Tricia Wang of UCSD’s Department of Sociology and Barry Brown of the Mobile Life VINN Excellence Center Stockholm presented the paper “Ethnography of the telephone: Changing uses of communication technology in village life” at MobileHCI 2011.

Abstract

While mobile HCI has encompassed a range of devices and systems, telephone calls on cellphones remain the most prevalent contemporary form of mobile technology use. In this paper we document ethnographic work studying a remote Mexican village’s use of cellphones alongside conventional phones, shared phones and the Internet. While few homes in the village we studied have running water, many children have iPods and the Internet cafe in the closest town is heavily used to access YouTube, Wikipedia, and MSN messenger. Alongside cost, the Internet fits into the communication patterns and daily routines in a way that cellphones do not. We document the variety of communication strategies that balance cost, availability and complexity. Instead of finding that new technologies replace old, we find that different technologies co-exist, with fixed telephones co-existing with instant message, cellphones and shared community phones. The paper concludes by discussing how we can study mobile technology and design for settings defined by cost and infrastructure availability.

Download paper (alternate link)

(via MobileActive)

During the Pop!Tech conference, well known design researcher Jan Chipchase gave a talk about his research work. In the panel session an audience member asked two questions relating to personal motivations of doing this kind of research and whether anyone has the moral right to extract knowledge from a community for corporate gain:

- What is it like working for BigCorps pillaging the intellect of people around the world for commercial gain?
- How do you sleep at night as the corporations you work for pump their worthless products into the world?

Read his answer

Jan Chipchase thinks that 80 to 90% of current recruiting for design research/ethnographic studies (excluding focus groups) that is currently placed through recruiting agencies could from a skill and work-flow perspective, be carried out in-house through a clever use of social networks.

“For researchers this means learning new skills: maintaining an online identity that is a suitable interface for potential recruits; knowing how to gauge reach through which social networking sites, running and iterating an ad-campaign; effectively screening and knowing how to turn leads into participants. Whilst it is relatively early days the effectiveness of the platform and the low barriers to entry will mean that the change will be rapid. You are the agents of this change.”

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In its new focus on products for girls, Lego is using quite a lot of ethnographic research:

“To develop Lego Friends, Knudstorp relaunched the same extensive field research—more cultural anthropology than focus groups—that the company conducted in 2005 and 2006 to restore its brand. It recruited top product designers and sales strategists from within the company, had them join forces with outside consultants, and dispatched them in small teams to shadow girls and interview their families over a period of months in Germany, Korea, the U.K., and the U.S.” [...]

Lego won’t say how much it spent on its anthropology, but research went on for months and shattered many of the assumptions that had led the company astray. You could say a worn-out sneaker saved Lego. “We asked an 11-year-old German boy, ‘what is your favorite possession?’ And he pointed to his shoes. But it wasn’t the brand of shoe that made them special,” says Holm, who heads up the Lego Concept Lab, its internal skunkworks. “When we asked him why these were so important to him, he showed us how they were worn on the side and bottom, and explained that his friends could tell from how they were worn down that he had mastered a certain style of riding, even a specific trick.”

The skate maneuvers had taken hours and hours to perfect, defying the consensus that modern kids don’t have the attention span to stick with painstaking challenges, especially during playtime. To compete with the plug-and-play quality of computer games, Lego had been dumbing down its building sets, aiming for faster “builds” and instant gratification. From the German skateboarder onward, Lego saw it had drawn the wrong lessons from computer games. Instead of focusing on their immediacy, the company now noticed how kids responded to the scoring, ranking, and levels of play—opportunities to demonstrate mastery. So while it didn’t take a genius or months of research to realize it might be a good idea to bring back the police station or fire engine that are at the heart of Lego’s most popular product line (Lego City), the “anthros” informed how the hook-and-ladder or motorcycle cop should be designed, packaged, and rolled out.”

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Reboot, a service design firm working in the fields of governance and international development, recently spent time with three marginalized groups in China — the rural poor, ethnic minorities, and migrant workers — to research the impacts of three decades of disruptive change, and to design new services to improve their livelihoods.

Their task was to make sure that the coming mobile banking revolution — unlike too many other revolutions — is inclusive and accessible for everyone, and especially the disenfranchised populations who could stand to benefit the most.

As they work through their findings, they’ve found three key principles that will help make sure this happens:
1. Design for Trust
2. Design for Stability
3. Design for All

Read article

Using open source tools Homesense brings the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home.

“The Homesense project was an open research project around the topic of bottom-up smart homes initiated by Tinker London. In mid-2009, founder Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino wrote a blog post highlighting what the opportunities were for a large-scale open source interrogation of the “smart home” concept. Often explored in closed R&D environments, it was possible to think of the results being more relevant and accurate if the participants could build their own solutions to their problems rather than operating under the assumption that most people would accept top-down design. An existing relationship with EDF R&D via Arduino workshops led to a sponsorship from EDF R&D for 50% of the projectʼs value (£58K or so at the time). Partners in the project also included two PhD students from the HighWire group at Lancaster University, Natasha Carolan and Richard Wood who helped design the packaging for the tools available to users in this experiment. The project was eventually wrapped in mid-2011 and technical tools featured at the New York Museum of Modern Artʼs exhibition on smart objects: Talk to Me.”

After almost 2 years, here is finally the final report outlining all the work & findings.

View/download report

She and her colleagues were tasked to assess the market and value the opportunity space for Village Telco, a social enterprise start up whose mission is to enable affordable access to voice and data communications in challenging environments.

“Since their intended target audience was to be cyber cafes (internet cafes) and this industry is very much a grassroots mom-and-pop corner store and part of the informal economy, little information was available that was easily accessible.

We took inspiration for our qualitative approach and methodology from the field of human centered design, specifically design planning (now also known as innovation planning), as taught by Larry Keeley of the Doblin Group at the Institute of Design, IIT Chicago. Our outcomes from the field were intended to inform Village Telco’s market entry strategy, including pricing and business model recommendations for their Mesh Potato device.

We were also permitted to share our insights openly on the blog, a factor that was much appreciated given that the focus of the study allowed us a wide ranging glimpse of how the internet, the mobile phone and communications technology was being adopted across significantly different parts of the country, allowing us a worm’s eye view of how innovation diffuses across socio-economic and cultural boundaries, in real time.”

Read all Niti’s posts on her Kenya project

Dianna talked with her about social research, myths, design research and several other interesting subjects.

DM: What new skills and knowledge should interaction designers who’ve been focused on screen-based projects be developing now to design for smart objects and environments?

GB: I think there is a lot to be gained for reading the work in material culture from neo-Marxism through the Manchester School and the various American reinterpretations of cultural studies. There is much to be gained from the theoretical perspectives that have been rehearsed in that body of work. I think we need to continue to privilege thinking holistically. Even if you are not designing for the whole system or the whole environment, I suspect you need to understand it. For me, that means we also need to attend to ideas of power, both social and political, as it has much to do with these news spaces we find ourselves exploring.”

Dianna Miller is professor and program coordinator for the Service Design BFA/MFA program at Savannah College of Art & Design. She has twenty years experience as an interaction designer, user researcher, project manager, and content strategist. In 2003, she completed studies at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

Read interview

“The preponderance of research and publications on user studies deal more with principals and practices of the discipline and less with understanding the users themselves, much less in a deep, multi-disciplinary scientific way.

The future of design will belong to those who are able to untangle what people do and why, even those who can predict and understand – using a scientific basis – what people are likely to respond to and why and how, as opposed to simply making gut decisions.”

Read article

Ginsberg was a Clinton/Kerry campaign manager and a researcher at Penn Schoen. Salvador was the first ethnographer to join Intel.

The combination of demographics with social, neurological and market research gives Intel insights into product design as well as customer targeting.

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It was part of the MCHA project (Minimum Configuration – Home Automation) that focused on IT solutions that help to optimise and reduce energy consumption in homes.

“This guide is a presentation of the results of a qualitative user study of patterns in user needs, motivations and barriers in relation to energy consumption and willingness to change consumption behaviour. The objective is to develop an energy control unit for the home which will help users to understand and control their energy consumption and ultimately encourage them to change consumption habits.

The guide contains a presentation of the MchA project, a project funded by the Danish Enterprise and Construction Agency, and the user involvement methods applied during the project. A result of the user study is for example the definition of four ‘user profiles’ and 11 relevant themes that are interrelated. In this guide we have decided to refer to these themes as ‘user voices’ because they express the different motivations, needs and barries that are at play in a more or less conscious inner dialogue in the users before he or she takes action. These motivations and barriers open a window of opportunity for an energy control unit. At the back of each user voice card, you will find details and recommendations for an energy control unit.

The recommendations are not exhaustive, and the intention is that different readers should contribute additional opportunities, depending on the context in which the cards are used.

The guide can be read from one end to the other. It can also be used as an easy-to-read tool that provides an insight into relevant themes in the users’ consumption behaviours. The guide is meant as an inspiration on how to respond to several user voices and user profiles at the same time and thus reflect on how these different and often conflicting user voices influence consumption behaviours in the home.”

Download guide

What is the soul of the new machine?

This isn’t a design or product question. It’s a philosophical question. What is this thing? What is it supposed to do? How will it do it? How do we get there? [...]

This question sparked deep user studies at Google on mobile phone use, what Matias described as “Serious baseline ethnographic research which hadn’t happened before.” He tells me that the company spent a great deal of time and effort watching how and why regular people used their smartphones. Not just Android phones, but all smartphones. The company even had employees “shadow” users, visiting them at their homes and workplaces to watch how they interacted with their devices. Matias wouldn’t share numbers, but intimated that the study was a significant undertaking.

“A lot of what we found confirmed what I thought for years. At Danger, we had this idea that smartphones were not for a certain kind of person. They were for everyone. Smartphones were the way phones were supposed to be.”

“What we heard from everyone we talked to in the study was that they love these things [smartphones], they are a part of their lives. They’re incredibly passionate about them. They can’t live without them. That was awesome. But we also heard a lot of things we didn’t like to hear.”

“With Android, people were not responding emotionally, they weren’t forming emotional relationships with the product. They needed it, but they didn’t necessarily love it.”

Matias says that the studies showed that users felt empowered by their devices, but often found Android phones overly complex. That they needed to invest more time in learning the phones, more time in becoming an expert. The phones also made users feel more aware of their limitations — they knew there was more they could do with the device, but couldn’t figure out how to unlock that power.

Read interview

(summary article)

“Researchers found that when we expect to be able to access information in the future, we tend to have reduced memory for the actual information, but enhanced memory for where to find the information.

Thus, while we do measurably worse at remembering that the capital of Vermont is Montpellier, we apparently remember with greater accuracy, where on the bookshelf the atlas is located.

These findings suggest that making sites memorable as the repository of information may be the key to gaining return visitors.”

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“Market researchers may argue that with proper segmentation, you can understand every niche within the long tail. This may be true, but to truly understand the diversity between people, your task is not simply to “summarize” the audience, but to delve deeply into the dynamics of what makes them different.

This is why design research is a better fit for today’s long-tail economic model. Context matters. Design research is all about understanding the context because it is rooted in qualitative methodologies, and ethnography in particular. Designers solve contextual problems.”

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“Dori Tunstall is a Design Anthropologist, meaning she tries to understand how the processes and artifacts of design help define what it mean to be human. Design Anthropology argues that by taking into account how others see and experience the world differently, products and services can be designed that work with people and nature rather than disrupt them.

Dori is an Associate Professor of Design Anthropology at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia as well as Associate Dean of Learning and Teaching in the Faculty of Design.”

Listen to audio

“People often say they love a product. What do they really mean when they say this, and is this a phenomenon that is relevant to the field of design? Findings from a preliminary study in this thesis indicated that people describe their love as a rewarding, long-term, and dynamic experience that arises from a meaningful relationship built with products they own and use. Inspired by existing approaches to the experience of love from social psychology, research tools are developed for the closer study of person-product love. Using those tools the research in this thesis investigates how person-product interactions are linked to the experience of love and how these influence love over time. The findings reveal how the experience of love arises from person-product relationships, how love relationships develop over time, and which factors can provoke change in the love experience and love relationships over time. These findings present opportunities for design researchers and designers to foster rewarding experiences and long-lasting person-product relationships. Person-product love relationships can bring emotional rewards that benefit people’s wellbeing and stimulate sustained efforts to keep loved products for longer.”

Download thesis

(via InfoDesign)

“Ultimately, my team’s role is about making sure the product development processes start from an understanding of what people care about when it comes to technology.

And that as an organisation, we are literally testing our silicon against that ideal at each and every step of the way.”

Read article

This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around ‘digital revolutions’ in a post MENA (Middle East – North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.

The conversations, research inquiries, reflections, discussions, interviews, and art practices are consolidated in this four part book which deviates from the mainstream imagination of the young people involved in processes of change. The alternative positions, defined by geo-politics, gender, sexuality, class, education, language, etc. find articulations from people who have been engaged in the practice and discourse of technology mediated change. Each part concentrates on one particular theme that helps bring coherence to a wide spectrum of style and content.

Book 1: To Be: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?
The first part, To Be, looks at the questions of digital native identities. Are digital natives the same everywhere? What does it mean to call a certain population ‘Digital Natives”? Can we also look at people who are on the fringes – Digital Outcasts, for example? Is it possible to imagine technology-change relationships not only through questions of access and usage but also through personal investments and transformations? The contributions help chart the history, explain the contemporary and give ideas about what the future of technology mediated identities is going to be.

Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?
In the second section, To Think, the contributors engage with new frameworks of understanding the processes, logistics, politics and mechanics of digital natives and causes. Giving fresh perspectives which draw from digital aesthetics, digital natives’ everyday practices, and their own research into the design and mechanics of technology mediated change, the contributors help us re-think the concepts, processes and structures that we have taken for granted. They also nuance the ways in which new frameworks to think about youth, technology and change can be evolved and how they provide new ways of sustaining digital natives and their causes.

Book 3: To Act: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?
To Act is the third part that concentrates on stories from the ground. While it is important to conceptually engage with digital natives, it is also, necessary to connect it with the real life practices that are reshaping the world. Case-studies, reflections and experiences of people engaged in processes of change, provide a rich empirical data set which is further analysed to look at what it means to be a digital native in emerging information and technology contexts.

Book 4: To Connect: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?
The last section, To Connect, recognises the fact that digital natives do not operate in vacuum. It might be valuable to maintain the distinction between digital natives and immigrants, but this distinction does not mean that there are no relationships between them as actors of change. The section focuses on the digital native ecosystem to look at the complex assemblage of relationships that support and are amplified by these new processes of technologised change.

(via Luca De Biase)

They contain drafts of papers and workshop abstracts, and photos and abstracts from Pecha Kuchas and Artifacts.

Print proceedings will be mailed to conference participants and will be available through Anthrosource from October 21.

Download draft proceedings (pdf, 385 pages)

The Helsinki Design Lab (an entity within Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund) has created a Design Ethnography Field Guide which is a booklet that participants of the HDL Studios use when venturing into the field to see the reality of a system as it is lived and experienced on the ground. It is intended to be the minimal starting point for this kind of activity. They supplement this document with group discussions to prepare participants and adjust the booklet as needed in different situations.

The download page also contains some other resources that may be a useful starting point.

And obviously more resources can be found on this very blog.