I can describe how I work is as an overlap of design | research | insight. All are informed by my background in social science, my work with computer scientists and designers, among others. I have many years' experience of performing detailed, nuanced ethnographic fieldwork utillising both traditional techniques and using video, still photography and audio recording. More than that, I have a lot of experience of communicating these findings to different groups, be it designers, management, or other researchers from different backgrounds. I have experience of performing short, intensive fieldwork projects as well as longer immersive longitudinal projects. Statistical methods, segmentation etc, all have their place. But well selected and explained vignettes of real behaviour can be invaluable. Because ethnographic work does not start off with closed-off questions, it can produce surprising answers.
design | research
What is the
design space?
How do people do things? Why? How might they do things in
future?
Researching the design space. Looking at existing behaviour around and through the technology or situation in question, mayb the ways in which people 'hack' things; the way they talk about them; to give an idea of the design space that a new technology might inhabit. Not dictating to designers, rather giving them a description of how things work now and a 'jumping off point'.
Reflections on fieldwork informed by many conceptual touchstones: Ethnomethodology and sociolinguistic approaches give valuable conceptual tools in unpacking interaction and communication. The Material Culture approach is useful for an insight into the social meanings of technology. Ecological psychology is useful for looking at things-in-use. I take inspiration from the sharp design eye of Jane Fulton-Suri. Most in-depth qualitative work is done aobut people and culture; it is also important to look closely at things.
design | insight
How do people use what we make? why does it succeed? why does it bomb? What does it connote?
15 years ago the default setting for any piece of software was to be embodied in a computer or computers. Now, 'intelligence' may be embodied in many different settings, from small devices with one intended purpose to multipurpose devices allowing many different possibilities.
Perhaps you want to know what people are doing with an existing version of your technology. Perhaps this is very successful or perhaps it isn't doing so well. You may have a wealth of statistics and user insights from the marketing department. However you might also need an in-depth look at particular users and situations.
As well as the artefact itself, what might be important are the connotations of the object. It's not just the object, but the values that the object is percieved to embody, the place of the object in the ecology inwhich it is used. It may sound a little odd, but we can talk about the use-ecology of the object: for example, think of tracking and monitoring. In many situations tracking might be considered, quite rightly an infringment of human liberty and privacy. However in some situations we may very much want to be tracked; if, for example, we are about to have an operation in a hospital, we might quite like the hospital to know that we are who we are. Big brother in one context (a city street) becomes a reassurance in another. A device may have attributes which aid it or disable it for a particular use-ecology.
research | insight
What's out there? What inspirations can I find? What is happening in the research world?
My academic background makes it straigntforward to provide desk research - reports of whatever length which can provide a state of the art view and a context from a number of different perspectives.
The design space may also be influenced by what is out there, by patterns and new ideas. Rather than reinventing the wheel, you may find that the concepts you are talking about are not so new but may have resonances in any field from architecture, and anthropology to psychology or ... My background in psychology, by way of anthropology and sociology and collaborations with people as diverse as architects, engineers, and artists, enables me to know where to start start asking the questions, if not know the answer.
other techniques | sublime or ridiculous
Over the years I have explored different techniques for gathering experiences and representing different pictures of the field, from the persona techniques as used for experience design, generated from focussed ethnographic observation and iterations of interviews, to much more experimental approaches, such as situationist-based interventions which I have found useful in encouraging those in the design process to view things from a completely different direction. I am only too glad to be allowed to explore those further should anyone be interested.
capabilities
You can find more about equipment capabilities, confidentiality, and other issues here.