• Interview with Steve Portigal conducted at the ID Design Research Conference
  “It’s not my style to say ‘First of all the question you’re asking is wrong, and here’s what we will do.’”

  Note: they warned me that the site has IT problems and some browsers may not like it. Firefox complained but I let it create an exception and it opened it. Others are telling me they are having problems. Not my site so not much I can fix

I was in Chicago last weekend for IIT Institute of Design’s excellent Design Research Conference, and spent a day walking around the city. (I’m happy to say I can now use the term ‘Miesian’ with authority.)

I ended the day in Millennium Park eating a hot dog and looking at Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate sculpture.

Actually, to say I was looking at the sculpture sells the experience short. I’d seen the giant silver bean from a distance earlier that day, but once I was next to it, the combination of scale, surface treatment, and form made it such an unusual and compelling object that I couldn’t help but start interacting with it. Chicago writer Lynn Becker’s article on Millennium Park sculpture-as-architecture delves further into the interactivity of Cloud Gate.

After a few trips around and under the sculpture, I decided to sit back and watch how other people were responding to it.

I saw people

• photograph it
  
• photograph themselves with it
  
• photograph others with it
  
• have strangers photograph them with it
  
• use it as a mirror and check their makeup, hair
  
• clean it and (while being photographed) lick it
  
• fit their bodies into the smallest possible space created by the sculpture’s curves
  
• smear their fingerprints along the mirrored surface (this seemed like a form of graffiti, a recording of presence)
  
• pretend to be holding the sculpture up
  
• use it to hold them up
  
• pose suggestively on all fours next to it
  
• talk about having come there other times
  
• lie on the ground in poses to create specific tableaux in the funhouse mirror-like underside
  

It was fascinating to see how people reacted to having this functionless object placed in their midst. It struck me as a form of spatial/environmental prototyping, and I’m sure that noticing and examining what people do and what their patterns of motion around this object are and synthesizing that data could produce insights to inform many types of design.

In our research work, we periodically use objects to elicit responses from people to new concepts. Sometimes these artifacts take the form of storyboards, sometimes models, and sometimes we’ll just put something in a person’s hands to give them a starting point, something to react to. One time, I handed a person we were interviewing a CD box set that was on his coffee table, and he proceeded to talk us through a whole design for the product idea we were discussing. “It’d be smaller than this, I think the corners should be rounded, maybe this part could come off . . .”

We’ve been collaborating lately with a couple of our clients on the creation of storyboards and models for this purpose. It’s been interesting figuring out in each case the right balance of detail and abstraction; how to give people enough cues to get the basic concepts, while leaving them enough space to think about how they would like to see those concepts refined.

Of course, what gets created depends on where our client is in the development process and what we want to learn from the people we’re talking to, but I think that what I saw at Cloud Gate is a good model for what one hopes an artifact will spark in a research participant: the urge to experiment, to hypothesize, to test, to interact, to play, to see what’s possible.

Related posts:
On using objects for generative research
On noticing
On prototyping and fidelity

Tags: Anish Kapoor, architecture, art, artifacts, Chicago, Cloud Gate, concept, concept test, concept testing, design, design research, Design Research Conference, DRC 08, IIT, institute of design, interactivity, Lynn Becker, Millennium Park, model, noticing, play, product development, prototype, prototyping, sculpture, storyboard

• Flickr as “Ethnography on the cheap”: lamest post ever from Core77
  “Ten years ago, if you were designing a laptop bag and wanted to see what people carried in theirs, you could either a) hire a research firm or b) get a job in airport security. But now ID Ethnographers need look no further than Flickr. (For those too lazy to dig through the link, hit the jump for our compiled roundup of shots.) It’s not as in-depth as a focus group, but you also don’t have to provide cookies, juice, and those envelopes filled with crisp hundred-dollar bills.”

  First of all, isn’t this something that’s about 4 years old (hey, I can do user research by looking at pictures on the Internet). Second, while I’m not saying the information you can get from this isn’t useful but for God’s sake don’t throw around terms like “ethnography” if you don’t know what they mean.

• A profile of HTC, the Taiwanese handset maker in the spotlight thanks to the launch of the Google Android phone
  They have sought to infuse the company with the style and culture of many Silicon Valley pioneers. For example, three years ago HTC created Magic Labs, a group that in addition to about 50 software, hardware and mechanical engineers and industrial designers, includes a writer and a jewelry designer. They all help brainstorm ideas and design new products. Many have titles like software magician and mechanical wizard. The marketing chief John Wang’s business card reads “Chief Innovation Wizard.”

  One of the group’s mandates is to generate ideas at a torrid pace with the understanding that most of them will never turn into products. “We have an organization that is designed to fail,” said Mr. Wang, who helped start Magic Labs. “It takes close to 1,000 ideas to turn up a few projects that are worth running.”

Last weekend was my workshop (“Did you see that? Tapping into your super-noticing power”) at the Institute of Design’s Design Research Conference. Most of the folks in the workshop completed a homework assignment where they went out and took photos of something they noticed (similar to the assignment I had given to the students I taught at CCA, discussed here). During the workshop itself, people presented their photos and stories, while I asked both speakers and listeners to think about the noticing process more than the details of the specific examples (all of which were interesting and enjoyable).

We did just a first pass at synthesizing the observations, and some of the things that came out may or may not be obvious to others. Here’s a sampling:

• To notice, we filter on our previous experiences, our personal backgrounds, and our professional experiences
• We react to something that evokes an emotion in us
• Rather than noticing details, we may simply grasp the gestalt of the details in the moment
• Taking the picture helps you notice, even if you go back to the picture later and notice things in that picture
• The importance of slowing down, relaxation, being calm/still, having a time of contemplation (in contrast to “trying” to do a noticing activity…several people reported that they couldn’t do the exercise when they tried to do it, but then later on they noticed all sorts of stuff
• In contrast, for some, there is no on/off button for their design research way of thinking/being
• There’s a need to give ourselves permission to look silly by stopping to pay attention to something seemingly trivial
• Notice similarities when you expect differences
• Notice differences when you expect similarities
• Most importantly to me, was that it’s okay not to know the “why” of something; this was tough during the workshop when some people had a strong urge to try and explain what others had noticed; to rationalize, clarify, or even solve it

I look forward to the next opportunity to lead this workshop again.

See also: Ever notice? by Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg at AIGA Gain

Tags: Chicago, conference, design research, drc08, drc2008, id, IIT, institute of design, noticing, workshop

• Rob Tannen’s Design Research Conference Recap
  He also points to Kolko’s summary and adds some of his own reflections as well.
• Jon Kolko’s review of the IIT Design Research Conference
  I haven’t even picked up my luggage on my trip back from Chicago and Jon’s got a blog post up. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the only writeup of the conference that appears; I’m hoping to share some content from our workshop on noticing in the next few days.

  My take on the specific sessions varies from Jon’s (I was disinterested or annoyed by some of what he found rewarding; I was thrilled by some of what he omitted, etc.) in some cases, but I think his overview of the field(s) involved is insightful.

• Podcast: Rick Smolan
  Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Rick Smolan, author of "America at Home," who tried to capture how Americans live through pictures of their homes.

Next week we’ll be in Chicago for the Design Research Conference at IIT. My workshop Did you see that? Tapping into your super-noticing power is sold out.

Let us know if you’re going to be there so we can be sure to say “hi!”

Tags: Chicago, conference, design research, drc08, id, IIT

• Before they can be creative, they have to listen
  At the University of Minnesota, Thomas Fisher’s students are learning a very important lesson about being architects: before they can be creative, they have to listen. After starting a project to help build homeless shelters, they began to talk to homeless people and discovered that shelters were irrelevant to them. What they wanted was for the police to stop taking and trashing their stuff when they drive them out from under bridges or tunnels.

  As it turned out, their biggest complaint had a design solution: The students created highly magnetized packs in metallic colors that served to camouflage them. When the police come, their users can throw the bags up to the closest metal structure, and they stick.

I blogged previously about our research with a wine brand. The other day I was in the store and saw that the packaging redesign, informed by our work, is on the shelf!

Landor did the design work in creating the new Stone Cellars package, informed by our exploration of how Beringer’s customers were thinking about, talking about, and making meaning with wine and its packaging. One piece that emerged very strongly was that the folks we were talking to really wanted to associate a sense of place with any wine they had a relationship with, and that is prominent in the new design.

Stone Cellars, before

Stone Cellars, after

And on sale, too!

Tags: beringer, bottle, branding, insight, label, packaging, stone cellars, wine

• Redefining the Art of Smart Living – Ajman Uptown
  A concept inspired in French style one of a kind in Ahman
  Best location on Emirated Road.
  (Ajman, is the smallest in all the seven emirates with an area of only 161 square miles)
• Great Gig in the Sea — Pink Floyd Themed Cruise to the Bahamas
  Great Gig in the Sea is the first Pink Floyd themed concert cruise to the Bahamas. The cruise will allow Pink Floyd fans to combine sun and sea with an amazing concert experience. This one-of a kind voyage will feature the music of Think Floyd USA: The American Pink Floyd Show, and will celebrate material from Pink Floyd’s earliest days through the present.

• A conversation between friends: director Werner Herzog and tightrope artist Philippe Petit
  PP: Film is a lying media.
  WH: It’s beautiful to invent. And truth is not found in facts per se. In Philippe’s case, there’s a deeper truth in what he’s doing–an ecstasy of truth. And he’s discovering, of course, walking in the sky, in the clouds, means a form of ecstasy–a quintessential metaphor of an ecstatic moment. There’s a truth in it that we can somehow function beyond our limitations. He can walk in the skies.
  PP: Truth deserves more than being factually recorded.
  WH: We have to be cautious when we use this term “truth”–let’s touch this only with a pair of pliers. Not even a mathematician or a philosopher could give you a real definition of it.

We’ve seen coffee cup sleeves used to carry advertisements:

Last month, there was a sleeve around my copy of Metropolis magazine. Is advertising in the magazine no longer effective?

What’s next?

Banded bird, © Dan Soltzberg 2008

Previously: Forced Engagement

Tags: ad, ad space, advertisement, advertising, bird band, brand, branding, coffee cup sleeve, magazine, Metropolis

My latest interactions column, Living in the Overlap, has just been published. I riff on the relevance of pop culture, the spaces between disciplines and the importance of resisting the urge to label and categorize everything neatly.

Here’s a bunch of stuff I haven’t tried: Project Runway, High School Musical, American Pie movies, robot wars, molecular gastronomy, Halo 3, Dancing With the Stars, Frisky Dingo, sudoku, biopics, House, Desperate Housewives, Portishead, Fifty Cent, Dane Cook, The Da Vinci Code, The Life of Pi, Marley & Me, The Lovely Bones, Augusten Burroughs, and Mitch Albom. I’m mildly curious about some; intensely disinterested about others. A lot of it might make a “sophisticated” individual uncomfortable. But my profession is identifying and establishing the connections between people, culture, brands, stories, and products, and that means it’s absolutely crucial that I know a little bit about all sorts of stuff that I may personally regard as crap.

Get a PDF of the article here. To receive a copy of the article, send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.

Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting With Advertising
• Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
• Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity

Tags: categorization, column, disciplines, identity, interactions, interests, overlap, pop culture, profession, skills