven my own research), but I wouldn’t say it’s essential without first knowing what was being designed and by whom. It’s also important to keep some perspective about being in context and from there immersion; on a very practical level what can one expect to learn from short periods of time spent in another culture or context?

The perception of those “immersed experiences” also plays a role when it comes to communicating the research results.
Its one thing to say that you conducted qualitative research in a 3rd tier city in northern China, it’s another to show the richness of that context through a video of an interview conducted in a two room family apartment.
The extent of to which you were engrained in that context can be implied by the body language of the participants in the video or the degree of access you have in their home.
Diary techniques such as the everything-I-touch-diary can extend our reach and understanding into contexts which many readers would assume to be off limits, for example taking a shower, lying in bed, or sitting in a nightclub bathroom (all situations from which we have collected self-reported data).

In a recent study we wanted to understand the complete 24-hour flow of everyday life so we embedded researchers in participants’ homes for a couple days. It was an interesting exercise both in terms of understanding the user’s perspective, ethical considerations and the immense responsibility that comes with having access to the minutiae of peoples’ lives.
The study yielded interesting and relevant data but I certainly wouldn’t argue that it’s necessary to have that level of immersion on every project.

The extent to which the research team spends time in context is an issue I struggle with even on something as seemingly routine as deciding where to stay during a field study.
Our default accommodation is often a multi-national hotel chain with everything that that entails, but except for the financial elites in many of those societies you’re cut off from the people you’re researching.
But on the other hand to function effectively the team needs to work from a safe, clean environment that supports interaction with team members, home bases and the other people that are part of our working lives.
These demands create conflicting needs. My ideal situation is to book locally owned guest houses situated close to the communities where the research takes place though it doesn’t always work out that way.

This is probably a good point to raise the issue of cultural translation. Access to situations and contexts is important but how do you know you’re drawing the right conclusions?
It’s a particular challenge when spoken communication is through an interpreter. In many ways we are only as good as the local researchers that we partner with.

Yes, I have also had a chance to hear similar considerations from English-speaking researchers conducting their activities in Italy, assisted by an Italian researcher and/or translator.
This also brings to mind the old saying that when a book gets translated a good translator actually ends up rewriting the book, the whole activity actually being more of an interpretation than a literal adaptation from the original.

In terms of scope do you favor exploring large domains looking for emerging patterns or rather conduct field studies focused on specific interest areas?

For projects with a broad scope there is an element of not knowing where the value is going to come from which can be pretty daunting considering the resources that goes into making a multi-cultural study happen.
Generally I prefer to go in the field with a specific interest area, for example Mobile TV or illiterate contact management, clear topics that can be researched and delivered. During the project-planning phase I try to ensure methodologies that allow us to collect data on related issues and I always leave enough time to scout new topics.
The role of research is to explore the boundaries of what’s out there. It’s typical for some research to continue existing trajectories whilst others are at more of a tangent to current practices.
Tangent research topics tend to have higher risk, but taking (and managing) risk is an important part of successful research portfolio.

To some extent being the first amongst your peers (or your client’s peers) to conduct field research in a given area makes it easier to spot and document items of interest.
Some things are obvious, it’s just that no-one has looked or asked those questions in that context before. Assuming that the research findings are both new and relevant to the client’s interests, one of the highest compliments is when they say “that’s so obvious now”. The comment suggests that we’ve picked up on behaviors that are subtle enough to be largely invisible but common enough to be understood.
By saying “it’s obvious” the listener has already has bought into your view of the world which is half the battle of communicating the research.
A simple example of “obvious behavior” is in breaking down the reasons why so many people leave objects in taxis, the behaviour that people adopt to reduce the risk of forgetting (which we called the “Point of Reflection” in one of our studies), and why despite this behaviour people still forget.

Let’s look at research in the larger scheme of things for a moment.
A Human-Centered Design process should ideally have User Research as one of its ongoing activities, informing and validating the various phases of product development, but from what I’ve heard from researchers in the recent past there’s a certain amount of frustration regarding how and when it is actually integrated in the process.
I’ve sometimes heard it explained as “throwing your findings over a wall”… never to see/hear how they will be actually applied.
Leaving Nokia aside do you share similar concerns regarding the current fit of research-at-large in current product/service development processes?

User researchers don’t have a monopoly in understanding everyday life. It’s natural for researchers to assume a degree of ownership over ideas and concepts that they generate, but it’s important to recognise the limits of the research itself without buy in from other members of the design team and the organisation as a whole.
What steps need to be taken to make research relevant?
Who needs to buy into the research results for it to make a difference?

My colleagues are smart and I trust that they apply the research to their own context. A lot of the back-end work we do is about getting the right data to the right person in the right format at the right time.

If there is frustration in the way research is enterpreted then much of the blame falls on the researcher: not taking the time to understand the design needs of the research team; an inability to clearly communicating ideas, and not making the effort to re-package research results to arising needs.
Walls are there to be climbed over and once over the other side, knocked down (with the help of the rest of the design team, naturally).

That’s a fantastic answer Jan, and one that should apply to all team members in any multi-disciplinary context.
All too often I’ve heard complaints from usability engineers or interaction designers or project managers that others in the team/organization “don’t understand them and what they do”, but not as often I’ve heard the same people question their own willingness (and even ability) to shape a shared vocabulary to ease and foster dialogue with their colleagues.

Talking about dialogue and interaction among team members let’s also briefly look at the role participants usually have in ethnographic studies, which is often quite passive, as they are observed conducting their daily activities.
Participatory design practices, which are increasingly common these days, see people play a much more active role in shaping products and services.
Do you see this competing or integrating with the type of work you tend to be involved in?

We tend to apply a variety of research methods in a single field study ranging from observational techniques (observations, shadowing, diaries, logging) to being more interactive (in-depth or ad-hoc interviews, walk-throughs, role play) and yes, we sometimes actively engage participants in the design process.
Observations only take you so far in understanding what. To understand the why and the details of how you need to communication and engage with people. Deciding on what approach to adopt for any given project is dependent on understanding the resources that are available, and the people you have access to.
Good participatory design is dependent on participating with the right people, so the smart question is: who are the right people to work with, and what level of access will you have?
The bottom line is not to be hung up on using one method or another, but in figuring out what you’re trying to achieve and what resources and participants you have at your disposal.

Any chance you could be convinced to share a few secrets regarding how to find “the right participants”?

Unless absolutely necessary, avoid recruiting companies.

Ethnography and anthropology are current buzz-disciplines in the industry, and articles such as Business Week’s “The Science of Desire”, have both highlighted innovations fostered by the adoption of research practices in various industries, but also somewhat cautioned about potential misuses and pitfalls.
Is it maybe again a problem of “cultural translation”, only in a different setting?

A crude answer is it depends to what extent these words are appropriated, hyped, used and abused… but this is an answer coming from someone who doesn’t claim to be either an anthropologist or an ethnographer.

Shifting the focus onto methodologies, which are in your opinion the most effective ones when it comes to conducting field studies in a non-academic environment?
Any tips for others working in similar positions elsewhere?

In deciding what methods to use we always start with the participants and their need to be comfortable with the research process.
Given that we want to collect data from pretty much every context where the phone is used from when people get up to when they go to bed, and techniques such as wallet mapping can expose very sensitive data.

The tip is to keep the process simple for the team and transparent for the participants.
We work hard to ensure in-depth participants have sufficient control over the data that is gathered (the same principle works with ad-hoc participants such as street interviews though the process is a little different).
Participant control comes from a variety of techniques such as entrusting them with research team recording equipment, de-mystifying the technology that has invaded their space and more subtle techniques such as researchers remaining in lines of sight during home visits. More concretely we offer in-depth participants complete control over the data that is collected.
Towards the end of a session, after any rewards are handed over and before any data consent form is signed, we encourage participants to review all digital data we have collected on them and to delete what they don’t want us to have, no questions asked. Most participants delete one or two photos but no one has yet asked us to wipe everything.
We also like to follow up the study by sending participants a copy of the digital data that we retain, essentially the original data filtered to remove photos we consider inappropriate or overly sensitive (this can range from photos that include phone numbers or drying underwear it really depends on the study).
Knowing that the process is largely a positive experience for participants positively changes the way data is collected and handled.

You seem to be suggesting that a secret for conducting effective research is to treat people being observed as people, or as team members, and not just as “participants”, which sounds like a perfect way to frame the end of this exchange Jan.
Any infamous final word of advice for someone interested in following your footsteps?

Surround yourself with smart, committed people.

Sounds like the kind of suggestion that goes well beyond research and actually applies to all contexts, and I couldn’t agree more.

Thank you for your time and insightful answers Jan, looking forward to keep reading your reflections on Future Perfect.

Posted in User Research, Human Centered Design, Interviews | 6 Comments »