This is my last post on this blog. Radio Userland has served me well since I started blogging in 2003. I will post more details on the transition, at my new blog - for now I just wanted to make this announcement, and provide the new url and feeds.

New Blog URL - http://dinamehta.com/
Subscribe via RSS 2.0 - http://dinamehta.com/feed/
Subscribe via Atom - http://dinamehta.com/feed/atom/
Comments feed - http://dinamehta.com/comments/feed/

The new blog will also be called Conversations with Dina - it's just a new blogging platform - but the same old blog! I do hope you continue reading and feeding it.

My old blog will be archived at its old url (http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/) and I will keep the archives going. Stuart, who has worked out the platform for Conversations with Dina on Wordpress has done some neato hacks - one that I love a lot is that the search function will not just search the new blog archives, but also my old Radio blog archives. And he has managed to transfer some of my posts over too. That's so cool!!! Lots more needs doing there ... and that will emerge I'm sure.

12:26:59 PM    comment []  trackback []

"Design Democracy is the wave of the future. Exceptional design may only be done by great star designers. But the design of our music experiences, the design of our MySpace pages, the design of our blogs, the design of our clothes, the design of our online community chats, the design of our Class of '95 brochures, the design of our screens, the design of the designs on our bodies---We are all designing more of our lives. And with more and more tools, we, the masses, want to design anything that touches us on the journey, the big journey through life. People want to participate in the design of their lives. They insist on being part of the conversation about their lives."  Bruce Nussbaum, Businessweek Online  [link via Putting People First]

12:26:21 PM    comment []  trackback []

Choices,

Simplicity

and

Elegance

"If you're using the term simplicity to mean "grace and economy" or "elegance," that's terrific. A great example of this is the difference between the way you search for music on Rhapsody and the way you search for music on iTunes. Rhapsody makes you decide if you want to search for albums, tracks, or artists. iTunes doesn't give you any choice: it just searches all fields, which works just as well and is easier. Economy means power, in this case, and itís a feature.

1:33:45 AM    comment []  trackback []

is on November 14, 2006.  An interesting initiative from Making Life Easy:

As part of World Usability Day weíre asking you to make some noise about things that are hard to use. London-based research and design consultancy Flow is marking World Usability Day with a campaign to get people to speak up about the things that make their life needlessly difficult.

Confusing cash machines, unclear signs, frustrating websites - poor usability is everywhere and it gets in the way of life. Sometimes it is just annoying. At other times it stops us doing what we need to do. It can even be dangerous.

World Usability Day is an international event promoting the message that people have had enough of things that are hard to use. We want people to share their usability frustrations with their fellow sufferers. Record your experiences at the campaign website MakingLifeEasy.org and:

1) See what is frustrating other people
2) Rate these annoyances on a scale of Usability Pain (coming soon!)
3) Upload a photograph and describe what makes life needlessly difficult

11:46:57 AM    comment []  trackback []

"A camel is a horse that was designed by a committee. In my experience, market research can sometimes feel very much like "design by Committee", which can spell disaster with a capital D. Your product, or service, can't be all things to all people, even those within your target market. So beware of embracing the committee mentality. Sir Barnett Cocks said it best: A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled."

Danielle Rodgers reminds us of some of the challenges in traditional Market Research and shares some boobytraps to watch out for.

Tags: market research, marketing research

8:48:48 AM    comment []  trackback []

I discovered and enjoyed a series of qualitative user research reports by Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase, who takes some amazing photographs and blogs them with observations at Future Perfect. [link via Chetan Kunte via Adaptive Path]

Interesting to read about informal repair cultures in India and China ..

"What sets these locations apart from cities in more 'emerged' markets? Aside from the scale of what's on sale there is a thriving market for device repair services ranging from swapping out components to re-soldering circuit boards to reflashing phones in a language of your choice , naturally. Repairs are often carried out with little more than a screwdriver, a toothbrush (for cleaning contact points) the right knowledge and a flat surface to work on. Repair manuals (which appear to be reverse engineered) are available, written in Hindi, English and Chinese and can even be subscribed to, but there is little evidence of them being actively used. Instead many of the repairers rely on informal social networks to share knowledge on common faults, and repair techniques. It's often easier to peer over the shoulder of a neighbour than open the manual itself. Delhi has the distinction of also offering a wide variety of mobile phone repair courses at training institutes such as Britco and Bridco turning out a steady flow of mobile phone repair engineers. To round off the ecosystem wholesalers' offer all the tools required to set up and run a repair business from individual components and circuit board schematics to screwdrivers and software installers."

"We noted that textually non-literate users of public call offices often took a scrap of paper with a phone number scrawled on it to the owner and asked them to dial the number. This system is open to errors caused by inaccuracy, either because the number was not clearly transcribed, or simply because the paper on which the number was written was worn and faded from being carried.

User interface designers often talk about the user's mental model of a system, and how it maps to the reality of how a device actually functions. It is typical for designers to use metaphors such as the 'desktop' or 'soft keys' to support the building of an accurate model. Textually non-literate users will not have access to textual cues, so their mental model may well be poor. Whilst a poor mental model is not a problem within a limited range of (rote learned) tasks, if and when errors occur users may adopt the wrong strategies to correct the problem. Designers use a myriad of audio, visual and textual cues to support the user's understanding of how the mobile phone works. Literate persons are able to quickly absorb (and subsequently ignore) this textual information and apply the knowledge in practice. A positive outcome reinforces their understanding of how the system works and helps build an accurate mental model. Textually non-literate people are required to make assumptions for the textual prompts based on how the device responds to their actions. A plausibly positive result is sufficient to believe that is how the system works regardless of how well it maps to the actual system."

9:16:24 AM    comment []  trackback []

This is the last in the series of Cultural Insights for doing business in India. Just wanted to say these observations are based on learnings over 18 years of doing qualitative research in India. It's interesting to see how some things have changed, while others remain constant, over generations.

Part 4. Technology Perspectives

• Technology adoption doesn't always follow trends in the West
• India is leapfrogging the PC stage - cell phones are becoming our gateway to the internet
• From no cameras to cam phones - digital cameras are being squeezed out
  
• 4.5 million cell phones are added every month, 95 million subscribers in March 2006, 200 million projected in 2010; landlines a little over 50 million
• Most turn off power to hardware when not in use to save electricity, and avoid power surges due to fluctuations. Less of an 'always on' perspective in India.
• Belief that cost of technology is dropping - so no point planning purchase in advance.
• Little DIY - cheap service is available
• Assembled goods and second hand goods are freely available from the grey market

• Upgrading is not a natural habit - the average consumer is not tech savvy, and technology products are usually used until they break. (Exception being cell phones, esp.among youngsters as they can be a status symbol).
• Upgrading often needs to be driven by buy-back/replacement schemes offered by
• Choice of brand and model often made by price/discounts/deals
• Celebrity endorsements rampant for tech products - playing on image and low role of product or features

• Trend towards 'all-in-one' gadgets - e.g. cell phone + camera + mp3 player. PCs play multiple roles, for instance as the household DVD player, communication medium, gaming system, etc.
• Trend towards laptops which is the fastest growing segment - costs dropping, mobility, status associations are key drivers.

The complete series:

Part 1. Culture of Business, Service and Consumption
Part 2. Attitude towards Rules and Regulations
Part 3. Value for Money Equations
Part 4. Technology Perspectives

Many thanks - to all those who have commented and linked to this series of posts - I love the conversations around these issues - keep them coming - and I will add my two-cents shortly!

5:37:35 PM    comment []  trackback []

Charu is sick of Focus Group bashing, and feels, Don't Shoot the Messenger!

It's a debate that's been going on for years ... its funny .. I feel a little caught in-between ... as I do more and more ethnographic research, I'm getting less fond of focus groups. Still, traditional FMCG sort of clients rely heavily on focus groups as their preferred method, and I work with many such Clients.

Perhaps part of the problem is that Clients and Researchers don't really look at these tools as data collection tools but as ends in themselves. How many times have you heard the brand manager or the account planner say ... we've done the 'mandatory' focus groups. Both researchers and clients adopt one or the other method, depending on their own comfort levels, rather than the requirement or need from the project.

Focus Groups are a bad word among many anthropologists and ethnographers ... and Ethnography is seen as the latest hyped buzzword by many motivational researchers. It's about hybridization and we need to be flexible as researchers in adopting these tools ... I remember during a recent project that involved Ethnographies, there came a point when I felt a couple of quick focus groups might help our understanding of an issue ... luckily the Client, although a workplace Anthropologist, felt the same. We did them, and they added lots of value to the Ethnographic Study.

I'd rather think of myself as a Qualitative Research Practitioner or Consultant ... than a focus group moderator, or an ethnographer !

8:33:45 PM    comment []  trackback []

Thought I'd share some great blog posts and papers I had bookmarked and finally got down to reading:
 
Rashmi Sinha has some really good essays on Tagging.  She has a whole category dedicated to this area, and I found the following posts particularly useful:
-  A cognitive analysis of tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular)
-  A Social Analysis of Tagging (or how tagging transforms the solitary browsing experience into a social one)
- "Tagging: From Personal to Social" - a powerpoint presentation here.

Some good tips in An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in Enterprise by Suw Charman.  She suggests that its key to identify users "who would clearly benefit from the new software, helping them to understand how it could help, and progressing their usage so that they can realise those benefits". I still struggle with tryig to figure out how we can enable the lowering of perceived risks in using such technologies. 

Doc Searls introduces the concept of the Intention Economy turning on its head the Attention Economy conversation that focusses more on the 'seller'.  He says:

"The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don't need advertising to make them.

The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don't need marketing to make Intention Markets.

The Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos. In The Intention Economy, customers don't have to fly from silo to silo, like a bees from flower to flower, collecting deal info (and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer's purchase. Simple as that.

The Intention Economy is built around more than transactions. Conversations matter. So do relationships. So do reputation, authority and respect. Those virtues, however, are earned by sellers (as well as buyers) and not just "branded" by sellers on the minds of buyers like the symbols of ranchers burned on the hides of cattle.

In The Intention Economy, a car rental customer should be able to say to the car rental market, "I'll be skiing in Park City from March 20-25. I want to rent a 4-wheel drive SUV. I belong to Avis Wizard, Budget FastBreak and Hertz 1 Club. I don't want to pay up front for gas or get any insurance. What can any of you companies do for me?" ó and have the sellers compete for the buyer's business."

7:46:37 PM    comment []  trackback []

Last Session - Digital Summit 2006

Moderator - Rohit Mull, Tata AIG

• Anup Bagchi COO, ICICI Web Trade Ltd.
• Sanjeev Bikchandani, CEO, Naukri.com
• Satya Prabhakar, President & CEO Sulekha.com
• Harsh Roongta, Founder & CEO, Apnaloan
• Sharat Dhall, Business Head, Ecommerce, Times Internet Ltd
• Anaggh Desai, CEO, D'damas Jewellery (I) Pvt. Ltd.

It was great meeting Rohit Mull and Harsh Roongta after many many years. I had done some qual research for apnaloan.com many years ago.

Digital Summit 2006 Mumbai

4:46:48 PM    comment []  trackback []

Since today seems to be my day of linking, I thought I'd also shoot out this list of things that have caught my interest recently ... many are from bloggers I read regularly - Nancy for instance is a huge repository of resources. I've bookmarked many of them with Furl too.

2:26:46 PM    comment []  trackback []

I finally got around to doing some housekeeping on my blog. Have edited the categories and links - am hoping they will render alright. The nice thing is each of them acts as a separate blog - so readers can subscribe separately to specific categories that interest you!

Here they are - links and RSS feeds :

1:19:43 PM    comment []  trackback []

I've set up a Bloglines account for the Global Consortium at Social Solutions on an aggregation of feeds around ethnography, anthropology, usability and user design and experience and some other feeds I thought might be useful. You can access it here. I leant heavily on Lorenz's hard work in setting up the Antropologi feeds :)

2:03:47 PM    comment []  trackback []

Nancy blogged my session - I enjoyed talking about the blog we set up for the Pitney Bowes project. I did run badly over time and wish i had had more time to talk about other social tools like VOIP, wikis, tagging etc that would be so useful for global projects of this nature.

I also discovered all full papers are available at the EPIC 2005 Website (pdf file).

epic2005

5:17:49 AM    comment []  trackback []

Using photographic data to build a large-scale global comparative visual ethnography of domestic spaces: can a limited data set capture the complexities of 'sociality'? Simon Pulman-Jones - GfK-NOP

This is a study I had done the India portion of the ethnographies through Social Solutions, and it's great to see how it was all pulled together.

"Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning" Clifford Geertz

The survey is a visual documentation of consumer homes over 240 households in 12 countries, on an ongoing basis and is a multi-client. First start with a mapping of global consumer "value profiles along dimensions of Fun, People, Power and Tradition. Value segments that have emerged - creatives, fun-seekers, strivers, altruists, devouts, intimates. Interesting, altruists and intimates drop and strivers increase perhaps due to the economic boom in India and China.

The VSDS (Visual Study of Domestic Spaces). To do conventional ethnography would have been prohibitively expensive, so visual ethnographies were done. The study covered nine functional areas - food preparation, consumption, relaxation/leisure, sleep, "center", personal hygiene, home office,motor vehicle, maintenance. The images were coded then. They allowed an illustration of quantitative findings and data.

"the photograph in anthropology is as much a means of discovering information as it is of presenting that which has been founf ... a locus of dialoguing rather than as a source of information in itself." The value of the image in ethnographic fieldwork is here precisely in its intermediary

The value wasn't just in illustrating quantitative findings, but to reveal new things and throw up new hypotheses. The primacy of the visual data perhaps was different than what would have been achieved through narrative articulation of participants.

Risks - it can pull people out of their more social contexts, falling into the trap of physical spaces and material objects becoming the defining the individual.

Questions : does what you do become archaeology instead of ethnography? At what point in the process does this distinction happen? A - The method does have similarity with archaeology, and what we attempted to do is work with the virtues of that reality - that we don't have representations of narratives and experiences. We probably have a lot to learn from looking at archaelogical practices.

Q - what do you personally find most challenging working with data sets like this ? A - its a real challenge to abandon one's normal facility with manipulating narrative data sets. Recognise there are skills and knowledge sets in analysing visual data.

Q - mystified by what you did - there seemed to be a lot of information there that wasn't in the photographs - how did you get the detailing around the pictures? A - researcher notes.

1:19:13 AM    comment []  trackback []

Jo Pierson, Bram Lievens & Pieter Ballon, Studies on Media, Information and Telecommunication (SMIT) Interdisciplinary institute for BroadBand Technology (IBBT) Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)

Talking of e-paper project -- which is a handheld reading device, using e-Ink technology. How can a living lab setting based on ethnogrpahic principles be used in Sociality. A living lab - is TEP - test and experiment platform. Early in innovation process, and facilitates design. Characterisitics - the use of natural user envt, multi-methodological approaches and ethnographic methods.

Phases of living lab -
1.Contextualisation - desk research with broad focus, technogical and socio-economic scanning. Hoovering, picking or selection criteria that solves the lack of clarity between the 'who' and the 'what'
2. Concretisation - initial measurement - fixed components like demographics and ICT adoption and usage, and variable components - reading profile and news consumption. Then simultaneous and phased introduction.
3. Implementation - Spotting and Digging - Direct analysis - more technical analyses and now ethnographic methods being incorporated too. And Indirect analysis - focus groups, in depth interviews, self-reporting techniques
4. Feedback - Matching phase - ex-post measurement - survey methods, identifying changes in user behaviour, and to look at changes in the level of social structure and motivations, so recommendations can be made in an iterative process.

The value of this approach :

Individual company -- helps to structure 'fuzzy front-end', multimethodological approach, sociality and unpredictable uses thrown up, and how this all affects home, work and on the road life. At another level, when looking at a cluster of companies, you can assess pre-competitive setting and work better to systematic innovation.

Question - What pitfalls in the project ? A - how to define a living lab, and how to select cases were challenges. Also how to combine and link together quantitative and ethnographic methods.

epic2005

12:52:16 AM    comment []  trackback []

Brinda Dalal & Pat Swenton-Wall, PARC Inc. & Xerox Corporation.

Spirit of Gift in Business - how does it emerge in business settings, and what rewards as a result. They speak of ethnography in Service Encounters. How it transforms the scope and definition of our work. Evolution of Methods and Tools - visual representations connect better. Portfolio consists of a library of icons in a graphics toolkit. They are even being used in ways the developers hadn't envisioned.

Conclusions ... representations help put people back into the forefront. They embody a common referent that be shared by the customer and employers. They provde more than expected on behalf of both the customer and the companies we work for.

Update: I met Brinda in the hallways ... and she asked me weren't we together in Sociology class at St. Xavier's in Mumbai, and I must say I didn't initially recognise her, and then suddenly I had this vision of this beautiful girl with long flowing hair, always in loose kurtas, interesting earrings, and a wonderful smile.  And she was right here, shorter hair, and more 'corporate' looking, but still the same eyes and smile :). It is such a small world !

epic2005

12:35:34 AM    comment []  trackback []

Fieldwork and Ethnography in Design - The state of play from the CSCW Perspective

Dave Randall, Department of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Mark Rouncefield, Department of Sociology, Cartmel College, Lancaster University & Richard Harper, Microsoft Research Cambridge

We are rushing in all sorts of ways in our lives. We are confronted with a world that disagrees with us.  Other ethnographers work differently than us - and it is their right.  Different people do different types of work.  Some positions :

- Anthropologists have no monopoly on ethnography

- The body-politic of ethnography - some are disciplinary, some are nascent

- The kind of chaos and possibilities it throws up

We need to grow up and face the fact that if corporate life has funded ethnography for the last 20 years, we have to recognise that ethnography has become a hybrid - some may agree with some methods, others maynot.

With this powerful introduction, the speaker took us through CSCW .

He shares case studies that reflect that we cannot define fieldwork because we dont have a particular analytical tool anymore.  They are emergent tropes, they are interdisciplinary.

The foci in CSCW is design but in a broad encompassing way.   Let it emerge.  I AGREE :).  Its a good message for all practitioners.

epic2005

11:33:02 PM    comment []  trackback []

Nina Wakeford sets off the session on Methodology with a discussion around Us vs Them - academia and workplace anthropology.  Interesting perspectives - I enjoyed her talk.

Methodology - ways of surviving experience models.  Methods are just not for others - but resources we can draw on ourselves.  We can begin to engage in different ways.  She talks of subjective realities and false objectivity.

"The term traditional ethnography makes me shudder, as much as the term family tradition does" - got a big laugh from the audience.

epic2005

11:10:10 PM    comment []  trackback []

Jeannette Blomberg in her summation of the workshops yesterday talks of the notion of hybrids  - Hybrids are here now.  "In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse and in daily practice we find outselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras" - Donna Haraway

She ends her summaries with a call to recognize our hybrid subjects and hybrid identities - and celebrate our commitment to the ephemeral, situated orderliness of everyday practice.

One-minute summaries of the workshops from convenors :
 - Business Ethnography for BoPs (details here)
- Working the Process - Anthropological Approaches to designing and evaluating organisational work processes - focussing on the relationship between work practices and sociality in the context of global workplaces.  Unpacked the process of work process. Many issues related to crossing boundaries and many stakeholders involved.  Conclusion - study of work process needs to be trans-disciplinary and there needs to be language developed for sharing work and results.
- Object Sociality - Researching Living things - How we could conceptualise objects in terms of being social with them.  Looked at some Marxist traditions and theories that address this.  Shared personal stories and observations around this.
- Collaborating across social, organisational and disciplinary distances - The focus was to address how can we do better collaborations, and what challenges.  Design game using video clips were reviewed and make sens of the work, and pulling themes  out.  Then drew maps.
- Holy Hanging out - exploring spirituality and religion in an organisation. The boundaries between culture and religion aren't to broad - we need to study them and communicate them.  Have public conversations about them. Is a huge business opportunity.
- Distributed Sociality - doing online and offline work --- started by preliminary remarks on background, distributed people on three tables and asked them to get to know each other. Issues -- how to get informed consent from an avatar, whats happening to participant observation as we move from offline research as we move to cyberspace. 
- The Sociliaty of Fieldwork - a conversation that spiralled and scaled to a lot of things --- what happens when you see people cry - start off by listening then counselling, how do ou explain truth in different contexts, recruiting people like dressing up like a hedgehog, how do you explain
- Defining the Impact of physical spaces on social interactions - there was diversity in the group, and how we could still think together.
- Framing ethnographic Praxis for Innovation - co-developed ideas around the Innovation space.  Theories of innovation, how is it constructed, how do people participate, how do we engage in it. Co-developed a visual model to begin to map out the space.

epic2005

10:53:54 PM    comment []  trackback []

Nirmal Sethia starts by framing the agenda, with a Peter Drucker comment - "Business is a social organ". And then attributes the genesis of thinking around BoP to C.K. Prahlad. He shares his ideas on Business Ethnography - there is much excitement but little experience - three sorts of traps --- greed, ignorance and glamour.

How can Business Ethnography help .... to help businesses steer clear of the traps. Slave of greed - engine of growth, victim of ignorance to vehicle of innovation, captive of glamour to agent of good. An important partner in all this is Design.

We need to be sensitive to improving the lives of the poorest populations with our products and services.

The ultimate user-researcher is Gandhi ! "He understood the masses and the masses felt understood by him" Kamla Chowdhry. Having more versus being more.

Jeff Smith - who has spent 28 years in product design and development takes the discussion further. Talks of ethnography adding a dimension of "conscience-ness" to business strategies and decisions.

Darrel Rhea CEO of Cheskin - Innovation through Research in Underserved Markets. Business ethnography facilitates design processes, and design is about creating value for human beings. BE - therefore is the search for value. Value lives in the experience of users. So the question is what are the most highly valued experiences? They are those that are meaningful - in the sense that it helps provide a sense of value for you as a human being. Levels of value differ .... economic, functional, emotional, status and identity and at a deepest level, provide us with a sense of meaning. Stickiness is higher at the level of meaning.

Traditional market research methods work well for commodities,goods and services, but are weak for experiences. That requires a sense of cultural context. So what is meaning ... we require an explanation of the world to help us decide to act. Meaning provide's a contruction of reality. Which provides us a view of the world or framework for understanding what we value, believe, condone, desire. Its the sense we make of reality. How we tell the story of our lives ... we live for them and sometimes die for them. We need to listen to people's stories.

Historically, the constructions of meaning have been shared through religion, govts, family, mass movements for instance. In the modern world however, the construction of meaning is becoming more personal - the value of govts or religion are being broken down for eg.Markets are devolving into niches as well.

Erica Seidel, Pitney Bowes talks of the ethnographies we conducted in India, and shared lessons from building a BOP Business for Pitney Bowes and the India Post. And the challenges having started the project very broad and unfocussed, to the challenge of making a business case for value propositions, to getting favourable responses from the senior decision-makers at India Post.

Great Question --- What lessons can you bring back to the top of the pyramid from your experiences at the bottom of the pyramid.

We then had a short break and split up into two groups, to discuss Role, Value and Strategy for business ethnography for B2C and B2B organizations.

Some of the issues thrown up at these sessions that reflect role, values and strategy :
- can a framework be developed within the bottom of the pyramid markets rather than imposed from the outside
- do we need to look at B to C (business to collectives rather than customers) and B to G (business to government)
- the need to look at formal and informal structures
- not much research available on these markets through traditional market research - the need for ethnography
- business considerations - palatability by using the right terminology when selling it within your organisation, applicability across markets, translating it into a business model, how do you get buy-in from your organisation
- distributing vs generating wealth, listening, learning, serving
- entrepreneurial traits, creativity and flexibility - to be able to assert solutions on the fly
- what's the starting point, and the need to engage local thought leaders early in the process

3:30:19 AM    comment []  trackback []

I hear you Nancy ! I'm a practitioner, and there maybe some great stuff here .. but it's all lost on me, as I am not engaged to listen.

epic2005

2:06:33 AM    comment []  trackback []

Grass roots campaigning as Elective Sociality (or Maffesoli meets ësocial softwareí): Lessons from the BBC iCan project - Stokes Jones, Lodestar

Am excited to be listening to this paper ... Lee Bryant had spoken of how he used social tagging for the BBC at Reboot7. .

Pre-history of the project :
- record low turnout in 2001 British elections
- quantitative research showed - apathy among voters widespread

The original brief : develop a unique interactive community in which people can make a difference in civic life. To participate in democracy.
Focus : Biased towards the local, and biased towards action.
Why research : belief that the site's success would depend on how well it met campaigner's needs.
Research focus : defining iCan's space - grassroots campaigners.
Methodology : indepth incontext interviews and capaign office tours, gathering oral histories of specific campaigns, etc
Deliverables : results expressed processes, priorities and needs of campaigners.

The Questions for the iCan system conceptual model : what is the journey between being a passive user and an active user ? A : iCan is the journey - using online journals and blogs among other things.

Conflicts : need for concept testing - unsung moments needed to be supported on the site - needed communications tools, a campaign blogging tool. Designed a prototype to be tested among target audience - 5 campaigners and 5 sympathisers - asked them a battery of questions and user journeys. Result - its too ambitious, it looks more difficult than campagining actually is. Only one thought the website would encourage them to start a campaign. The bias towards 'comprehensiveness' needed to be re-thought.One of the big learnings was that what they ended up with was a one-stop shop -- and that was overwhelming.

The problem - research had perhaps ignored this - "experiencing the other is the basis of community" Michel Maffesoli. Campaigners were getting something out of the community, far beyond the primary objective of campaigning. They threw back to elective sociality - unite and divide based on community affinities, which is voluntary, affect-based, about strong ties and based on local ties.iCan protocols then supported this model.

What a story !

1:23:04 AM    comment []  trackback []

Kris R. Cohen, from the University of Surrey (UK). Yayyy he's a blogger. And does some photoblogging too! But that's not what he is talking of. Design research is what he's talking of and the concept of the user. And forces that suture a 'who' to a 'what'. Landscapes of possibilities.

Am not sure what's new about this basic call to look at the landscape of possibilities and not narrow-focus on users. When I started working as a qualitative researcher over 17 years ago, I quickly learnt that your research is as good as your subject. So we looked at users in a broad context - users, non-users, users of competitive brands and services, lapsed users, heavy and light users, old and recent users. Maybe ethnographers and anthropologists need some grounding in market research:):):)???

He leaves us with an interesting thought that researchers can create 'publics' - public spaces and action. Products enter spaces and get transformed. Public action is unpredictable. Ethnographic methods try and suture the who to the what. Design research not only describes but also can predict 'publics'.

Great Question --- how can we get clients to pay us to landscape the possibilities? No real answer.

epic2005

11:52:53 PM    comment []  trackback []

EPIC starts with an introduction from Rick Robinson of GfK-NOP - his talk is called "Let's Talk - Introductory remarks for thoery section". He makes us smile when he says "I've never been in a room full of people who's mothers don't know what they do!"

1. Where's "here" ?
2. Who else is in this conversation?
3. Why theory matters .... quotes Richard Buchanan's diagram - from his paper, Design as Inquiry. He says case studies cannot be the only fodder for conversation, there must be active engagement - not just observe and collect artifacts, but work to the future. We act at this intersection of theory and praxis. We have considerable influence on the future, as a result.

He quotes as his conclusion -"I dont fuck much with the past, but i fuck plenty with the future" --- Patti Smith, Easter/Babelogue, 1978.

There's a live conference blog too. But no Flick'r photo feed (ethnographers and anthropologists should be using Flick'r - maybe I'll start a tag that says EPIC2005!), no IRC or back channel!

epic2005

11:09:53 PM    comment []  trackback []

We had a great session today at the Social Solutions Global Consortium Summit in Seattle, USA. Pat Sachs led us through an engaging conversation on how we participate in this new world, how do we work together and take this forward.

We then moved into a discussion of how we should position this group - while I won't get into details on our discussions, the key concepts we were playing with were around presenting ourselves as the bridge, or the rub connecting customer insight with company innovation. 'Glocal' truly describes us too.

And, as expected :) - I'm excited too about the possibility of adopting social tools like blogs and wikis and VOIP into our work practices and collaborative projects.

Felipe - Spain. Action research, participatory work, PhD on Action Research - getting children back into the mainstream - Clinical Psychologist and Therapist, Human Resources, Started his own company. Also teaches at the university. PAR - participatory action research.

Hugo - born in Italy, moved to South America. Venezuela and then to Argentina. Degree in Social History from Buenos Aires, Masters in Economic History. Research in Human History - Nashville. 12 years ago, moved to Barcelona, Spain - scholarship to do PhD on Social Anthropology. Studied a city Santa Rosa - immigrants found cities - the idea of a city - how did they name streets, etc Exploring how people put into practice ideas.notions. concepts to create organizations. Wife also an anthropologist - CLAY consulting focussing on adoption. Corporate culture - culture debate. We are not social engineers ...in Spain, anthropologists have this motto. Second PhD in Management studies - Focussing on another set of immigrants - expat managers - uses and practices of 'culture' in companies

2:16:39 PM    comment []  trackback []