Hacking Life – the India Way is a presentation I made at Microsoft SCS 2012 in NYC in January.  Here’s an introduction by Stuart:

In this presentation Dina makes a nice case viewing “hacking” as a generative construct for thinking, and an organizing principle for life … hacking life and living … rather than it being just about hacking infrastructure to do different things. In other words think about how hacking empowers the user and betters their life, rather than the technical approach or the work around. And this presentation is not about the much-touted concept of Jugaad!

And a video recording of the presentation that I did later, as the slides were just a support for my talk:

Am quite excited that we’ve finally launched this project!  In short, it is a year long research and immersion program with 12-21 year olds in India.  We’re really looking for 5-6 sponsors  - to help kick it off the ground – personally I believe that one of the key benefits (apart from the actual understanding and immersions with kids and youth) is that Clients from different non-competing industries will go on this journey together and learn from each others rich and varied experiences too.

More details and the brochure available for download here – bit.ly/convokids

Crossposting from the Convo Blog

For the right job, in the right situation there’s nothing more powerful than getting the client to come to grips with a persona they don’t know or understand well. We know that personas can help organizations have the conversations they need to have. Over the last few years working with technology products in particular we’ve seen this first hand. The engineers who are designing products and services sometimes don’t know or  understand how people really live, what conditions they live in, what work they do, what stress and painpoints exist in their lives. We believe Personas help in creating effective value propositions for a representative user group by understanding them in depth.

What’s a Persona: a description of a representative user.  Personas tell us who the user is, what they wish to do with your products or service, why they buy and use – what their motivations and drivers are, how your product/service fits into the context of their lives.

Examples of Personas we have co-created with our participants and clients in the last year. Categories we studied ranged from tech products, mobile phones, wikipedia, naturals based personal care product ranges.  You will notice that some of the personas are “kaccha” (unfinished) and deliberately so.  And in some cases, we’ve brught in a designer to help us create an impactful visual representation of the persona.

Crossposting from the Convo Blog

Blographies add to the conversation! We’ve been using the term “Blography” to help explain how we capture information for clients on longer ethnographic research projects in a real-time immersive and agile way. As all our team members are using blog it was only natural to consider where they fit in a research program today. For the client (reader) it’s a great and transparent way to see how our field work is progressing. A typical project today combines direct inputs from participants; typically forms (mobile or PC enabled) which result in blog posts and updates to the common database. This creates a number of benefits.

Discussions with the client can become real-time. This is particularly important when doing more longitudinal studies. Our client blog-space remains completely private. Which means we can have an ongoing conversation around everything from transcripts, interview summaries, emerging themes, planning and scheduling, to diary updates, questions of the week for participants etc.

There’s a second aspect. Blographies can save money and get greater depth. We find we are using them more and more to screen participants, target further areas for inquiry. We are also using them to set up and get to know participants before running co-creation workshops with them.

It also means – at the end of the job you also get a repository of information that is accessible, searchable, and readily sorted into new categories or tagged to be looked at in different ways. If required we can even turn it into a “book” for you.

And finally, after months of derailment, and a ton of good longitudinal projects, we’re live!  A little history here

Just discovered Tricia Wang’s really super blog, Cultural Bytes, thanks to Experientia‘s blogpost on Ethnography’s contribution to values in technology design and use. She’s blogging her way through her research on the socio-cultural contexts of technology usage in low-income communities and migrant communities in Mexico and China. Lots to learn!!

A couple of months ago former Nokia ethnographer Tricia Wang gave a talk at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, CA, and she just posted the slideshow and the abstract on her blog.

“My talk today is about how I came into my research at Nokia wanting to answer the question: how can ethnographers contribute to the product design process of a mobile device? Ethnographically grounded research for technology use is a method that aims to reveal users’ values, beliefs, and ideas. Nokia was one of the first mobile companies to concertedly hire ethnographers as part of its design process, In the mid to late nineties, Nokia changed the mobile industry forever by creating affordable, user friendly phones. More than a decade later, the hardware mobile phone market is nearing saturation. With Nokia transitioning from a company that produces hardware to software, how can ethnographically driven research provide strategic insights for this shift?”

Here’s her slideshow:

Discovered this eBook on Ideo’s Method Cards at the Healthcare Innovation by Design Blog.

From the Ideo website:

IDEO Method Cards is a collection of 51 cards representing diverse ways that design teams can understand the people they are designing for. They are used to make a number of different methods accessible to all members of a design team, to explain how and when the methods are best used, and to demonstrate how they have been applied to real design projects.

IDEO’s human factors specialists conceived the deck as a design research tool for its staff and clients, to be used by researchers, designers, and engineers to evaluate and select the empathic research methods that best inform specific design initiatives. The tool can be used in various ways—sorted, browsed, searched, spread out, pinned up—as both information and inspiration to human-centered design teams and individuals at various stages to support planning and execution of design programs.

Inspired by playing cards, the cards are classified as four suits—Ask, Watch, Learn, Try—that define the types of activities involved in using each method”

I was asked this question at the Anthrodesign group, in the context of a conversation around getting into the swing of a project and developing some working momentum . I shared there, how I often find myself turning to my blog and twitter communities for helping me with my thinking on qualitative and ethnographic research projects. I was then asked these questions: Could you elaborate a bit more on how you tap into your twitter community? with the limited character set, do you drive them to answer in more detail on your blog? How effective have you found twitter in generating meaningful conversations and resources?

Sharing my response here with a few modifications – there are many many ways I use Twitter, apart from keeping in touch with people, the world, and sharing warm fuzzy feelings or rants. I’ll try and describe some of these:

• If I’m looking for advice (from a community I trust) on say which phone to buy next, or where to find macbook chargers, or how to solve a particular problem I find I can really rely on my twitter community.  During the Mumbai 26/11 terror attacks Twitter was what kept many of us feeling ‘safe’ (in the way of experiencing it together) and connected to the outside world, as we were stuck in our homes. We also used it to try and reach out to people who were affected – eg. sourced and published lists of victims from hospitals (and directed people to those lists via links on twitter). I’ve often also used Twitter to help mobilize action around immediate causes like someone needing blood of a certain group in a specific hospital. But these are all very specific short term needs being addressed by quick responses.

• I often use Twitter (and my blog – they’re linked BTW) to have meaningful conversations, tease out some areas, ask for help on resources, opinions, suss out experts, or participants for studies. Obviously, with no mention of the actual client or specific subject of research. A recent example – a client is looking to understand Durability as a driver for purchase in her category, and I  broadened the issue and asked a question on Twitter  - the thought to actually blog this series started off with this tweet – and responses to it - looking for evidence that ‘durability’ as a brand proposition isn’t a big purchase driver for youth today. egs, links anecdotes welcome!”.  Sometimes its linked back to my blog, or to something someone else has published and I’m always amazed at both the depth and width in the sharing of perspectives that it evokes.

• And I use it increasingly to share links around what I’m reading or find interesting. The way I do it, is bookmark the link on Delicious and I’ve automated it to show both at my blog, and on Twitter. Often, these are starting points for meaningful conversations among several tweeters who share similar interests. And as importantly, if not more, I get to see all their marvelous links too!

• Or to live-tweet an event I’m at, as I did with TEDIndia last year and then just aggregated my tweets at my blog, and TedXMumbai more recently. The interesting thing about such tweets is you actually have people responding back in real-time, you feel your community is ‘present’ too, and often their questions and comments are shared back at the conferences. These could be conferences around my areas of work too.

• To amplify interesting thoughts, ideas, requirements, needs of others I follow on twitter thru RTs.

• Every post I make on my blog, every bookmark I link to at Delicious – is tweeted. As a result, it helps me broadcast my thoughts, and encourages people to come in and add to the conversation. It really doesn’t bother me where they do this – as today it’s possible to weave much of this into a lifestream of sorts. (I know this might be annoying to those who follow my blog, my twitter profile, and facebook as there can be much repetition – I need to find a way to sort this one out!)

So to answer the question more directly … I find I’m using Twitter increasingly both as a quick-byte sort of space – in and out, and as a gateway or pipe through which information and conversations flow!

Would love to hear your views – How do you use twitter or your blog in generating meaningful conversations and resources around what you do?

Is a good series from Portigal Consulting on an exploratory study using an ethnographic approach to explore the evolution of books and reading habits, and is intended to inspire conversations and innovations around the future of reading, an issue that’s quite a meme these days in the digital space! The series takes us on a journey through the research process that leads to the generation of insights for innovation and product design.

Apart from the findings which are interesting, and worth a separate dialogue in themselves, I find that sharing the process of research, as Steve and his team have done, really demonstrates the use of different methods and techniques you can use in qualitative research and ethnography during the different stages of a project. You might have heard these terms being thrown around, and wondered what they mean – the team, with this series of blog posts, situates them in a real project, gives them meaning and brings them alive. Ethnography, secondary research, recruitment and screening of participants, contextual inquiry and show-and-tell methods of interviewing, visual and video diaries, kits and materials for participatory design, interview guides, props that help inspire imagination around future designs and that get participants to create artifacts themselves, analysis and reporting formats, are just some.

I think researchers and ethnographers worldwide use many of these tools and techniques but we rarely get the opportunity to share them with other researchers, as most are Client specific and are bound by confidentiality issues.

Thank you Steve and your team for sharing these so openly – we can all benefit! It’s also a great collection and a primer for those interested in understanding the process of research for participatory design and future directions across product categories.

“A month ago, we announced the launch of Reading Ahead, our self-funded exploratory study on the evolution of reading and books.  We’re excited to report that we’ve finished synthesizing our field data, and have published our findings. You’ll find the narrated presentation on our blog, along with numerous posts detailing our process throughout the project. It’s been great to work on a project we can discuss so openly, and we hope to hear from folks and continue the dialogue around this work.”

Check it out the full series: Reading Ahead

And slides which form the final output:

For a few days over the next two weeks, I’m going to be a “scribe” where I will visit with people who’s lives are being transformed through mobile innovations. This will be in rural Maharashtra and Kolhapur, and the two projects we are covering in India are Nokia Life Tools and Nokia Tej.  This is part of  Progress, a Nokia initiative with Lonely Planet that is focused on capturing the human impact of mobile innovation; bringing to life real stories of people.

As a scribe, I will be reporting on ordinary people progressing through mobile innovation from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, taking parallel content – text photos, podcast and video.

Why I accepted this project is because it’s a great opportunity to be exposed to mobile innovations on-the-ground. One of my pet research themes for the last few years has been to study how technology is making or can make a real difference in the way we live, work and play. Also how it might bring real changes in people’s lives. It also ties well into my experiences and skills of being a researcher, and I’m hoping to view these projects through an ethnographer’s lens.

I, like Stuart who is covering other programs in San Francisco and Manaus Brazil, was asked by Andy Abramson [@andyabramson] and Danielle Ross of Comunicano to participate in an evolution of the Nokia blogger relations program.  Stuart has a good post on what this means for blogger relations and how might a company engage with bloggers in such programs.

Full disclosure – I’m not getting paid to do this, but my travel and accommodation costs will be borne by Nokia.

UPDATE:

Here’s the full series:

1. Mobile Innovations – Introduction
2. Nokia Life Tools – Agriculture Service – “The Internet for the next million” – mobile innovations in rural India
3. Nokia Life Tools – Education Service – “Raju go get bakery” – mobile innovations in rural India
4. The old, the not-so-old, and many facets of the new
5. “My laptop, my MBA” -  Commercial Mobile Innovation for SME’s

• Anthropology and Activism in Pakistan with lullabies – A great example of Anthropology being used in Activism:”A few days ago, Pakistani anthropologist Samar Minallah lauched a “video song”, a tribute to little girls in all the regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan where schools are being destroyed, depriving girls of their right to education, The News reports.

  The song ‘Allaho: A Lullaby for You, My Daughter’ (both in Dari and Pashto) is one of the first lullabies that have been dedicated to girls according to the news report. Traditionally lullabies are made for sons alone. The new song is “a welcome break from the traditional practice” …… ”

  …..”Samar Minallah is a Pukhtun (Pashtun / Pashto) from the North-West Frontier Province who has done her MPhil in Anthropology and Development at the University of Cambridge. She heads Ethnomedia, an organisation in Islamabad that works in the field of media and communications for a social change.” (tags: anthropology pakistan humanrights activism video ethnomedia)

• Infinite SMS ends the text messaging rip-off. Sort of » VentureBeat – SMS is dirt cheap in India – we probably don’t need such solutions ”More and more people are picking up on the fact that SMS text messaging is a scam — VentureBeat writer MG Siegler complained about the text message rip-off in the iPhone 3G pricing plan last June, and even The New York Times has looked at accusations of carrier price-fixing. There have been some applications offering workarounds on the iPhone — such as SMS for Free, which lets you send, and only send, a text message from your email account — but they’re not very satisfying. Now a developer called Innerfence has released the Infinite SMS app, and it offers a reasonable if imperfect solution.” (tags: sms mobilephones venturebeat texting)
• Why Your Community-Building and Social Media Efforts Aren’t Working… – The Viral Garden. Some good observations at this post at the Viral Garden:
  “Many companies want to use social media as a channel to push marketing messages at customers, while those customers are using social media as tools to connect with and communicate with others. They have almost zero interest in receiving marketing messages via social media, so predictably, companies that try to do just that, see their efforts falter.Along these same lines, Aaron recently had a post asking if you would join a toothpaste community. This is another area where many companies fail. They want to ‘create’ a community because they want to use that community as a way to generate revenue for their business.

  Problem: Communities do not come together around the idea of being monetized.

  People do not come together and form a community around a particular product, at least not in most cases. They come together because of a ‘bigger’ idea. They have a common association or feeling that’s related to that product.” (tags: socialmedia blogs media socialnetworking community branding strategy viralgarden)

• Sathya’s Tumbles: From the mouth of babes … smiling as I read this …. “ My 8-year-old sister proudly declared that she knows that “WTF” means “Wow, That’s Funny” and has been using it all over the internet. ”
  (tags: life internet language)

• Andy Budd::Blogography: Are Social Media Consultants Harming Social Media? There’s a fair amount of cynicism (realism?) creeping into the social media scene today.

“Now I’m fairly pragmatic and realise that this descent into marketing is probably inevitable and if consultants weren’t doing it for them, companies would end up doing it themselves. However I think there is something a little seedy about people who purportedly love social media, yet end up helping companies pollute it with marketing drivel.

It reminds me of a guy I met while travelling many years ago. He was an ethnographic researcher employed by a big oil company to asses the impact oil pipelines would have on the indigenous population. He loved tribal culture so much he desperately wanted to work in the field, even if that meant being partly responsible for the destruction of the very thing he loved.”

• (tags: socialmedia andybudd blogography)

Dr. Aviva Rosenstein – “Fake Ethnography vs Real Ethnography” at URF08 from bolt peters on Vimeo.

In a review of the User Research Friday Talks, Celeste Roschuni provides a recap of Dr. Rosenstein‘s talk:

….. and finished with the idea that it’s more important to be doing good research than to be doing “real ethnography.” Aviva laid out a few criteria for “good research” (which should sound fairly familiar to anyone involved in research):

1. avoid biases (or at least try to identify yours as clearly as possible)
2. be reflexive, truthful
3. be ethical
4. collect data, check assumptions, triangulate, record observations
5. don’t just report, look for patterns
6. deliver credible and valuable insights
7. generate new ideas
8. be creative and resourceful

I like the reference to bricoleurs and Bricolage. Many years ago I had posted some links around qualitative researchers as bricoleurs - here’s a quote from the Admap article [link is broken now] that still resonates, and is reinforced by the talk by Dr. Rosenstein:

This means a new ‘proposition’ for qualitative market research – a shift from:

* ‘we use contact with consumers to generate material from which to extract insightful and useful meaning’
to:
* ‘we use qualitative methods of detection and analysis to extract insightful and useful meaning from all sorts of ‘texts’ relevant to consumer culture’

Here’s a very neat mashup of GoogleEarth and Twitter for ethnography (it’s in French). @thiteu sent me the link on Twitter.

This work is a simulation of a 3 dimensional Geography using GOOGLE EARTH and of a social signal using TWITTER in ethnography nowadays.

Cool? Yeah. Imagine Second Life sort of re-enactments of the whole world based on Twitter graffiti. Is seems like an extrapolation of what services like Brightkite and Qik are offering. Interesting possibilities to build into ethnographic research. They should be watching this space!

Gabriel Biller & Kristy Scovel from IIT Institute of Design, Chicago have a neat video called Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer. It’s long – about 30 minutes but great for anyone who wants a good primer on conducting ethnographic research and interviewing.

Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy on Vimeo.

The video project sets out to help people discover and understand the “real story” of ethnographic interviews, helping students learn about why we interview, what it looks like, how to make the interview effective, what looks good, what looks bad and all the other stuff you would normally find out through trial and error, only hopefully now there will be less error.

The project has led Kristy and Gabe to talk to experts on the subject of ethnographic interviews including Dori Tunstall, a design anthropologist at UIC, and Colleen Murray, an ID Alum who works at Jump Associates. Their interviews serve as the narration to examples of different situations such as in-home, man on the street, shop-alongs, and expert interviews. Besides the experts, other students were asked to contribute stories of good and bad user interviews they have been involved with as well as tips and tricks they’ve learned.

[discovered here]