I’ve tweeted it and facebooked it … but this is still my space, my main lifestream and my first love … and although I haven’t been blogging much, I thought I’d  share my talk on the Future of Insights which I made at the India Social Summit 2012.

Here’s the deck on Slideshare – in fully downloadable format, along with the talk script:

And here’s is a video of my rather rushed presentation at the India Social Summit 2012.

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.

Abundance  - i’d certainly add that as a key principle . I’ve been spending time at Slideshare checking out presentations on principles, processes, personas, ideation, creativity, scenarios and story in Design Thinking for new product development (NPD as researchers often call it, and covers the areas of User Experience, User Design, ). By no means a complete list, but  I thought I’d share some gems I found here – thank you all, for your generosity in sharing your presentations!

And Phillippe Starck rocks the stage with his deep and inspiring thoughts on Design at TED 2007!

I was chatting with a friend today who’s not a Twitter user, and trying to explain why I like it, and why so many people do too. I found myself turning to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and his Theory of Human Motivations to try and explain this. I discovered this blog post titled The Hierarchy of Tweets at the Innovation Diaries, with this clever diagram based on Maslow’s model. The author makes an interesting connection between what motivates people and how these needs are expressed in 140 characters:

Click to Enlarge

I also discovered this neat little blog post by students of new media at the University of Amsterdam, where the question discussed is whether Twitter is in fact a tool that nourishes our social needs or is it in fact, increasing our needs to keep track of our friends every minute of the day? Here’s a clip:

Humans are social beings with social needs. We need each other to grow as well. Rom Harré describes in his book ‘Social Being’ that we exist as persons for ourselves and other people. We exist solely by the virtue of networks of relations in which we stand to other human beings of our kind. We are partially created by other people and our actions and interactions are jointed actions [3]. Twitter in this case would be a platform on which network of relations are enhanced. Networks are created and the followers you have and you follow are people you have shared interest with; they are ‘humans beings of our kind.’ Aristotle on the other hand speaks of how achieving the good life. We all have social needs and to have a good, successful and happy life we need to socialize with others. And because humans are by nature social beings it is good to live in a society in which the social life is mostly based on a community. Social life in a community is a necessity for a human’s complete flourishing as a human being. Another aspect that Aristotle addresses is friendship. This mutual admiration between two human beings is a necessity. This moral admiration for one and another is essential in friendships and taking advantage of these friendships can make a person fully human. [4]. The Maslow’s hierarchy of needs also addresses this fact. After physical and safety needs we all have our social needs. According to Maslow these social needs involve emotionally based relationships such as friendship and intimacy.

And how can one forget this piece – Understanding the Psychology of Twitter – at Moses Ma’s The Tao of Innovation Blog, written in March 2009.

All this research took me back to 2007, when I had talked about Social Media Strategies – Let’s Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I had then said:

Click to Enlarge - Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Web 2.0 companies have shown the way – their products are in perpetual beta, their architecture and marketing is decentralized, they encourage communities of users to self-organize around them. Recently, in an email to Rob, I wrote …. I think one of the most difficult things for people to do is give up control and relinquish ‘power’ to the many unless they see tangible ‘cost-per-click’ sort of gains. It’s the single largest barrier to accepting and adopting a process that is different to one we have been so conditioned to. Sadly, what few realise the act of giving up that power itself can be so empowering for them – why is WordPress gaining popularity – why is Flickr so popular – why are del.icio.us and Skype and so many others gaining traction today? They weren’t built in a day and pushed onto us as a final product or service – they are being built by and around the community that breathes them. The folks behind them had the guts and vision to say – let’s see how our customers ‘play’ – how they self-organize into networks (developers for instance) – embrace the criticisms with the accolades – and build around what they build. Chaos ….. and creativity. So powerful.

and

I’m not one of those academics who is framework-crazy or model-crazy, still it is good to pause sometimes, and reflect on their relevance and application, especially those that deepen our understanding of basic human motivations , which directly affect how we work, play and even ‘consume’. Triggered by the link I discovered today, I’m amazed at how relevant some of these models are, in our understanding and appreciation of the work we are doing in the social media strategy space. So much of our own social media usage that goes to form what Ton refers to as our distributed self, is driven by these needs – del.icio.us, furl, facebook, blogging, flickr, youtube, twitter, plazes, skype, last.fm – the list is never-ending! As I think about each, I see each one fulfilling a different need, and yet coming together to form a lifestream that is driven by the ‘gestalt’, often sub-conscious, of my own needs.

Moreover, the ability for brands and organisations to be in beta, and to listen and engage in Social Media – those that can take that leap, will be fulfilling some of the higher-order needs in the classic pyramid model, and in Jennifer’s circle, forming and providing ecosytems to their customers that enable the fulfillment of these needs. Ultimately, good marketing and PR is always one that delivers on meeting customer needs.

Something marketers, consultants, techies and geeks, and PR folks who are working in the area of Blogger Relations, Social Media and Web 2.0 should well keep in mind when they design their projects, processes, products or services and strategies!

Actually, my super lazy blogpost post TEDIndia. It was an absolutely fantastic experience and the best part was meeting such a great group of people. I feel incredibly fortunate, and humbled to have been a TEDIndia Fellow.

I’ll be blogging more thoughts and pictures in the next few days, but for now, here’s a compilation of my Tweets (for me, my notes and apologies for typos & grammatical errors) as I was live-tweeting some of the sessions.  Read them, bottom-up!

DAY 3:

well done #tedindia blog and social media team! “TEDTalks will be available starting mid-november” http://is.gd/4PIaR
oddly enuff, many of the BIG names were in the latter group – disappointing. #tedfellows pre-conference truly gr8. will blog later #tedindia
talks i loved – those that came thru w raw honesty. disappointed when projects pitched w’out extracting big pic & some ‘same old’ #tedindia
overall thoughts on #tedindia – transformational for some, inspiring to others. for me utterly humbling & I made many super new friends
feels strange being back after #tedindia and having to shift modes so rapidly. working on a research presentation & off to delhi for monday
oieee TED is almost over … a bunch of us are leaving on the 1 pm bus for bangalore. so pack-up time real soon #tedindia
india is a nationalism of an idea that has emerged long ago – consensus in diversity is how we move into 21st C #tedindia @shashitharoor
Tharoor – the story also rests on political will – secular india & how we’ve embraced religions of the world. a (ra-ra moment) #tedindia
the country that tells the better story wins! (i so agree – and our stories are also in our pop culture). #tedindia @shashitharoor
afghanistan – most popular TV serial – Kyonki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi – eg. of soft power. lots of popculture egs. @shashitharoor #tedindia
.@shashitharoor tells stories interestingly. empowerment of the poor is the real achievement of communications #tedindia
thanks for all the shout-outs for my tweeting from #tedindia
the cell phone 15 mn/month story – what did we have to do to get there.!! talks of growing up w’out one. #tedindia @shashitharoor
soft power emerges partly because of govt but partly despite it #tedindia @shashitharoor sez
talking of india’s potential in the 21st century – the Future Beckons – soft power #tedindia
lakshmi also sez @shashitharoor singlehandedly made twitter popular in india. ???. #tedindia
Lakshmi apologizes to tweeters following @shashitharoor for late start #tedindia
A. Balasubramanium – artist, sculptor, painter, printmaker on stage – work here – http://is.gd/4PmVM & http://is.gd/4PmZL #tedindia
lol sivamani doesn’t spare a suitcase – he’s making it sing! wonder if brand managers r watching – sponsorship opps galore :):) #tedindia
he’s using everyday items – pans, empty 10 litre water bottle etc. sheer genius – Sivamani #tedindia
sivamani is awesome! hope all u tweeters r watching the livestream. @shashitharoor will be on later. http://ted.indiatimes.com/ #tedindia
the irony is that so many years of denying being a girl has led us here!! eve ensler #tedindia
being a girl is so powerful that we’ve had to train everyone not to be a girl. Eve Ensler #TEDIndia
Eve Ensler – playwright and activist – best known for The Vagina Monologues is on!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Ensler #tedindia
Matthew Spacie – talking of rugby being an institutionalized safety valve. And Play as a way to learn. Sport teaches u abt life! #TEDIndia
Matthew Spacie – a #TEDFellow – Magic Bus – http://www.magicbusindia.org/
Riverside school url http://www.schoolriverside.com/.
if the city gives to the children, in the future, children will give back to the city #tedindia
in Ahmedabad – how did the city respond to the school? every other month – biggest street closes down & infected by kids playing #tedindia
kid said – teacher told me “i can do it” – but parents said what abt grades?? kids actually did v v well in math eng and science! #tedindia
Kiran Sethi – aware (see the change), enable (being changed), empower (leading change) = “i can” – infect children with this bug #tedindia
Kiran Bir Sethi Riverside School. Contagious is a good word – laughter, passion, inspiration – infected by “i can” bug! #tedindia
Aravind Eye Care – Fastcompany article here – http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/43/drv.html #tedindia
disappointed w session – where’s the new way of learning in all this? eg. ask questions faster, stories, dialogue, real-time etc?. #tedindia
“eye care with the efficiency of macdonalds” – deliver eye care like a burger??? heh! Aravind Eye Clinic – #TEDIndia
CK Prahalad is talking of mobile revolution now!. Didn’t say too much we haven’t seen. Wish he had focussed on stories of change #tedindia
Interview w CK Prahalad on how bottom of the pyramid strategies are paying off. mobile phones as an eg. #tedindia . Link -http://is.gd/4PjBV
CK – 4. multilevel dialogue. 5. Knowledge creation. all thru access to connectivity, information, analytics, dialogue, assessment #tedindia
CK – how to democratize learning? a. eliminate info asymmetries, b. give access to analytics, c. make access affordable & avail, #tedindia
CK – for the first time in history, everyone has access (cell phones eg.) leads to democratized learning. #tedindia
CK – instead of having an institutions view of citizens have a citizens view of institutions – facilitated by tech and internet. #tedindia
CK – how do we change – break down hierarchical power structure becos pple hc access to information and can challenge each other #tedindia
CK – why do gr8 companies lose leadership – becoz cant excape the past or create the future. mistake momentum for leadership #tedindia
multiple discontinuities challenge mental models – learning is abt selectively forgetting the past & refuelling for the future. #tedindia
CK Prahalad – discontinuities egs. eg. suddenly deal w 5 bn pple on less than 2 USD a day OR 400 mn connected by mobile phones #tedindia
CK Prahalad – success has its own learning disabilities built into it . Discontinuities disrupt the process! #TEDIndia
social determinants to learning impt. learning must lead to change. information –>inference (educ + socialization –> Action #TEDIndia
CK Prahalad on!!! #tedindia I want to separate teaching fm learning. learning does not take place in isolation – we’re part of a social grp
Sashwati – “if we can’t reach them, we can’t teach them” – mobile & wireless tech will bridge the gap. with engaging content. #tedindia
looking forward to C.K. Prahalad’s talk. Galli Galli Sim Sim – Shashwati Banerjee of Sesame Street Workshop on now. #TEDIndia #TEDFellows
wow #TEDFellows get a Nokia E71 and a 1500 USD cash card among other things! pays for my new macbook :):) #tedindia

DAY 2

Hehe. The bollywood party continues in the bus back. #tedindia rocks. http://twitpic.com/oi3wi
song at #TEDindia Grand Party at Lalit Palace Mysore. Bollywood Nite. Jai Ho! http://twitpic.com/ohvo2
Abhay Deol – thinking woman’s eye candy (paraphrased by Shandana). He’s cute. And seems a lil nervous #tedindia
E3it. Engage entertain educate immerse transform. It’s his mantra. Cost him 250 USD. He’s a dude!!! Rocking #tedindia
RT @tedindia: TED’s June Cohen invites you to join the TED Open Translation Project http://bit.ly/2yFqSF #TEDIndia
E3it. Engage entertain educate immerse transform. It’s his mantra. Cost him 250 USD. He’s a dude!!! Rocking @tedindia
Digital Hampi. Travel to hampi. Ramachandra Budihai takes us there on his augmented reality headset! #tedindia
familiar sight at #tedindia queing up for the vest seats in the house http://twitpic.com/ogrr6
Loved Kavita Ramdas. On feminism – there’s no need to lose yr femininity or yr traditions. SHE (woman) rocks & can be on top. #tedindia
Experienced a real TEDmoment in the last session. Magical. Collective. Worth being here even if just for that. Thanks #tedfellows #tedindia
What can civil society do? Accept and embrace victims of human trafficking in our daily lives. And tell 2 friends. #tedindia
Touched by Sunitha Krishnan of Prajwala. rebuild faith in victims of human trafficking. 1 person changes life of 3200 people. #tedindia
Rapid transformation impt for rapid diffusion. Esp w mess we r in. Often best solutions cone in v lil time. Agility. Banerjee #tedindia
RT @infosys: Banny Banerjee: reframing insights -> concepts – > prototypes – > new paradigms in design that r solutions to probs. #TEDIndia
The simulcast lounge is cool. V v comfy. Here’s a pic. #tedindia #tedfellows http://twitpic.com/og7l7
For me best part of the last session was Bribe Buster idea. Wish the others had moved to the ideas space more than showcase work. #tedindia
Anil Gupta – scalability must not become the enemy of sustainability. Shows egs of innovations fm grassroots to global #tedindia #tedfellows
Anil Gupta knocks maslow’s hierarchy of needs out of the stadium! Don’t have to go thru levels fr self actualisation.
Anil Gupta -honeybee network. To learn fm & support grassroots innovation. Minds on the margin are not marginal minds.
@shaffimather totally loved the bribe busters thought. Let us know how civil society can help. #tedindia #tedfellows
RT @pkgulati: Shafi at @tedindia – we are insane people and an insane person does not know what’s an impossible task !! #tedindia
New idea. How to fight the demand for a bribe!! Call in the Bribe Busters Dial …… Nice :) Shaffi Mather. #tedindia #tedfellows
Shaffi Mather. Ambulance service. Dial 1298. Similar to 911. Furst on scene on 26/11. Was at Jugaad workshop Y’day. #tedindia #tedfellows
Dr Asher Hassan. Main Bhi Pakistani Hoon. (I too am Pakistan). Sharing stories of normal people thru photos. #tedindia #tedfellows
RT @bcampbelljr: Idea from TEDIndia – write your obituary. If you don’t like the way it reads, change your life – now. #tedindia
Quite inspirational!! Q- one key idea to spread ? Shukla Bose A- educate the teachers!!! #tedindia #tedfellows
Content of education is education. Not necessarily things like toilets. Take one child at a time and unleash her potential. #tedindia
98% of fathers r alcoholic. An ex-maid was of 28 kids selected for Duke’s scholarship. These kids r using facebook!
Showed videos of kids of roadside flower seller talking of hardy boys and ducatis. Kids teach their parents. ICSE curriculum. #tedindia
Dream is to prepare kids to live peacefully in this conflict-ridden global world. English medium. #tedindia #tedfellows
What?? Her research found one out of four teachers in slum schools donot go to school all yr!! Educating poor > a numbers game #tedindia
Shukla bose- 3 schools for poor kids. 26 yrs in corporate world. Quit. 2003 started Parikrama fm kitchen table.
Q fm @tedchris.how do u get yr insights working in villages on ground?? A- test it first & refine. Iterative process.
Need to combine psychology marketing art and the scientific method. On the verge of a new social science – Sendhil
Intentions don’t always translate into actions. Last mile problem shd be talked of as last mile opportunity. #tedindia #tedfellows
Sharing puzzles w us. We hv intuitive ways of dealing w the world. For Last mile problems our mental models may not always work. #tedindia
Sendhil mullainathan on stage. How people make choices and decisions. #tedindia #tedfellows http://twitpic.com/ofray
At the TED x Fellows breakfast. Spreading ideas. #tedindia #tedfellows http://twitpic.com/ofndt
(ed) RT @rmack & @AndreMartin: “A trip into d secret, online ‘cloud’”: where & how yr files r stored online -plain English http://ow.ly/zuwf
Does anyone in the simulcast lounge at #tedindia have an iPhone charger?? It’s a real trek to my room!!He got 3 sets of standing ovations. @tedchris says he’s one of the most outstanding innovators he has ever seen. #TEDindia #tedfellows
Integrating computing with everday objects. How powerful is that!!! Pranav mistry is sheer genius. Wow. #TEDindia #tedfellows
Wow!!!! Took paper. Removed mic from camera. Clipped cam to paper. now plays games using paper as the computer. With info too. #TEDindia
Explored 3D pen and stickynotes. Then reversed this thinking Why not paint real life with digital info??? And WOW!!!! #TEDindia #tedfellows
Pranav Mistry – SixthSense we use objects and gestures as part of everyday life.wHy not mimic in tech?? #tedfellows #tedindia
Modified camera to record his acuity. Dylan is the system being used. Now testing Dylan for autism. Awesome!!! #tedindia #tedfellows
Motion or dynamic info processing the bedrock in recovery. Using Darius his baby as a baby cam!!! #tedindia #tedfellows
Really enjoying being here. Get a bit of “india shining” feel tho. 1st session was v entertaining. 2nd session a bit of same old. #tedindia
Pavan sinha fm MIT tells us that recovery is possible and has treated 200 kids despite extended congenital blindness. #tedindia #tedfellows
Project prakash. Neuroscience. Outreach +treatment + study. Showing kids from blind school on video. #tedindia #tedfellows
For all those who asked. Was in the main auditorium so no tweeting. Only allowed in simulcast lounge and last row. #tedindia #tedfellows
And another pic of the mainstage. #tedindia #tedfellows No video allowed at all. http://twitpic.com/obxvm
The TED stage. Event begins in 10. Nice sarees as a backdrop. Mobiles off soon. http://twitpic.com/obx04
Crazy rush for the best seats for the opening session of the main event. #tedindia #tedfelliws. http://twitpic.com/obvqe
Jugaad flourishes where government fails to provide solutions. Bottom up social arrangement. Scale makes it viable. #tedindia # tedfellow
What??? RT @vishalgondal RT @ppeach: Credit card companies know whether couples will divorce 6 months before they do. #TEDIndia
Calls chit funds stripped down capitalism! Regd industry 3-4k billion dollars. Unregistered 10 to 100 tines that amt. #tedindia #tedfellows
Modit on Chit funds in context of jugaad. Much like the kitty party concept. Lending/saving/ insurance device. #tedindia. #tedfellows
Reuben sez new term for ambulance = death taxi ! #tedindia #tedfellows
Charges approx. 2.5 times normal taxi rates Bigger barrier is cultural, located in association with dead body. Jugaad #tedindia #tedfellows
Context for his business idea. 90% usage of ambulance in india was for dead bodies. #tedindia #tedfellows jugaad panel
Shaffi fm 1298 dial for ambulance. Jugaad. Differential pricing paid &free. depends on type of hospital. Pvt or public #tedindia #tedfellows
For working poor. Rentals play a key role in pricing. Selling impressive homes fr USD 6k to 10 k. Jugaad #tedindia
Housing market in inda. 25 million units of unfulfilled demand. USD 150 billion opportunity in sales. Jugaad
Dhaval fm ashray housing. His company treats land as working capital rather than rely on appreciation. Jugaad.
David Kyle on jugaad panel sez jugaad is inherent in education sector in india. He’s a financer.
Jugaad is a work around the system sez Reuben. Affordability is at the heart of jugaad
Workshhop on jugaad with reuben abraham and others just starting.

DAY 1:

5 Mins into Microsoft surface demo here’s what we see. @amitvarma spilt coke on it. Hehe. #tedindia http://twitpic.com/o8ezk
Watching a demo of Microsoft Surface. 10000 usd. #tedindia #tedfellows http://twitpic.com/o8enq
over and out for now – party time !!!
announcements on now – party at brindavan gardens tonight – gr8 becoz infosys campus does not allow booze!!!!!!!
he’s a great speaker!! whatever brilliant ideas you hear – the opposite also may be true – essence
he should study indian addresses too!!!
final lecture of the day beginning – confounding systems of japanese streets = derek sivers
new opps for collab, multimedia integration, imaginative ways to tell their story – grade 4 using it too!!!
Rob Newberry – students using prezi. http://prezi.com/. So what does web2.0 in classroom mean for the future?
kids r thinking vieually – engaged and tech minded – when u ask for proof of learning – non-linear ways!
Rob Newberry – emerging tech are changing classrooms & students. give it to them, rather than teach, u see learning!
she’s holding a brain in her hand! talking of info processing. starts left goes right forward & backwards
strange twist – cowdung trade led to increasing cattle & degrading forests & elephants (which were in my coffee!!)
growth of trade in cowdung – YES cow dung – it is being sold as get far higher price than chemical fertilizers
Prof. Madhusudan Nature Conversation – nice first slide – “waiter, there’s an elephant in my coffee!”
Bacterial Consortium formed to solve these probs. Cultured at diff salinity levels. Nitrifying BioReactors
Prof Mohan Kandaswamy – traditional systems of aquaculture lots of waste & harmful ammonia – pollution – hi mortality.
eve blossom’s company is lulan artisans http://www.lulan.com/blog/ -
artisans vulnerable to trafficking – at risk. formed social venture to prevent human trafficking & generate eco opps.
talks of human trafficking as a marketplace – and she felt the call to do something after a horrifying experience
Prof Eve Blossom – moved to vietnam as an architect of buildings and left vietnam as an architect for change
Raqs – photo, installations, video – invite viewer to analyse a crime. subodh gupta – celebrates everyday artifacts
interesting set doing art and installations – loved the skeleton of a rickshaw by jitin kallat
Ravin Agarwal 10 indian artists- bharti kher, – bindis, balasubramanium, chitra ganesh – amar chitra katha,
.@thecomicproject tons of references to Jugaad this morning at the Fellows sessions!
the infosys campus is fantastic in a weird sense – architectural kitsch! not sure i love it tho – ot inviting me to explore more!
Ramachandran – Gandhi neurons – there is no independent self that is outside of others – bridging the science-humanities gap!
similarly – with touch – these neurons are based in empathy. but you don’t feel the touch. empathy but not experience
MIRROR neurons – transmitted eg. tool use, fire, shelter, language – this is the basis of culture and civilization.
neurons fire when person performs a specific action. a subset will also fire when u look at someone else performing that action
VS Ramachandran – representation of self and others on the human brain #tedindia @tedfellows . puts electrodes in nerve cells & eavesdrops
Suneeta Reddy – Apollo Hospitals talked of telemedicine – a bit like a pitch – didn’t learn v much
Richard Alderson of Unltd India – DNA of social entrepreneurship made up of Economic, social, political, Spiritual.
First interesting TEDUniv talk – PalletRacks Structures by Freeman Murray
this morning was cool; got to hear what 25 Fellows are doing! will be posting pics I took later.
TED University consists of 4 minute talks – 3 sessions with 6-7 people each. Before the main event tomorrow
Bruno Guissani introduces the first session at TED Unilversity #tedfellows #tedindia Kiran Khalap talking. Are Ideas Good or Bad?
In the bus to #tedindia with #tedfellows. Much bonding happening. @amitvarma is in form! http://twitpic.com/o3l2e

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:

This morning, I set up an Open Phweet around the Future of Social Computing, triggered by Jan Chipchase’s paper called Future Social, and my subsequent feeling of reinforcement and validation around a study we recently did around the future of Mobile Social Computing.  It’s been an interesting day, talking to a few people who joined my Phweet Cafe on this!  Am going to keep it open for a few days more!

@whitelight007 on Twitter then asked me – what’s my take on the future of social networking.  Had to keep the words to the bare minimum given Twitter’s 140 character limit so here’s what I said in two tweets and edited down here to:

“Networks based on & layered around location, access, presence & context. Those that enhance real-world interactions. Enabling choice, privacy and control”

Do you believe this is in the zone? Makes sense? What’s missing?  Would you like to share your shot at describing your perception of the future of social networking in say 140 characters?

Come and discuss it! All you need is your Twitter ID and password to enter the conversation.

Thought I’d share something we worked on last year – almost at the same time Twitter came into its own. and before we thought up Twitter for Ethnography.

We spent some time developing an SMS-Blog research prototype with Srinivas Mogalapalli at Netcore (Rajesh Jain’s company), built upon the MyToday SMS platform.

This was a module in a larger research project among youth, designed to meet the following broad objectives to:

• access and connect to consumer learning and conversations around the patterns for both one-hit fads and enduring trends
• capture insights in the following areas – lifestyle, fashion, relationships, careers, music, technology (gaming, mobile, internet) consumption/retail, entertainment.
• engage customers in ongoing conversations with us
• prototype new formats for research using mobile and internet environments

The research process was designed to include the following modules:

Living Diaries
Focus Groups
Personal Inventory/Character sketches
Virtual Ethnography β

Massive changes in the way youth live their lives today, provide the opportunity to augment traditional qualitative research methodologies. To understand where youth is going, new dynamic, flexible, responsive research approaches are required that more effectively capture their attention. Combining conventional methods like focus groups with methods borrowed from ethnography (that include contextual inquiry with the youth in their personal spaces), will allow us to explore their personal spaces and generate a range of possibilities for deeper dives into their minds and spaces.

We will target a) leading-edge segment of college students and young working people, who are ‘ahead of their times’, differentiated from bleeding-edge consumers, who tend to be atypical, mavens and sometimes a little over the edge. And b) regular upscale consumers to assess brand equity in specific.

This research process will adopt the target group’s own culture-of-use (SMS, MMS, Internet), both to get closer to them and speak their language, and to enhance flows of information.

The objectives of the Virtual Ethnography β module were to:

a. To capture real-time, real-life moments and thoughts as they occur – both written and visual. None of the other research techniques delivers this level of spontaneity, immediacy and ‘realness’ in responses.

b. To test this system out as a prototype or precursor to further assessing how we can make effective use of a networked panel in the belief that it will greatly enhance the way you listen to and engage with your consumers, as you will have access to the information as it flows in.

c. Long-term, we would like to help build, and facilitate making continuous consumer conversations possible. These could also be used further as a playground for new ideas, testing solutions, feedback mechanisms.

The Process and Tools:

We will use SMS, MMS, Blogs and an online email group as the key tools to capture data. 25 participants within the target segment will be recruited per city. They will be at different life-stages and of different gender. They will be required to participate for a period of 2 weeks. There will be three components to this process:

a. SMS-Blog
b. MMS-email/flickr-Blog
c. Blog QOD (question of the day)

We propose the following activities with them within each component:

SMS-Blog

• 4 questions will be sent to each participant every day. The questions will be common to all. These will be quick questions, requiring short immediate responses. We will need to identify close to 60 questions for the two-week duration in conjunction with you. For instance, “where are you now .. who is with you?” or “ did you think of sex today? what triggered the thought?” or “what 3 words best describe why you listen to music” or “take a picture that will show us where you are now and send it to us” or “how would you describe your mood right now?”

• Their responses will be automagically pushed onto a Blog set up on WordPress. Each participant and question/answer will have a unique identifier code which will allow us to read the data separately by segment, and by question.

• Blog categories will be built as the data comes in with the help of tags; demographic categories will be pre-defined as per the recruitment criteria.

• At this stage, we recommend that the participants cannot directly publish on the blog, rather they use SMS to publish to it. This is to keep biases in responses out of the research process.

MMS-Email/Flickr-Blog:

We will ask them to send in pictures to a common Gmail/Flickr account, with 6-10 word descriptors for each image. A private group at Flickr will be opened, where these pictures will be posted. These pictures and tags will be sucked back into the Blog.

Blog Question of the Day (QOD):

For the two weeks, we will have one question of the day. We will post the question on the Blog and send out the link to the group. Their responses can be captured as comments at that post. The questions will typically require longer responses than the SMS questions and will provide us rich data in a very easy format. We could even run some quick opinion polls at the Blog. While they will be asked to comment for each of these questions, we will ensure that they cannot see each others’ comments to ensure that the research process isn’t biased by one comment influencing another. Each commenter would have to drop in their respondent code, so the comments can be sorted by segment.

Unfortunately, although we got the prototype for this up and running, we couldn’t really put it into actual field research then for reasons that had little to do with this module.

Am now wondering what refinements it needs – and would love to hear your own experiences of using the target audience’s “cultures of use” (mobile phones, sms, social media in this case) as a research tool. Do drop in your thoughts and suggestions please

Rob Paterson alerts me to Jeremiah Owyang’s social media experiment in a comment at my post a few days ago on Twitter for Ethnography:

From Rob’s post at the Fast Forward blog:

This is how Jeremiah framed it:

I’ve created MicroMedia events before, this time, I want to frame it as an overlay to the multi million dollar advertising event, the Superbowl.

[TwitterBowl is a real-time social experiment where the audience rates million dollar advertisements in real time using Twitter]

Are you a superbowl ad critic? Of course you are, everyone is. Even if you don’t watch the superbowl, those pervasive ads will end up in YouTube, Digg, and your cousins blog and your best friends Facebook profile. Tired of others choosing which one was the funniest/stupidist/biggest waste of time? Well this year, you can rate your own superbowl ads using Twitter, and see what everyone else in Twitter thinks too.

How did it go?

Check out the results here. Please also look at the comments – they tell us even more.

Josh Bernoff, another Forrester analyst has compiled and analyzed the responses to ads during the SuperBowl Jeremiah helped evoke.

Very very cool!    A good example and validation of my thoughts on Twitter for Ethnography on Feb 1, a couple of days before the SuperBowl

Mahatma Gandhi once said: “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”

My recent experience with the Learning Journey we organised for Clients actually reinforced to me that given the right balance of content with experiential immersions and a focus on ‘how’ learning would take place, learning-to-be can begin even with just a week’s exposure.

One of the instances that brings such a smile on my face is the sight of youngsters lighting up one cigarette after another, while chatting with 13 older persons who were all non-smokers from North America all in an enclosed area in a coffee and hookah bar! And not one of my clients complained or even minded, although I was so conscious that this could potentially be quite uncomfortable for them!!! You can keep talking about how the youth is confident, irreverent, etc, you can build models based on consumer insights and on all sorts of qualitative and quantitative data, but when you actually observe their manner of ‘being’ and they actually draw you into their world into which you walk in openly and begin sharing yourself, how much easier and more effective it is to understand and learn!

So many other experiences ….

we’re all observers together

lunch cooked by a family in a village on a traditional stove over firewood.

new best friends from the village

with dabbawallas understanding how grassroots self-organising systems work

renovation underway

a variety of food!

with bloggers

[pictures from Flickr group and Elena's flickr page]

This comment from a senior member of the group actually reinforces how a Learning Journey can really create a ‘we participate therefore we are” learning framework:

Each of our Team members has been changed for life as a result of our experiences – and we are most grateful. The experiences of our recent Learning Journey has been woven into the very fabric of my soul. More than ever I understand more personally that we are all citizens of the globe bonded together by the common threads of our humanness. Many thanks, again, Dina, to both you and Shubhangi for shaping experiences that touched our lives so profoundly.

vs

Great piece on Social Learning titled Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler. The supercool text illustrations are by Susan E. Haviland.

Some snippets I really enjoyed:

What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.

There is a second, perhaps even more significant, aspect of social learning. Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field.

In a traditional Cartesian educational system, students may spend years learning about a subject; only after amassing sufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit) knowledge or practice of how to be an active practitioner/professional in a field.⁹ But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.

Although this article has been written in the context of education, there are some great learnings for researchers, ethnographers and for business too. One of the greatest challenges and often a dilemma is how to leverage social tools into research and marketing that would create a shift from a much hyped must-do model based on explicit learning (yeah – lets go build a social network or lets start a Facebook community for our brand) to a more intuitive method grounded in tacit knowledge and real experience.

One reason why we believe researchers experimenting with these tools should immerse themselves in using them first, one reason why we believe all brand managers should build their own social media toolkits through actual experience! One of the problems with this is the time commitments required for these personal explorations, which could then morph into professional insights. I cannot emphasise more the importance of being touched at a personal level for developing a learning-to-be mindset. That’s what good Learning Journeys can accomplish.

There’s a discussion on at the anthrodesign group around how best to approach a diary project. An excerpt from the initial query:

“We’ll be fielding a diary study trying to understand people’s initial experiences with a new mobile phone, particularly understanding the set up experience and the first few days of use. We are interested in what they are doing, barriers/successes, feelings during the process. “

There have been some thoughts and ideas around using voicemail, online diaries, digital voice-recording. Voicemail and digital voice-recording may present problems in analysis I feel. Also, would the participants be comfortable with it?

Something I feel that could work, and here’s what I sent:

Have you thought of using something like Twitter for this? You could set up a private group or channel there – where you could ask participants to send in short (140 character) messages. These updates could be either via SMS from phone, IM, or web-based. Advantages – you would capture feedback in real time as it happens, if youth is your target group then you’re enabling them to utilise their own culture of use (sms/IM) and hence a more natural and spontaneous capture and flow of responses. A few times a day you could send out specific questions. Here’s a link to a hack for this.

Likewise, if you need visual representation too – a private Flickr group could be set up too – and there are tools like Shozu to upload pics straight from your phone onto Flickr with one click!

An alternative to this is an SMS/MMS to Blog option, which is more controlled – where you could set categories like cribs/delights etc. Send out short questions over the week to participants – their responses come into a blog site via SMS or MMS. You could also consider a more detailed QOD – Question of the Day – if required, where they log into the blog and post their responses.

Last year, we had set up a prototype for an SMS-Blog system for trends research – unfortunately, the client – a youth TV channel wasn’t quite ready to run with it at that point in time. I’d have loved to have used Twitter itself even then, however, we didn’t have a short code for India specifically and hence, would have been too expensive for users. Now we do, and am eager to test it out as a research tool!

Check this post by Leisa Reichelt – Guerrilla Techniques – Does inexpensive research have to be ‘quick & dirty’ where she raises a “whole lotta questions” about using tools such as Twitter for research – my favourite question there is “Are we getting to the point where, perhaps, we can do better research outside of the lab than inside it?”

Any thoughts on how we could refine our research methods and the social tools available today for more formal research? I don’t think it’s really about being ‘quick and dirty’ – the real value is in being able to use these tools to set up long-term and robust research solutions that encourage participation in real-life and real-time situations. This is one of our key areas of focus at Mosoci and we keep experimenting!