By Steve Portigal at 1:57 pm, Monday April 16 2012
Meet Google’s search anthropologist [SF Chron] – While the article still has a bit of the wow-technology-companies-use-social-science-to-watch-people-use-stuff wide-eyedness we see in every popular press piece, I was intrigued by the nice exploration of the gulf between what some people reveal they need and what design changes make it into the product. It’s not a one-to-one match and the article speaks to that reasonably well.
Google has hundreds of millions of users, each with different needs, working styles and levels of search competence. Every change for one subset – like those who occasionally use advanced search – comes at a cost for others – like the vast majority of people who never use it and don’t want it cluttering up the main page. Striking the right balance for the greater good requires listening to the data – and, of course, to the users themselves. “That particular interview didn’t finish off the painting,” Russell said. “But every interview helps fill in a little bit more of the canvas.”
Why Storytellers Lie [The Atlantic] – “Lie” is a perfect headline-grabbing word and it probably pays to read the piece with a less judgmental take on what people tell us. There are many situations that are lies but in research it’s our job to seek a number of possible truths and understand why what we hear may not always be the same as what we identify as true.
Sinister as that may sound, therapy likely helps many of us feel better at least in part because it encourages us to become less truthful autobiographers. As studies have shown, depressives tend to have more realistic—and less inflated—perceptions of their importance, abilities, and power in the world than others. So those of us who benefit from therapy may like it in large part because it helps us to do what others can do more naturally: to see ourselves as heroes; to write (and re-write) the stories of our lives in ways that cast us in the best possible light; to believe that we have grown from helpless orphans or outcasts to warriors in control of our fate…We should remember how much we all have a tendency to fictionalize, whether we realize it or not. We like stories because, as Gotschall puts it, we are “addicted to meaning”—and meaning is not always the same as the truth.
The delighted shouts from middle-schoolers and seniors alike suggest that neither group is accustomed to having its opinions solicited. But with a clicker, “suddenly their voices are important,” said Professor James Katz, the director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers. “If people feel their opinions really count, they’ll be happy and likely to give more opinions.” The dynamic of social comparison — understanding where you stand relative to your tribe — is also a draw. Clicker software satisfies that curiosity by immediately displaying a bar graph of responses in the room. “This is a new form of transparency for crowd psychology,” he said. He added some cautions about using clickers, also called audience response systems. In a society in which checking the crowd’s opinion becomes the norm, Professor Katz said, taking risks or relying on one’s instincts may be devalued. “Those who want to strike out in new directions and challenge the sentiments of a crowd, like artists and writers, have an additional burden with this technology because they can know that no one takes comfort in their vision,” he said. “There goes the Great American Novel.”
We’re starting another research study this week. We’re interviewing 8 users in their homes, for 90 minutes each, to understand how people define their online life. It’s purposely broad as we’re trying to learn more about how people discover and organize websites from both online and offline sources. It wouldn’t be a successful interview without some artifacts to help us collect this data, so we came up with a two fun activities – the timeline and “me in the middle”. At the beginning we’ll start with a simple timeline and have the participants walk us through their yesterday – what they did, where they where and we’ll prompt for what tools and devices they used – but that is just a way to get all the raw data on paper quickly. What we are really after is their stories.
By Steve Portigal at 5:22 pm, Friday April 13 2012
Robots Ate My Job [Marketplace] – “Robot” is a bit of a red herring…the series is really an investigation of automation, when we interact with other devices instead of a human. Not sure there are too many surprises here but it’s still great to have this topic receive some focused attention.
Special Correspondent David Brancaccio takes us on a week-long series on air, online and on social media, called “Robos Ate My Job” to explore how technology is impacting the future of jobs in America. Find out who’s winning and who’s losing at the hands of the robots.
The Strange Art of Picking a TV Title [The Hollywood Reporter] – I’d be interested in knowing if the TV people design for nicknaming. Battlestar Galactica comes BSG among the cognoscenti. Does that little hook let people take ownership as the narrative pulls them in? Around my house we call “The Simpsons” by its shorter form “Simpsons.”
Would Friends have been the same hit had NBC executives approved its original title, Six of One? Would Lost have lasted six seasons with its earlier name, Nowhere? And would Grey’s Anatomy be able to charm nearly 12 million weekly viewers had it remained Surgeons? These are the questions now haunting studio and network executives as they look to attach the perfect title — catchy, but not cheesy; clever, but not confusing; inclusive, but not vague; provocative, but not inappropriate — to their crop of pilots in contention for the fall schedule. Producers and executives agree that getting a title right is more important than ever given the increasingly crowded and fragmented television landscape, where standing out is as important as telegraphing what a show is about. And while a great title can’t carry a poor show, it can get an audience to show up, which is why networks and studios have been known to rely heavily on focus groups and the occasional consulting firm.
Some names come out of the blue. While seeking inspiration for his new London venture in 1926, an Italian restaurateur called Pepino Leoni saw a poster for the 1925 film “Quo Vadis”. The restaurant that bears its name can still be found in Soho. In 2002, about to open a place specialising in French food, the British chef Henry Harris was forced into creative thinking by his signmaker. “He said if we didn’t come up with a name right then, we wouldn’t have a sign in time. So I put together a long list of French words, including a few writers as fillers: Beaumarchais, Molière, Racine…Going through them, we went, ‘Crap, crap, crap’ until we reached Racine and someone said, ‘Racine, of course, French for root. Absolutely brilliant.’ So there it is. Both interpretations are true.” The restaurateur Will Smith explains the origin of Arbutus, in central London, thus: “We discovered there used to be an arbutus, or strawberry tree, around the corner in Soho Square. The name felt good and sounded great. It was a bit like naming a child. At first, people went, ‘Eh?’ but soon said ‘That’s interesting’ and accepted it. Also, arbutus fruit have a culinary application in Portugal, where it is made into a spirit.” So does Arbutus sell arbutus spirit? “No.”
The Personal Analytics of My Life [Stephen Wolfram Blog] – I was pretty surprised to see this was just about his email. Email is one lens into someone’s life, but it doesn’t provide much detail into what you are doing when you aren’t using email. I was hoping for something along the lines of the good ol’ Americans Use of Time Project that took a broader look. The title is definitely an overreach.
What is the future for personal analytics? There is so much that can be done. Some of it will focus on large-scale trends, some of it on identifying specific events or anomalies, and some of it on extracting “stories” from personal data.
And in time I’m looking forward to being able to ask Wolfram|Alpha all sorts of things about my life and times—and have it immediately generate reports about them. Not only being able to act as an adjunct to my personal memory, but also to be able to do automatic computational history—explaining how and why things happened—and then making projections and predictions. As personal analytics develops, it’s going to give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives. At first it all may seem quite nerdy (and certainly as I glance back at this blog post there’s a risk of that). But it won’t be long before it’s clear how incredibly useful it all is—and everyone will be doing it, and wondering how they could have ever gotten by before. And wishing they had started sooner, and hadn’t “lost” their earlier years.
By Tamara Christensen at 6:00 am, Wednesday April 11 2012
We are delighted to announce the debut last week of our new series, Curating Consumption on Johnny Holland. The idea was born right here on All This ChittahChattah as an occasional curated collection of musings, seen through the bifocal lens of consumer/researcher. Not to worry if you missed it, we have it right here!
When is a door not a door? When the sign on it clearly states “Do not Touch, Pull, or Use This Door. Thank You!” I came across this (not a) door during a recent fieldwork trip to New York City, where I found myself invariably studying every door I walked by because they all seemed to have great stories to tell. Sadly, this story is one of inability to fulfill one’s useful purpose. What is a door if it is not a portal to some other place; a threshold to cross? Now it is a wall, and a window. I wonder if it will be repaired or replaced or reframed as an aesthetic relic that will remain in its present location and state of dysfunction. /TC
This television was hanging out on the sidewalk in the Mission, right here in San Francisco. I am curious who labeled this anthropomorphized electronic with feelings of inadequacy. It could have been added by a passerby; a reflective commentary on the choice by the TV’s previous owner to upgrade and abandon. In fact, a man passing me as I shot this picture told me “I love rich people, man! They throw away the greatest stuff. I got a vacuum cleaner last week that works perfect.” Or maybe the words were put there by the person who left that unsatisfying TV on the street. A “Dear John” letter from consumer to consumed: It’s not me, it’s you. /TC
When visiting Dublin, I was prepared for (and delighted to experience) all Guinness, all the time. What I didn’t realize was the supporting infrastructure required to make that happen. They’ve got tanker trucks of the stuff rolling down the street to meet the demand. /SP
Just days after the Kony 2012 video went viral, hitting the national media, images of the dictator appeared as stencil art on the streets of Austin. From Facebook and YouTube, the story touched the activism (or some say slacktivism) nerve. But what meaning is implied or inferred when the medium changes? Stencil art is hip, ironic, anti-mainstream. The street art form has none of the outrage of the previous forms. Is the previously unknown Kony now accorded folk hero status? /SP
By Steve Portigal at 8:42 am, Tuesday April 10 2012
On April 17 I’ll be presenting a UIE webinar about Championing Contextual Research in Your Organization. Sign up here!
To the delight of UX designers everywhere, organizations today increasingly conduct user-centered research methods like surveys, focus groups, and usability testing.
But what can we learn beyond the office environment? Isn’t user observation among the most powerful UX design research techniques we can do?
Yes! So Steve Portigal will describe the techniques, processes, and discussion points you can use to make it happen in your organization. And once you find out how to quell cultural or budgetary resistance to fieldwork, then you can create more analytical designs that make users jump for joy.
You’ll gain user insight before you need it.
Identify opportunities to learn about users
Conduct specialized interviews beyond just “talking to people”
Advocate for the adoption of contextual research
You’ll become a change agent in your organization.
Understand how markets and processes relate to one another
Discuss benefits and drawbacks for both stakeholders and users
Maximize the organizational impact of any research you do
You’ll start to establish research agendas from the get-go.
Integrate synthesis and analysis in any approved project
Create research outputs that are relevant to your stakeholders
Engage the rest of the organization in contextual research
You’ll make your process and outputs more visible.
Tackle entrenched belief structures with hands-on techniques
Involve teams in identifying patterns and themes
Please sign up here. If you can’t make the scheduled time, you can also get a recording of the event.
By Steve Portigal at 12:17 pm, Monday April 09 2012
We were here last week, working hard on exactly the same things we were working hard on the week before, so while we could have simply done a copy-paste-post, we took a week off from This-Week-@ing. But it’s Monday again and we’re back, baby!
We’re editing (and more to the point – rendering) video, getting our decks in a row, all to wrap up an in-depth and exciting study. We’ll be following up this week’s presentation with a creative workshop as well
Party time! Excellent! I’ll be checking out the book launch party for Mike Monteiro’s Design Is a Job
I’m sitting on a pile of helpful, challenging, provocative, and encouraging notes from reviewers who are helping me with my book; it’s time to start editing and rewriting!
Conference proposals to go out, acceptance (or not) for other conference proposals to come back, article outline to be shopped around, article copy to be crafted
I tried to opt-out of unwanted marketing email from Hertz. The link in the email took me to this outrageous page.
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Go ahead. Try to parse the nested logic and dense legalese. To add insult to injury, I was unable to submit without the ugly red form error admonishment (“You have entered an incorrect option. Please correct and resubmit”) for the whole first set of options. I eventually had to submit it without any of those checked. Will I get more unwanted marketing email? I’ll have to check with my lawyer about that.
By Steve Portigal at 10:37 am, Friday March 30 2012
I recently spent a while in Austin attending SXSW. Part work, part vacation, it was all fun and all inspiration (see, I’m now posting in rhyme???!!!). Here’s some of my observations and experiences.
Austin’s independence and weirdness are fairly unique and always enjoyable.
While there was a national uproar over an ad agency hiring homeless folks to circulate as wireless hotspots, FedEx hired non-homeless folks (we talked to them and yes, despite the cool outfit, they are not regular FedEx employees) to circulate as human phone chargers. No one raised a peep over this. It’s okay to to turn people into device support as long as they have sufficient income such that we don’t feel awkward?
A typical bewildering promotional scene. I’m unsure specifically what was happening here. Pose with this Grinch (I guess?) and tweet the photo with a hashtag for chance to win something? Anne posed for the picture but we never bothered to determine exactly what it was about. This sort of exchange and promotion was very common.
This was the moment I realized how much my localized norms had shifted. Over the course of a few days, we ate and drank and snacked for free. Wwe got delicious ice cream sandwiches for free; all we had to do was tweet something. We got a free lunch from FedEx, although they asked that we check in Foursquare. Moments before taking this picture we followed the trail of Ben-and-Jerry’s-eating-folks to find out where the cart was, asking of course for some tweet action in exchange. By the time I came upon this popsicle stand. I looked up and down to figure out what I had to do, or if they were just going to give me a frozen treat without any action. We were a little chatty, reading their sign out loud, but no one was initiating a transaction, finally the woman asks us “Do you work for Twitter?” (I guess since we had mentioned tweeting). Finally, the penny drops. “Oh,” she explains, “right now these are $2.50.” It was just a regular frozen-good-for-money cart! No special SXSW promotion or anything! And she’s located herself right across from the Convention Center – ground zero for crazy promotions (the spot where Kobayashi ate 13 grilled cheeses in one minute was just feet away)! Well! I walked away grumbling at the nerve of this person to try and ask for money for their food product!
Making new friends.
What does this mean? Kony went from viral slacktivism to stencil-art in a matter of days. Is this anti-Kony? It seems to be iconifying him with Che-like kitsch. That was fast!
Attention-grabbing scumbaags put realistic paper “clamps” on parked cars. Haw haw! Fooled ya! You didn’t really get clamped, just wanted to tell you about our great service! Ummmm, no, no, no. That moment – be it one second or 90 seconds – of angst and despair upon seeing your car clamped is not okay. You should not do business by upsetting people and then telling them that it was just a joke. I realize that’s the premise for prank television, but this is simply not acceptable for marketers to be doing. You can make me feel good, but you must not make me feel bad.
I’m intrigued by the proliferation of these backdrops in publicly accessible places, so that we too can play at doing a red carpet appearance. The opening party had an actively-posed-with backdrop that was not intended to see any of its traditional star usage. These backdrops were also throughout the Convention Center. Certainly the appeal is understandable (we made good use of a similar opportunity last year in Florence); perhaps this starts to replace the stick-your-head-through-a-painting-of-a-character; now it’s red carpet for the rest of us.
These folks in the yellow skinsuits were promoting SceneTap but found themselves seduced by a street hustler more skilled than themselves, doing some kind of of three-card-Monty meets card trick. And those onlookers wearing “MYSPACE IS DEAD” shirts are actually promoting Myspace,
Fun with The Daisies, or the unexpected pleasure of following a titanic sound down a back street only to find ourselves feet away from a young, skinny, long-haired rock-n-roll band kicking out the jams.
By Tamara Christensen at 1:08 pm, Monday March 26 2012
We are traveling this week and finding time for…
Storytelling - We are headed to sunny San Diego this week to deliver the results of a recent project. Though the prototypes were super sci-fi, the results are pretty down to earth.
Storymaking - We have converged upon the key insights and narrative for another project and are now weaving that story into a presentation and video.
Ideating - We are talking with friends at two different organizations (one hyper local and one far-flung) about innovation collaborations.
Retreating - Taking time to huddle at a hip SF coffeehouse to review, revision and recommit to our 2012 goals.
By Tamara Christensen at 10:54 am, Thursday March 22 2012
One of my favorite tools to inspire radical new thinking is a technique I call forced connections. It is, fundamentally, a cognitive math problem: x + y = ? (assuming, of course, that x and y are seemingly unrelated things). This concept, also described as combinatorial creativity, is amazing because human brains are wired for it. The brain experiences cognitive dissonance when you try to hold two or more dissimilar things in your mind at the same time. It wants to resolve that tension so it creates resolution in the form of a new idea. Understanding how ideas work helps us design tools that facilitate idea generation. The articles and talk below explore ideational procreation through the lenses of neuroscience, quantum theory, psychology, and anthropology.
Musical Creativity and the Brain [The Dana Foundation] – This article explores some big theoretical and empirical questions about creativity, namely what it is and how we do it. My researcher heart jumped for joy with the introduction of an operational definition of creativity that comfortably applies across a range of artistic and business contexts: a fundamental activity of human information processing. The researchers discuss the brain functioning behind creative problem solving and the processes that make up creative behavior. Not surprisingly, it is a study in polarities: creativity is deliberate and spontaneous, cognitive and emotional, improvisation and composition, productive and consumptive. One of the authors, Charles Limb is a surgeon who also studies creativity and talks about your brain on improv.
During any creative act, from language production to marketing techniques selling the latest iPhone, ideas or past experiences are combined in novel and significant ways via the interaction of such cognitive capacities. The creative cognition approach is the current model dominating the neuroscientific study of creative thinking. According to this approach, creativity is far from a magical event of unexpected random inspiration. Instead, it is a mental occurrence that results from the application of ordinary cognitive processes.
How the Mind Creates Ideas [Psychology Today] – I often use forced connections when facilitating brainstorming as a deliberate idea-generating activity with specific stimuli (i.e. research insights). Quantum theory offers a more expansive approach to thinking about ideas as unmanifested sub-atomic particles that represent endless possibilities and countless possible combinations. The key to harnessing your quantum creative potential is to harvest as many ideas as you can: observe, record, interact, react.
We are taught to be exclusionary thinkers, which means we exclude anything that is not immediately related to our subject. Creative geniuses do not think this way. They know that the sky is a billion different shades of blue. When they brainstorm for ideas, their first objective is to observe and record all thoughts and ideas as possibilities. They observe without judgment. This is why all their thoughts and ideas come into existence as possibilities. Creative geniuses also think inclusively which means they include everything no matter how unrelated or absurd. This is a basic requirement of creative thinking. Creative thinking requires the generation of associations and connections between two or more dissimilar subjects.
Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex [TED] – The notion of ideas having sex is not, in fact, a new idea and the fruits of idea coupling have been applied and studied in a variety of areas. Ridley brings to life this concept with a tour of human evolution that offers material culture as evidence of our inescapable need for cross-germination in the collective brain. If you are interested in such creative romancing you can also find some practical tools to set the metaphorical mood here.
What The Karate Kid Can Teach Us About Agile and UX [UIE] – While the selections above discuss the process of ideational procreation, this article illustrates the progeny of forced connections: Daniel-san + UX=Lessons in Agile Mastery. Gothelf suggests that ritual and repetition breed expertise in both the hard skills (i.e.rapid rendering) and soft skills (i.e. trust and transparency) necessary for collaborative cohesion. Mr. Miyagi would certainly approve of this evolution of “Wax on. Wax off.”
Daniel found this level of mastery in the final tournament where he anticipated his opponent’s moves and ultimately defeated him. An Agile team achieves this when they trust each other implicitly, react as a cohesive unit to change and manage that change as well as any conflict with little impact to productivity or quality of work.
*Nota bene: The forced connection as metaphoric literary trope is not necessarily novel. In fact, some might convincingly argue that it is overplayed for its linkbaiting ability to seduce readers with catchy headlines. Personally, I am a sucker for such headlines and I have yet to grow tired of this tactic because I liken it to creative calisthenics. Reading and writing such pieces forces the brain to contemplate a familiar topic through a new lens. It requires the brain to constantly make new connections and it nurtures our divergent thinking capabilities. If you are looking for such exercise, try some of these: What Jay-Z Can Teach Us About The Future Of Education,What Downton Abbey Can Teach Us About the Future of Energy, What Nature Can Teach Us About Design, and What Visual Designers Can Learn From Biggie Smalls.
By Tamara Christensen at 10:54 am, Monday March 12 2012
This week we continue to swim through an ocean of data from two concurrent projects.
Tamara and Julie are still poring over transcripts from New York and LA. We are looking forward to hosting our clients for another co-analysis session this week..
We are making sense of the transcripts and spreadsheets of data from our second project. Next up- outlining the key findings and drafting the presentation!
Steve is down in Austin for SXSW Interactive and a little vacation time. We look forward to getting the rundown when he returns.
What we’re consuming: Global Home, dim sum, homemade fortune cookies
By Steve Portigal at 4:48 pm, Wednesday March 07 2012
‘Brogrammers’ challenge coders’ nerdy image [SF Chronicle] – It’s a bit of a silly story that turns a catchphrase into a cultural trend, but of course there’s something happening to drive the growth of the catchphrase. Sad that flipping the nerd stereotype reveals a sexist one.
Tech’s latest boom has generated a new, more testosterone-fueled breed of coder. Sure, the job still requires enormous brainpower, yet today’s engineers are drawn from diverse backgrounds, and many eschew the laboratory intellectualism that prevailed when semiconductors ruled Silicon Valley. At some startups the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that it’s given rise to a new title: brogrammer. A portmanteau of the frat-house moniker “bro” and “programmer,” the term has become the subject of a Facebook group joined by more than 21,000 people; the name of a series of hacker get-togethers in Austin, Texas; the punch line for online ads; and the topic of a humorous discussion on question-and-answer site Quora titled “How does a programmer become a brogrammer?” (One pointer: Drink Red Bull, beer and “brotein” shakes.) “There’s a rising group of developers who are much more sociable and like to go out and have fun, and I think brogramming speaks to that audience,” said Gagan Biyani, co-founder and president of Udemy, a San Francisco startup that offers coding lessons on the Web.
Mr. Peanut has a stunt double. Sporting a goatee, aviator sunglasses and overconfidence, “Doug” performs death-defying feats that always end the same way: with him getting crushed and turned into peanut butter. Doug’s daredevil act is part of Kraft’s move into the crowded U.S. peanut butter market. In what may be the most overdue brand extension in history, Kraft is using the 100- year-old Planters brand to spark growth in its mature grocery business. Kraft is targeting adults, who consume two-thirds of the $1.8 billion of peanut butter sold in the U.S. each year, Kraft was looking for an adult mascot and settled on Doug, voiced in Web ads by Kevin Dillon in an homage to the hapless Johnny Drama character he played on HBO’s “Entourage” series. “Peanut butter was a natural extension,” Schmelter said. The new spread and Peanut Butter Doug, as he is formally known, are signs Kraft is getting more aggressive with the grocery business, said Alexia Howard, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York.
Internet Archive’s Repository Collects Thousands of Books [NYT] – Digital technology allows rapid content creation, and creates interesting archiving challenges. First all the digital data was worth preserving. Then digital was a method to archive the physical world. Now we’re going all-in and trying to archive the physical world itself. Seems like a setup for a Steven Wright joke (didn’t he describe his full-scale map of the US and the problems he had folding it?).
“We want to collect one copy of every book,” said Brewster Kahle, who has spent $3 million to buy and operate this repository situated just north of San Francisco. “You can never tell what is going to paint the portrait of a culture.” As society embraces all forms of digital entertainment, this latter-day Noah is looking the other way. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made his fortune selling a data-mining company to Amazon.com in 1999, Mr. Kahle founded and runs the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving Web pages — 150 billion so far — and making texts more widely available. But even though he started his archiving in the digital realm, he now wants to save physical texts, too. “We must keep the past even as we’re inventing a new future,” he said. “If the Library of Alexandria had made a copy of every book and sent it to India or China, we’d have the other works of Aristotle, the other plays of Euripides. One copy in one institution is not good enough.” Mr. Kahle had the idea for the physical archive while working on the Internet Archive, which has digitized two million books. With a deep dedication to traditional printing — one of his sons is named Caslon, after the 18th-century type designer — he abhorred the notion of throwing out a book once it had been scanned. The volume that yielded the digital copy was special. And perhaps essential. What if, for example, digitization improves and we need to copy the books again?
The first week is arguably the most creative in the life of a joke. For Mr. Kaplan it’s all about generating ideas. What could explain this jacket convention? Maybe, he speculated, jackets were once very cheap and, as he would later say onstage, “men wore seven coats out, hoping it wasn’t an eight-puddle day.” He also decided that the modern equivalent was leaving the toilet seat down. All these ideas were transformed into jokes as the bit expanded. Setups shrank. Punch lines multiplied. The jacket over the puddle soon became one of several examples of chivalry that began with his pantomiming opening a door after asking the audience: “Does it detract from chivalry if, when opening a car door for a lady, I say, ‘Chivaaalry!’” He dragged out the last word in the self-satisfied voice of a magician introducing his assistant. A coarse joke about chivalry during sex replaced the homeless-man line. By early January Mr. Kaplan’s rhythm became more assured and moseying, lingering on pauses, finding extra laughs between punch lines. His typical stage pose — leaning back, his free hand placed gently on his stomach as if he were pregnant — became looser, adding touches of showmanship. It didn’t matter where he performed (clubs, restaurants, even a hostel), chivalry always worked. The focus now was on getting the right laughs. It was important, he thought, to get a big one right at the start with his car-door opening, and in paring it down, he turned a question (“Does it detract from chivalry…”) into a statement. Later, he brought back the question. Laughter marginally improved.
Lucy Kimbell works as a designer, educator and researcher. She is head of social design at the Young Foundation in London and associate fellow at Said Business School, University of Oxford. As an undergraduate she studied engineering design and appropriate technology and made feminist performance/theatre. What she does these days does not look that different. Find her on twitter: @lixindex
Tell us about your work!
Lucy Kimbell: Over the past decade I have worked in a range of contexts, from academia to art to design. I have been able to move fairly fluidly between what might seem quite distinct fields, at a time when innovation and creativity are supposedly what’s needed to address global, community and organisational challenges but when artists, designers and others are not necessarily good at explaining how or why what they do might be relevant or productive, and the effects of their work are as varied as anything else.
In January I started a role as head of social design at the Young Foundation, a 60-person organisation working in the UK and internationally to trigger and support social innovation and venturing. Basically my role – which is new for the organisation – is to explore how practices within design and the arts can help support creating social (in the sense of civil society) ventures and projects. My brief is to build up the Young Foundation’s capability, rather than building a design team. There are lots of other examples of this shift both at government level (like Mindlab in Denmark or TACSI in Australia), and other activities initiated by consultancies and by universities and corporates. I’m hoping to be able to combine some of the ideas I’ve been exploring teaching design to MBAs at Oxford University for the past six years, research I’ve done in design thinking and designing for service in particular, and my own art/design making practice. The latter has dwindled although my Physical Bar Charts have been shown a few times in the past year including at TEDGlobal in Edinburgh and a show at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Right now I’m setting up a critical reflective conversation about all this stuff, with a series of talks and seminars co-organised with Guy Julier (University of Brighton/Victoria and Albert Museum) and the people at Policy Connect.
tOp: How do you define “technology?”
LK: I don’t think of technology as something that exists outside of people and what we do, who we are, and how we live and work. It’s not a thing, it’s not other, but rather is part of being human. We’re not human without the things we currently call technologies, whether these are Google, or management fads, or pencils. I think of the things often called technologies as stable arrangements or configurations that are a result of the ways humans and material/digital artefacts come together, at specific times and places. But they are not just results; they also shape how things are and how they could be. So our relationship with technologies are changing – who we are as human beings and the cultural practices within which we come to be those people change with this.
tOp: What do stories about technology reveal about our culture and our relationship with technology?
LK: This question makes me wonder who is telling these stories, who is engaging with them, and where they are circulating. The stories I see on TV in the form of adverts are more or less the same as they have been for several decades: This new device/network/thing will help you become a different, better person! more lovely! more effective! will make you become a more connected family! help drive sales! And so on. More or less the same but perhaps with higher levels of anxiety? Then there are the narratives that are often outside of corporate culture, of resistance, and alternatives, and questioning of assumptions. One of the interesting things about the Occupy movements in Western/Northern cities last year was resistance to advancing a totalising alternative – a narrative of what the right answer is. I suppose what I see is narratives about technology being mobilised for quite distinct purposes and there are probably examples of everything.
tOp: What are the factors that influence how (or what) technology is being developed?
LK: Every now and then I hear about a bubble-world I am not familiar with which is focussed on technology for example in healthcare innovation. And as an outsider I am struck by how existing practices in a particular sector constitute differently what the technology question is – what they hope a thing they call technology might be able to do for that sector. These vested interests and ways of thinking about what “technology” can do, whether they are professional or corporate or in the realm of public policy, have a big role in shaping what technology research programmes take shape.
tOp: How do you think technology is changing everyday lives for mainstream consumers?
LK: I wouldn’t say that technology is changing their lives, but rather that new configurations or arrangements of people and things come into being and stabilise and so what is possible, or expected, or what is at any point in time the regular way of doing things, changes. And material and digital techniques, tools and artefacts are part of this but so are the way people use them, adapt to them, break them or improvise in relation to them. So I would say that what it is to consume or rather be constituted as a consumer in relation to possible practices of consuming changes. My consuming as an affluent London resident living within a straight family involved in a global elite of educators and design innovators is different to other consuming I was involved in when I was younger, single, not a parent, less affluent and so on. Technological artefacts are part of that but are not the (only/main) drivers.
tOp: Your working definitions for “technology” and “consumption” seem close to each other. How do they relate?
LK: To be a consumer in an affluent society now involves lots of what in ordinary language we call technology. To be a teacher or student, to be a parent, to be someone who works in a supermarket, to be a bus driver, to be to be a person who goes out in the evening, to be a person who has a garden in a city, to be a person operating in the art world, all of these involve technologically-mediated practices.
tOp: What kind of impacts is technology having on your own life?
LK: My partner and I are finishing a major house refurbishment where we live in London. We sourced many of the buliding materials as well as furniture and fittings via eBay and Freecyle. Not just shelving and beds but also windows, doors, flooring, insulation, radiators, toilets, showers, ovens, tiles and so on. Rather than saying technology had an impact on how we did the refurb, I would say we developed some new ways of living and building, as we increased our skills and knowledge about how to source, price, bid for, exchange, pick up, transport, store, make use of and dispose of all the stuff that is involved in constructing a house. Digital networked technologies have made this possible through giving us access to platforms where people want to give away or sell their unwanted items, and allowing us to search for and research what we need, and get things transported if they are far away, and get input from the architect when we needed it. The carbon and materials costs are not very visible in these transactions but they should be.
Compared to other projects of this size, we may not have saved money (we saved on buying materials but then the contractors had to do lots of non-standard activities to fit or use them) or time (it’s taken two years). But there’s a satisfaction in knowing that the ash floor was picked up from the street where someone had thrown it out, and the gas hob, insulation, sliding windows, toilets and many other things would most likely be in landfill. We’ve paid for them not to be there, through our labour and through paying for adapting our building process to what’s available and when it’s available – a middle-class luxury, in one sense, but also a kind of living out of our values. So the technologies we used made all this possible in ways that we (and probably their designers and manufacturers) would not have foreseen.
tOp: As a society, do you think we are losing or gaining anything with these changes?
LK: I have the hope that the practices and devices that come into view through these changes support wider access to resources, enable participation in decision-making of people who have been excluded or marginalised, increase transparency and accountability, and reduce the effects of climate change. But I don’t think the technologies/practices that we now have that we are learning to live and work with do not necessarily do any of these things per se, even if their designers or funders or champions want it to be so. You can see the influence of the ethnomethodologists and ANT researchers on me here – it all depends on the local, the specific, the what is – I’m avoiding making generalisations, sorry. What remains an always open and public question is the what could be. Art and design practices have very powerful ways to constitute and involve people in collective imaginaries and in particular disrupt the current ones by doing what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls expanding what is visible and sayable in the distribution of the sensible (le partage du sensible).
tOp: Is your own work meant to provoke those imaginings? Who do you regard as influential in expanding the visible and sayable?
LK: I asked someone else a version of this question recently and after a long pause, the answer was…hmmm… Bourdieu, Wittgenstein… To be a bit more 2012 I have a whole long list of makers and writers and researchers and educators who provoke me to imagine (although I also like Bourdieu). Within design, this includes the people in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons in NY, Ezio Manzini in Milano, Thomas Binder in Copenhagen, Pelle Ehn in Malmo, Jon Kolko at Austin Center for Design, Nathan Shedroff at CCA, small consultancies like the fashionable young men at Berg London, or the people constituting new digital publics at Futuregov. Within the arts, practitioners like Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie of Somewhere, Heath Bunting or Natalie Jeremijenko. Within the social sciences people like Noortje Marres and Nina Wakeford at Goldsmiths and Cat Macaulay at Dundee. The people behind the Kenyan comic cultural enterprise Shujaaz. Some people I met yesterday who run a hostel for homeless people in Soho. The three Roca brothers who run El Cellar de Can Roca in Gerona, Cataluyna. The producers and writers and actors of TV shows like True Blood and The Wire. The people of the city of Homs in Syria. I seem in recent years to be located (to locate myself) in a way which asks me to be quite careful about how I do any disrupting which is the price of my institutional reconfiguring. It’s too early to say what that’s doing to my imaginaries.
By Steve Portigal at 5:32 pm, Monday March 05 2012
This week is all about data, and making sense of it
We’re poring over transcripts from New York and LA. We’ve killed a lot of trees with our printouts; everyone is heads down reading through interviews and making notes. Our clients are coming over for a no-doubt lively session of storytelling, analysis, debate, sticky-note madness, and pattern matching.
We’ve put a stake in the ground over last week’s multi-method mayhem; sharing a topline summary with those clients (now safely back at home overseas) and staging the next round of transcripts and analysis.
I’m off to Austin later this week for SXSW Interactive and then hanging around for some vacation time at the film festival, with some live music, tacos, and BBQ thrown in for good measure.
When is a door not a door? When the sign on it clearly states “Do not Touch, Pull, or Use This Door. Thank You!” I came across this (not a) door during a recent fieldwork trip to New York City, where I found myself invariably studying every door I walked by because they all seemed to have great stories to tell. Sadly, this story is one of inability to fulfill one’s useful purpose. What is a door if it is not a portal to some other place; a threshold to cross? Now it is a wall, and a window. I wonder if it will be repaired or replaced or reframed as an aesthetic relic that will remain in its present location and state of dysfunction. /TC
This television was hanging out on the sidewalk in the Mission, right here in San Francisco. I am curious who labeled this anthropomorphized electronic with feelings of inadequacy. It could have been added by a passerby; a reflective commentary on the choice by the TV’s previous owner to upgrade and abandon. In fact, a man passing me as I shot this picture told me “I love rich people, man! They throw away the greatest stuff. I got a vacuum cleaner last week that works perfect.” Or maybe the words were put there by the person who left that unsatisfying TV on the street. A “Dear John” letter from consumer to consumed: It’s not me, it’s you. /TC
When visiting Dublin, I was prepared for (and delighted to experience) all Guinness, all the time. What I didn’t realize was the supporting infrastructure required to make that happen. They’ve got tanker trucks of the stuff rolling down the street to meet the demand. /SP
Just days after the Kony 2012 video went viral, hitting the national media, images of the dictator appeared as stencil art on the streets of Austin. From Facebook and YouTube, the story touched the activism (or some say slacktivism) nerve. But what meaning is implied or inferred when the medium changes? Stencil art is hip, ironic, anti-mainstream. The street art form has none of the outrage of the previous forms. Is the previously unknown Kony now accorded folk hero status? /SP
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