Most companies would like their products and services to be something consumers have a relationship with; more than just a consumable good. Emotional relationships between people and things are one of the holy grails of product development.

Yet, in our research, we hear over and over from people that they simply don’t think this way about many of the products in their lives (particularly electronic goods).

Cars, however, are different. Cars get discussed fondly, wistfully, and passionately. They get named. They have histories.

As testament to cars’ tremendous resonance, look at the popularity of the Fast and Furious movies. And of the new Transformers film, which features vehicles as both heroes and villains, and which just bagged the highest weekday opening gross in movie history–despite being described (before the opening) by many in the media as a bad movie.

A number of factors about cars–perhaps the way they contribute to our personal histories, the level of complexity that lends them “personality,” the patina they acquire over time–transform them for many of us from mere objects into relationship material.

Camaro t-shirt, official licensed GM product, bought for $7.50 at Crossroads Trading used clothes

But products that are more towards the consumable end of the spectrum can also evoke emotions and create a sense of relationship. I think about Topps Bazooka bubble gum from my childhood–one of the most literally consumable products–and how evocative it remains, many years after I’ve ceased being a “user.”

Topps Bazooka Gum, photo by Sarah Lillian on Flickr

What’s it like for you? What are the ingredients that differentiate between just using something, and having a richer type of experience?

Related posts:

Object Love, Object Lust…
Packaging Surprise
Rage With The Machine
Miata Farewell

Artpiece made of clocks, Chicago MOMA

This list of 10 workplace skills of the future is going around the various ‘Scapes and ‘Spheres (it came to me on Twitter via Chris23). Without getting into whether the list is entirely correct or comprehensive, I think it’s incredibly thought-provoking.

For anyone involved in designing products–especially work environments and tools–it will be crucial to explore people’s daily lives and see what’s really happening: how these types of shifts are manifesting behaviorally and emotionally, and what new opportunities are being created as a result.

10 Workplace Skills of the Future
(From Bob Johansen’s book, Leaders Make the Future. Originally posted by Tessa Finlev in The Future Now blog.)

Ping Quotient
Excellent responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement; strong propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network

Longbroading
Seeing a much bigger picture; thinking in terms of higher level systems, bigger networks, longer cycles

Open Authorship
Creating content for public modification; the ability to work with massively multiple contributors

Cooperation Radar
The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task or mission

Multi-Capitalism
Fluency in working and trading simultaneously with different hybrid capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, financial, virtual

Mobbability
The ability to do real-time work in very large groups; a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously; extreme-scale collaboration

Protovation
Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles; the ability to lower the costs and increase the speed of failure

Influency
Knowing how to be persuasive and tell compelling stories in multiple social media spaces (each space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique)

Signal/Noise Management
Filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from the massively-multiple streams of data and advice

Emergensight
The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity that come with coordination, cooperation and collaboration on extreme scales

Inspired by my interactions column Hold Your Horses, I was interviewed for a Lunar Design podcast.

How do speed, creativity and innovation intertwine in the design process? In this Connections episode, Gretchen Anderson and Lisa Leckie talk with Steve Portigal of Portigal Consulting about getting results through design research.

Listen to podcast:

(Updated to include audio, video, and interactions article)

Here are my User Research Friday slides, along with audio and video. For me, the discussion at the end (there was a bit of stunned first-talk-of-the-day silence during question period so I turned it around on the audience and asked them to comment on the Escher-esque slide about design->research->design->) was the most stimulating part.

Listen to audio:

I’ve turned this talk into a two-part column for interactions; the first part is here.

Last year I gave a talk at an IDSA event where I described the practice of personas as user-centered bullshit. In January I expanded that into Persona Non Grata, my first column for interactions magazine. More recently, I was interviewed about the topic by Forrester Research.

Vidya Drego at Forrester has now issued a report - How To Get The Most From Design Personas - although given her brief, much of our conversation around the limitations and risks of personas, as well as alternatives, does not appear prominently in this document.

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

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

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!”

Recently I was invited to ASU in Tempe, AZ, to participate in a Design Research Symposium called From Here To There, a reference (I think) to moving from questions to answers (or, perhaps, more questions).

I was pleased to be part of such a great lineup of speakers:

• Dennis Doordan, Editor, Design Issues
• Laura DeWitt, Research Director, laga Innovation Group
• Dan Formosa, Smart Design Worldwide
• Matthew Jordan, Director of Research and Interaction Design, Insight Product Development
• David Alan Kopec - “DAK”, Associate Professor of Design, Newschool of Architecture and Design
• Steve Portigal, Principal, Portigal Consulting
• Meg Portillo, Chair of the Department of Interior Design, University of Florida
• Altay Sendil, Design Researcher, IDEO
• Jason Severs, Principal Designer, frog design
• Susan Winchip, Professor of Interior and Environmental Design, Illinois State University
• Matt Zabel, Human Factors and Design Research Manager, Brooks Stevens

We heard from people in academia and people in consulting practices, and we learned about culture, education, methodology, a day-in-the-life of a professional design researcher, quantitative approaches, and a lot more.

I gave a plenary address that built on Practicing Noticing Stuff and Telling Stories. The bulk of the talk was different examples of cultural norms and/or design requirements revealed through observations and photographs. Some of those pictures have appeared on this All This ChittahChattah. In a great bit of small-worldness, one of the students in attendance was the very person who had explained (in a previous blog post here) just what was going on in one of my Hong Kong pictures.

Steve talks about poo

About

I also ran an in-depth workshop on interviewing techniques. In our training work, we’re often using this same material in professional settings where our clients have a little or a lot of experience in using interviewing and observation as a method for gathering insights so it made for a point of contrast to have the discussion with people who are in student mode and who have had very few applied experiences with design research. I’m appreciative of these opportunities to teach a range of people with different skills levels and backgrounds as I think it keeps the material sharp and our approach always fresh.

A smattering of other conference images:

Questions, answers, and dialog

The Incredible Jason Severs

DAK

It was a great event, a good group, well organized, and good interactions. There’s a rumor that the talks may be podcast eventually. I’ll update this post if that happens. Meanwhile, you can see more photos from the weekend here.

Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister gave a wonderful talk Wednesday night at Stanford, as part of the David H. Liu Memorial Lectures in Design series. He focused on Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far, a group of projects based on a list of personal maxims he took from his diary.

For me, the highlight of the talk came when someone in the audience asked about Sagmeister’s ideation methods. After mentioning “hotel rooms in foreign cities,” Stefan described an Edward DeBono lateral thinking approach which involves looking at a project from “a completely nonsensical point of view.” Then he picked up his water bottle and did an off-the-cuff ideation that created a perfect little gem of a moment.

I’ve paraphrased a bit, but this captures how he talked through his process:

“Say you were going to design a new water bottle. You could base it on a . . . zipper” (the choice was triggered by a zipper on the jacket of an audience member in the front row).

“Let’s see, it could interlock” (demonstrates by spreading and interlocking his fingers), “You could have 2 that go together . . . maybe a 4-liter bottle that comes into 4 parts. That wouldn’t be too bad.” (pause)

“Not bad. DeBono would be proud.“

From start to finish, this ideation took about 10 seconds, and it was just a great illustration of a creative thinking process.

This demonstration, coupled with a caution Stefan made about the dangers of starting ideation from existing solutions and opinions, got me thinking about the art of research.

Design research is often positioned as a kind of counterbalance to the type of creative act I’ve just described. But, when it’s well-practiced, research includes a juxtaposing and synthesizing of ideas that is similar in creative process to the bottle+zipper riff. Just as with other aspects of the design process, research culminates in possibilities for new ways that things can go together. For design researchers, the materials for this synthesis include a deep and focused exploration of people: behaviors, bodies, meaning, culture, complaints, wishes, lies and truths.

At the beginning of the night, Stefan talked about his fear of doing graphic design primarily for other graphic designers, comparing it to playing “music for other musicians.” He said at a later point, “If you can reach a mass audience with good quality, that’s the highest honor” (and listed the Arch of St. Louis, The Simpsons, and the Champs Elysees as examples).

The beauty of integrating a focused understanding of people into the whole design process—using it as one of the basic materials with which to design—is that what comes out the other end of the pipe will be imbued not only with the vision of its creators but with the soul of that wider audience as well.

There’s been a lot of interesting discussion recently around personas. Part of what’s really being talked about is how to tell an effective story. As in, one party has information they want to impart to another in a way that is impactful, memorable, makes a good working tool, and can be internalized and passed along to others.

Stefan Nadelman’s animated short, Food Fight, which I discovered over at Drawn, is a virtuosic example of telling a story through alternate means. Nadelman’s film presents a history of major armed conflicts since WWII, using food to represent the conflicting nations. It’s hilarious, touching and thought-provoking, and it made me want a Big Mac.

Food Fight relies on a set of shared reference points to tell its story, and I think it’s useful to keep in mind that the more we use proxies to convey information, the more we are relying on all of the communicating parties having the same set of reference points. That’s why it’s so important in a design process that any type of information vessel be treated not as a static artifact, but as a material that we can work with to clarify interpretations and surface assumptions.

Sketches for “Personal Greenhouse” ©2007 Dan Soltzberg

Debbie Millman and Mike Bainbridge have posted their article, Design Meets Research, over at Gain: AIGA Journal of Design & Business. The piece provides a quick overview of various tools in the research toolbox, calls out their particular strengths and drawbacks, and makes the point that picking the right tool for the job and using it well are paramount.

Here are a couple of quotes from the article and some of my thoughts in response:

There are a wide variety of research techniques that can have merit for designers. . . There is not, repeat not, one correct way to test design.

I see research very much as a generative tool as well as an evaluative one, and have started to question whether the concept of a border between research and design is really accurate or productive. At the front end of the design process, research is a way of surfacing opportunities and generating ideas. At later stages, it’s a way of refining and validating these ideas as they become concepts and prototypes. In this way, research is a design tool in the same way that drawing is a design tool, except that at the center of the mechanism is the customer/user.

When used correctly, research shouldn’t stifle creativity but rather offer designers stronger inspiration and focus.

By taking a facilitative, collaborative approach to working with companies and design teams, research and research findings can be integrated into the design process in ways that enhance rather than stifle creativity. Keeping the customer/user and their needs prominent throughout the design process needn’t be limiting–having clear goals and constraints ultimately makes a design problem more interesting and leads to better, more elegant solutions.

And better, more elegant solutions are, after all, the end game here.

Don’t forget, my upcoming Design Research Methods class is in 3 weeks. If you’re planning on signing up, you might want to do so sooner, rather than later, as registration is steadily filling up.

Hope to see you there!

Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows of the early Louis Cheskin work, a recent Stanford study established that the more wine costs, the more people enjoy it, regardless of how it tastes.

Expectations of quality trigger activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure. This happens even though the part of our brain that interprets taste is not affected. While many studies have looked at how marketing affects behavior, this is the first to show that it has a direct effect on the brain.
…
“We have known for a long time that people’s perceptions are affected by marketing, but now we know that the brain itself is modulated by price,” said Baba Shiv, an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

When we worked with a wine brand recently, we sought to understand the complete wine “usage” process, from planning, through shopping, to storage, to opening, to serving and drinking. We looked specifically at people who were interested in lower-priced wines and most of them were limited in their knowledge and/or experience.

In other categories when the customer is new and is presented with enormous product choice (the amount of wine choice dwarfs most other categories I can think of) we might feel sympathetic for the learning/selection/usage learning curve they would face; with wine people spoke very enthusiastically about the journey. Each trial experience involved drinking wine…something they liked to do! A social, tasty, and rewarding experience. Even a wine they “didn’t care for” (the typical critique) wasn’t a failure, because it still carried all the symbolic meaning.

The marketers were hampered by a limiting view of their customers; the market had been sliced into ridiculously narrow price points and this inevtiably drove discussions of people characterized exclusively within those $3 slots (as in, “I’m a $7.99 to $10.99 drinker”). While our client no doubt had cash register data to support their segmentation, it was completely at odds with how people saw themselves. They purchased across a much broader price range, and their primary concern was their own knowledge and accumulated experience. We were given a great opportunity to offer this different view and illustrate some of the unmet opportunities this presented.

Registration is now open for the full-day Design Research Methods class that I’ll be teaching. It’s a full-day event on Saturday March 1, 2008 in at Involution Studios in Sunnyvale, CA. Not local to the Bay Area? Well, why not hop on a plane for the weekend?

This course will provide first-hand knowledge and training in core design research methods. At its root, design research emphasizes learning about people and using the insights gained to inform and inspire design. We will focus on exemplary models of what research is, what it looks like, its role in concept generation, and what it produces.

From the official announcement:
The Involution Master Academy recently released its Winter 2008 semester for open registration. A post-secondary education program designed for mid-career professionals, Involution Master Academy focuses on direct, one-to-one interaction and training between the instructor and students. To ensure maximum interaction and an intimate educational setting, each course only accepts nine participants.

The Winter 2008 course schedule features five courses taught by well-known user experience thought leaders:

Product Architecture Symposium
Instructor Andrei Herasimchuk
Saturday February 23, 2008
10:00 AM-6:00 PM

Design Research Methods
Instructor Steve Portigal
Saturday March 1, 2008
10:00 AM-6:00 PM

Applied Empathy: An Experience Design Framework
Instructor Dirk Knemeyer
Saturday March 8, 2008
10:00 AM-6:00 PM

Web Form Design Best Practices
Instructor Luke Wroblewski
Saturday March 15, 2008
10:00 AM-6:00 PM

Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience
Instructor Lou Rosenfeld
Tuesday March 18, 2008
10:00 AM-6:00 PM

Past courses have sold out. Given the small class sizes, you are
encouraged to register well in advance.