Hit Rate and Anthropology

October 23, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | by anthroguy | 25 comments

Greeting from Chicago, where I (Anthroguy) am attending the CEO Conference with some colleagues and students from Fresno State.

What does anthropology have to do with the market “hit rate” for new innovations?  Blogger and design anthropologist Eva G:dotter Jansson answers this question nicely in a recent blog posting.  Jansson makes an extended argument for the value of design anthropology and ethnographic user experience research for increasing innovation hit rates in the marketplace.  The secret to hitting?  Know what users really want and need.  The method for finding that out?  Ethnographic research – research that takes you into firsthand, face-to-face contact with users in their natural habitat, where you can observe, interact and talk with them around and about the product or service area in question.  From Huggies to Lexus, user experience research has delivered the results (see Jansson’s posting for details).

Jansson cites two main sources to back her anecdotal evidence.  First, she touches briefly on Standish Group’s CHAOS Report, an annual report on IT project success and failure rates.  The 2009 CHAOS Report recounts the worst project failure rate in a decade.  More importantly, a consistent finding across CHAOS reports over a 14 year period is, in Jansson’s words, a “lack of deep understanding of the user’s context and expressed and hidden needs.”  As Mitch Bishop said over the summer:   “When are companies going to stop wasting billions of dollars on failed projects?  The vast majority of this waste is completely avoidable; simply get the right business needs (requirements) understood early in the process.”

Why is it so hard to get the user’s needs right?  In my own experience, and that of others in my field, managers often rely on marketing to tell designers of all types what the customer wants or needs — yet, ironically, marketing often don’t know customer needs very well.  Or, to put it more subtly, they know a certain kind of something about customers: they know what customers say they want.  However, since people often have difficulty articulating needs, this kind of verbal report is unreliable.  At its worst, taking verbal reportage of customer needs straight to the design process results in feature-listing, over-loaded products, eventual customer and/or user dissatisfaction, more feature requests, etc.  (And the difficulties multiply when the customer and end user are not the same.)

Ethnography aims for the a deeper understanding of user needs, at a more general and hence more basic level than the feature.

Which brings us to the Doblin Group, a leading innovation consultancy.  Doblin founder Larry Keeley has been touting for years the value of design anthropology in increasing hit rates.  Going back to 2005, he told Nussbaum On Design that “companies can increase their innovation effectiveness by 35% to 70% or 9 to 17 times the norm. The norm, of course is the incredibly low 4.5% ‘hit’ rate of successful innovation that companies generally have. Keeley said that ‘if you just use anthropologists, you can triple your innovation effectiveness by three times.’” Blogger Jansson cites Keeley’s figures approvingly.  The hit rate boost from using design anthropology/ethnographic research makes perfect sense to me – after all, there is no other method that gets at user needs and desires any better.  But, I’m still trying to track down the data on which Keeley bases his numbers.  If I turn anything up, I’ll post more.

By the way, thanks to Tim Stearns and the Anthrogeek for encouraging me to blog about this.  Actually, what happened was, the Anthrogeek and I were taping The Pulse radio show (dated 10/24/09) with Tim when Jansson’s blog came up and the Anthrogeek told the listeners to tune into TheAnthroGuys for more.  So, here’s that “more” A-geek promised for you.

Can’t You Just Ask People?

September 17, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | by anthroguy | 61 comments

Recently, I spoke to a locally respected and experienced business advisor about the process of learning about consumer needs.  I said that I thought you can’t simply ask people what they want because most people can’t articulate – at least not in a verbal Q&A context – a clear vision of future products and services.  He said, “Hank, I’m gonna have to disagree with you on that.”  He went on to describe how he had once complained to his wife about a glaring blind spot in consumer electronics – a spot that was in fact filled years later.

These kinds of consumer anticipations certainly happen, but they tend to fall into a few categories.  Sometimes, when we’re deeply engaged in a product area, we produce good ideas – ideas that others are also having and acting upon.  Many people engage home electronics regularly and deeply, and so it makes sense that consumers will have all kinds of ideas for improvements and innovations – good ideas that often do make it to market.  Of course, if the consumer in question is an aficionado of the product area in question, then they are even more likely to produce great ideas.  (However, even in consumer electronics, breakthrough products take more than simply asking people.  The iPod, for example, was the result of a long process of research and development by Apple researchers; simply asking people what they wanted from a good MP3 player could never have resulted, in a straight-line fashion, in the wildly popular design of the iPod.)

But most product areas are not like consumer electronics.  We engage many products and services sporadically and superficially.  Some, we even use grudgingly, hoping to be done with them as soon as possible and with as little engagement as possible (like laundry detergent – see below).  And, most consumers don’t develop consciously articulated ideas about problematic products and services.  Instead, they either simply put up with the flaws of existing offerings, or they develop workarounds that help them to avoid the problem.

One of my favorite stories about the inability of people to talk about the problem with existing products concerns the genesis of ColorGuard.  A few years ago, I met a market researcher from P&G.  She told me that P&G spent many years surveying people, asking endless questions about laundry and detergent.  Their findings revealed the obvious:  when people do laundry, they have cleanliness in mind.  So for years, P&G focused their detergent development efforts on cleaning power.  Then, P&G started sending teams of researchers into peoples’ homes to observe laundry and other household routines.  Through observation, they learned that many people were turning dark clothes inside-out to protect the color from fading.  P&G research participants had never told P&G that they were struggling with fading clothes.  Afterall, they had developed a workaround to address the problem.  Also, since most consumers were not chemical engineers, they probably had trouble conceiving of a possible engineering solution to the problem of fading clothes.  However, armed with the observational data, the P&G researchers went back to their chemical engineers, who developed ColorGuard.

I am not suggesting that people are stupid or that they lack good ideas.  I am suggesting that people are often not very good at consciously articulating their needs and desires vis a vis future products and services.  If there is one thing that the past century of scientific research on human behavior has taught us, it is that most human knowledge is tacit and implicit.  (If it weren’t so – that is, if we held all our knowledge at the level of conscious recall – we’d probably keel over and die from the mental stress.)  Thus, consumer desires tend to be encoded in behaviors (e.g. workarounds) or buried under a few layers of consciousness.  (The Handbook of Marketing Research [2006] by Grover and Vriens has a good discussion of tacit knowledge.  Chapter 4 is online:  see especially pp. 110-117.)  In most cases, you cannot simply ask someone what they want and expect to receive to very insightful answer.

Take a different kind of design challenge:  showerheads.  Think you know what you want from your showerhead?  You may be able to say a thing or two, but most of your interaction with your showerhead is encoded in your body movements.  You probably use it without thinking about it too much, though your body movements tell a story about how the showerhead works or fails to work for you.  Ten years ago, a team of researchers from QualiData Research, Inc., in New York, tackled the shower product area for Moen.  They set up cameras in research participants’ showers to observe their behaviors (I’m not lying about this).  They then looked at the video and did follow-up interviews, and concluded that a large proportion of us shower not primarily for cleanliness, but for relaxation.  The problem was, peoples’ movements often resembled an awkward dance as they tried to aim and adjust the showerhead for just the right flow, pattern and direction.  Existing products were simply not satisfying the powerful, but tacitly felt and enacted, desire for a relaxing shower.  QualiData took their findings to Moen, which developed the Revolution Showerhead.  Revolution solved some of the problems discovered in the research by, for example, putting the adjustment dial below the showerhead so it’s more accessible to the user, eliminating much of the dancing the researchers recorded.

Business Week awarded the product a Silver Idea Award for Research in 2005, noting:  “Within eight weeks of its introduction at Lowe’s, the Revolution Showerhead became the number one selling showerhead (despite it being the most expensive showerhead they sell)…”

Henry Ford is widely quoted as having said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said, ‘a faster horse’.”  Whether he said it or not, the point is well taken:  if you seek visionary breakthroughs or even modestly successful innovations, you should do more than simply ask people.

Practicing Anthropology in the Shelves: Designing Academic Libraries via Ethnography

August 5, 2009 in Library, design anthropology | Tags: , , , , | by theanthrogeek | 1 comment

We are excited to announce the acceptance of a session of papers we organized about our Library User Experience Study.  We include the session abstract here and posted all of the paper abstracts at TheAnthroGeek.com

Practicing Anthropology in the Shelves: Designing Academic Libraries via Ethnography, a Presentation at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia PA

Session Abstract: Anthropology is most relevant to the public when it improves the lives of non-anthropologists. Practicing anthropology, as a type of research done to solve practical problems with relevant stakeholders who stand to gain or lose from a project, has a long tradition outside academia. Conversely, practicing anthropology on a college campus, across disciplines is a relatively recent phenomenon. Responding to this year’s theme, the papers on this panel speak to an “academic public” comprised of non-anthropologists across college campuses. Acknowledging one potential “end” of anthropology as an independent university discipline, panelists illustrate a bright future for practicing anthropology amongst this “academic public”.

Using ethnography to empirically investigate the factors that influence human relations between each other and their environment, practicing anthropology helps provide stakeholders invested and interested in this research to adopt effective and efficient responses to the problems relevant to them. California State University Fresno’s Institute of Public Anthropology (IPA) is an organization dedicated to improving the quality of life in California’s Central Valley through practicing design anthropology. By utilizing a mix of traditional and innovative methodologies, members of the IPA are able to make ethnographic approaches relevant to areas normally ignored by academic anthropology programs. The papers on this panel represent some of the latest research on user experience based upon a 15 month ethnographic investigation of CSU-Fresno’s Henry Madden Library.

In the first paper, Visser presents the context of the study, illuminating the relevance and use of traditional university libraries to “21st century students”. The following two papers by Barela, Arnold and Dotson provide a detailed explication of the background and methods of this study while emphasizing the strategies involved in ascertaining emic conceptualizations of “scholarship” (Barela) and ”library resources” (Arnold and Dotson) by predominantly ”first generation” college students. The next pair of papers by Mullooly, Ruwe and Scroggins explore some of the initial findings and that have evolved from the Library Study in terms of student/librarian disjunctures: disjunctures of the meaning of “reference” (Mullooly and Ruwe) “and of perception of time (Scroggins). The final paper by Delcore concludes the presentations with a discussion of the relevance of this sort of investigation to the evolution of design anthropology in relation to a variety of publics. Nancy Fried Foster, a leading voice in anthropological investigations of libraries, will discuss the papers at the close of the session.

The papers represent practicing efforts that analyze pressing issues in the contexts of scholarship, design, integration and innovation. Each presentation will be a rapid, data rich presentation (following the Pecha Kucha format) which will allow for an open discussion to follow including a critical analysis of the benefits of such approaches as well as the potential problems inherent in facing an “academic public”.

Steele Returns With Draft Tower Streetscape

July 30, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by anthroguy | 10 comments

On Tuesday night, MW Steele returned to the Tower District to present a first draft of a redesigned Tower streetscape.  The draft design is in part the result of a design charrette that Steele and the city put on last Saturday.

Tuesday night was a good chance for us to get more information about the process Steele used to take the input from the charrette and come up with a design.  It turns out that after the charrette was over, Mark Steele and Diego Velasco stayed in Fresno to look at the results.  For example, they showed us pictures of them laying out and looking over our designs in the corridor of their hotel.

Steele definitely showed that they are serious about community input for their design.  They broke the charrette results down into a list showing how many tables asked for what features.  They also came up with six guiding principles that any design should follow (e.g. historical continuity, pedestrian friendly, etc.).

One of the most intriguing items they presented was an interpretation of the unique layout of Tower streets.  They called it “The Zipper,” referring to the way north south streets do not cross directly over Olive Avenue, but instead dog-leg, creating a zipper pattern when viewed from above.  The only streets that go straight through are Van Ness and Wishon, the old streetcar routes.

Steele presented one design rather than a set of alternatives, apparently because the input seemed to lead in one clear direction.  The major features are a north-south pedestrian corridor from Fulton just south of Olive to the businesses along Fern Street, liberal use of sidewalk pop-outs, and two traffic circles at Van Ness and Olive and Wishon and Olive.

The north-south pedestrian corridor was a big hit with the 80 or so attendees Tuesday night, but the traffic circles generated some concern.  I for one am very skeptical about the utility and authenticity of traffic circles on Olive Avenue.  (City Traffic Engineer Bryan Jones spoke approvingly of circles as traffic calming devices.)  The biggest problem with the proposed traffic circles is that they do not fit the historical context of the Tower.  You can see a recent piece by the Fresno Bee’s Mike Osegueda and the large number of comments for some of the issues involved.

Mark Steele reported that sidewalk pop-outs and traffic circles were among the most popular features that came out in the streetscape plans that participants developed Saturday’s charrette.  However, the materials we had to work with virtually assured this outcome.  In addition to maps of the Tower business core and paper cutouts and stickers of various street features, we were also provided several sheets of paper with a few specific features on which to elaborate.  One was an intersection with pop-outs and the other was a traffic circle.  Not surprisingly, these features cropped up in a large number of designs we produced at the charrette.

Check out Kiel Famellos-Schmidt’s posting on the draft designs for more.

Critique: Tower District Streetscape Design Charrette

July 27, 2009 in design anthropology | Tags: , , | by anthroguy | 10 comments

Hank Delcore, Ph.D. (AnthroGuy), and Kiel Famellos-Schmidt (http://archop.org; this blog post is also available there)

Saturday from 10am to 2pm, about a hundred Tower District residents and business owners gathered for a design charrette put on by the City of Fresno planning department and MW Steele Group.  Steele has the contract for planning a redesigned Tower District streetscape as part of the Tower District Specific Plan.  Saturday’s event was a day of community input, with Steele returning this Tuesday night to present some design alternatives.

We laud City Councilman Blong Xiong, the city, various Tower District advocates, and the Steele Group for putting on this event.  Mark Steele and his team listened, took some hard questions, and were willing to engage in some good give and take.

As professionals in participatory design and community design methods, we also noted some things about the program that can inhibit the quality of community input and seriously limit the degree of real community participation in the design process. This critique is intended to increase the quality of design charrettes and community input in Fresno as well as raise awareness about the potential of participatory design.

Expert focus of the event:  The organizers stated that the day was all about the participants, but in practice, the more consistent emphasis was on the expert status of the architects/planners vis a vis the participants.  After an introductory presentation on the distinctiveness of the Tower by two long-time Tower advocates, Mark Steele took the stage and talked mostly about his firm and their approach to the project.  He presented his goals for the project, despite acknowledging that the day was about understanding our goals and aspirations.  His associate, Diego Velasco, followed with the firm’s views of the strengths and challenges of the Tower District – again, topics that the charrette was supposed to probe.  Expert statements are not the best way to begin an event meant to foster community participation in the planning and design process.

It wasn’t until 11:15am that the twelve tables of participants were unleashed on the first design drill.  By that time, some participants had already turned their attention away from the stage and were fingering the maps, stickers and other supplies on the tables.  An hour is too long for facilitators to dominate the stage at a four hour event.  The long lead-in both cut down the time for participants by a quarter, and set a strong expert-focused – not participant-focused – tone.

Diversity:  The tower district is a very diverse place. It is called home by many including: African American, Asian, Caucasian, Latino, young and old, the progressive community, and the GBLTQ community. Economically, there is a mix of home owners and renters, working class through upper class and even homeless. As well, Tower is a destination for those throughout Fresno and beyond in search of unique cultural, entertainment and dining experiences.

The participants at the charrette were overwhelmingly white and weighted toward local property and business owners; the average age looked to be about 50.  Conspicuously absent were youths and Latinos, two large and important resident/user groups in the Tower.  Tower visitors from other neighborhoods were also missing.  Those who attended are important, but they are already the most likely people to have their voices and preferences heard in this process, and they have a partial view of issues at stake in the streetscape.  For example, there were probably relatively fewer public transportation users among the participants than some other Tower constituencies, an important point when it comes to redesigning bus stops and associated features like sidewalks and bike racks.

Tight format, short time:  For each design drill, the participants had 15-20 minutes to work through complex issues, like recommending placement of street furniture and other features all across the Tower District business core.  Each exercise time was followed by thirty minutes of often repetitive presentations from each table to the entire group.  The design charrette had us wrestling with important and potentially highly creative design issues, but the exercise/presentation format was too tight and the table debriefings often came off as uninspired.

Constrained approach to community participation:  Finally, with the design alternatives meeting coming up Tuesday, we wonder how much of Saturday’s charrette can really be incorporated into the process.  Again, we agree that Mark Steele and his colleagues (and by extension the city) are sincerely trying to listen.  But it’s hard to believe that Steele and company didn’t already have some designs in mind or drawn up before the charrette.  If not, then they would have to work day and night from Saturday afternoon till Tuesday night to synthesize ideas from a hundred participants and come up with some design alternatives to present – and even then, this time frame is probably too tight.  Surely they are working with the charrette data right now, but they also probably had some designs already laid on and ready for their return to Fresno Tuesday night.  This raises the question:  how much community input can really be incorporated when the goals, strengths, challenges and preliminary design work have all already been done before the community is consulted?  (In fairness, Mark has said that the design alternatives they will present Tuesday night will not be very detailed; we’re sincerely curious about the firm’s process for analyzing charrette data and incorporating it into their designs.)

What We Would Do

In our experience, facilitating dozens of participatory design charrettes, as well as observation of other charrettes and research of best practices, here’s how a truly participatory design charrette might look:

Participant focus:  At one point Saturday, Mark Steele said, “today we’re gonna make you into streetscape designers.”  In other words, the experts were ready to teach us how to do something of what they do.  But a community design event shouldn’t be about transferring knowledge about design practice from experts to community members.  Instead, we start from the principle that everyone is a designer already, without expert help.  In other words, we all have design ideas and practices related to our surroundings, including our streetscapes.  A community design charrette should be aimed at unlocking the design insights we already have (or could have, in the right context), and making those insights available to professional designers.  Professional designers apply their experience and expertise to produce the actual design, inspired by community input.

In practice, a participant focus means that you deemphasize the role of expert or facilitator.  No long and potentially intimidating statements of who has what degree or affiliation or expertise; instead, you dive right into the participatory design exercises and maximize the time that the participants have at center stage.

Recruitment means diversity:  If you open the event up to “concerned citizens and business owners,” you tend to get a self-selected group of the usual suspects, as we saw on Saturday.  Instead, we recommend targeted recruitment among all user groups to ensure a diversity of participants in the design process. This of course takes more work up front in recruiting and screening. The result is much more useful data that can more accurately influence the design process.

Loosen up the format, take your time:  Getting true participation takes time and flexibility.  We would have recommended a series of three participatory design charrettes, with smaller yet more diverse participants, and more creative exercises involving, perhaps, larger scale prototyping and methods drawn from theatre and the arts — this is after all the Tower!  (Diego said that they considered a skit-making exercise but time constraints precluded it.)  Participants could act out common Tower interactions with streetscape props. Examples we bounced around included: the bus stop, the sidewalk café, the tower rat hangout, bar hopping, Rogue, etc. This would give the designers data about our culture and spatial needs. Using audio and visual recording, can capture both the data and the process through which it was produced for later analysis.

Another method we thought would be useful is to have different tables focus on different areas of the project area. With twelve tables of participants at the event all focused on the same design drills never more focused than the entire project area, a lot of redundant results were produced. The area is easily broken into six overlapping parts. Each area is then worked on by two tables. This would get all of the project area equal focus. At Hank’s table and the three tables Kiel facilitated, we noticed input was light at the edges. Also at the 1”=30’ scale aerial photo that was the last of the design drills, it was hard to definitively place streetscape elements and furniture represented by stickers in our tool pallet that included: sidewalk cafes, potted plants, streetlights, handicap ramps, benches, bike racks, etc.

Some of these measures would increase costs at the event level.  However, we have Fresno-area expertise to accomplish participatory design and planning work and the savings from keeping the work local would more than pay for the changes we suggest.

True participation:  Let’s face it, whenever we create something, we become wedded to it: we want to defend it, sometimes not even consciously.  From talking with Mark, and Diego, observing how the community was prompted, and the tight timeline, it seems much of the design is already in place.  Community consultation should take place before any designer digs into a project or puts pencil to paper.

While we value and honor the expertise of MW Steele Group and the work done by the City of Fresno and the Tower community, this is our honest assessment of the design charrette process and how it could be improved upon. Please attend the next meeting Tuesday, July 28th 7-9pm at Roger Rocka’s Dinner Theatre, where the design alternatives will be presented.

Tower District Streetscape Plan

Q & A with Diego Velasco

Tower District Streetscape charrette video

Bored in Fresno? Become an Anthropologist

ArcHop Construction Proceeds

Below, Tower District resident Jay Parks presents his table’s ideas from a design drill at Saturday’s Tower District streetscape design charrette while Diego Velasco of MK Steele looks on.

table 11

Data and Insight in Tension?

July 17, 2009 in design anthropology | Tags: , , , | by anthroguy | 3 comments

The AnthroGuys have been quiet but we’re still here, writing, moving, proposing, hiking, reading, researching, having our fall courses slashed, writing some more, and so on.

In the midst of all this I’ve had  something brewing about the relationship among data, insight/inspiration, and design — especially user-centered design.

First, I wonder if there is a false dichotomy brewing out there between design decisions based on “data” and those based on “insight.”  Second, I love how the data/insight issue mirrors some theoretical bugbears in anthropology and points to some affinities between good design and good anthropology.

Back in May, the New York Times ran a piece about Douglas Bowman, who left Google for Twitter, where he became creative director; his team is credited with adding the “trending topics” sidebar to your Twitter screen.  Apparently, Bowman left Google because, as the title of the Times article says, “data, not design, is king” there.  At Google, Web analytics rule the day and bold creative leaps are usually not welcome unless they are backed by solid data, which means that, in effect, they are not welcome.  Design Prof Debra Dunn of Stanford Institute of Design noted to the Times that Web analytics and related methods are good for some things (tweaking an existing design, or helping choose between option A and option B), but Web analytics do not produce broad design directions nor, typically, big leaps forward.  For that, Dunn said, one needs close-in engagement with users, understanding what they do and their pain points, and then some healthy design decisions can flow from that — decisions which can then be subjected to the Web analytics, but which cannot be inferred from Web analytics.  Bowman, who credits Google with doing what they do well (who doesn’t?), said nothing about user experience research per se, but noted that Twitter fits his sensibilities better because the organization is more open to inspirational leaps and design innovation.  (As far as I’m concerned, the trending topics bar is a super addition to Twitter, especially considering that they fielded it before #iranelection hit the mainstream news; at this writing, it’s still in the top 10).

The Times story stuck with me, perhaps because the “data is king” line about Google implies (perhaps unintentionally) that Web analytics generates data while Dunn’s suggested approach (going out and being with users, watching them, etc.) does not.  User experience blogger Andrew Hinton got me thinking even more with a thoughtful discussion of some of the same issues.

Hinton considers data to be both quantitative and qualitative, valuable and often essential, a great use in challenging ones own design biases, something clients often demand , BUT, not by itself the end of the story: “It’s just that data doesn’t do the job alone. We still need to do the work of interpretation, which requires challenging our presuppositions, blind spots and various biases.”  I love this quote from Hinton because it up-ends the positivist assumption that the data speaks for itself.  Data never speaks for itself, it always requires an act of interpretation (yes, even statistics are mute until we give them meaning!).  In design, the fact that data doesn’t speak for itself is especially obvious, since, as Hinton says, “Data cannot tell us, directly, how to design anything.”  What then should user experience professionals do?  According to Hinton, we should “use data to inform the fullest possible understanding of the behavior and context of potential users, as well as bring our own [design] experience and talent to the challenge.”  In other words, research-savvy designers need both data and designerly inspiration for good UX practice.

All of this reminds me of the anthropology as science vs. interpretive anthropology divide in my own discipline.  While explanatory science vs. interpretive understanding is not a necessary dichotomy, many have practiced anthropology as if it were.  On the science side, we have data (quant and qual), variables, causes-effect relationships, comparisons, and scalable conclusions.  The best work in this vein often leads to modest but reliable conclusions about human behavior.  On the interpretive side we have data (mostly qual), its interpretation, some insightful leaps, compelling illustrations, and a story that, if it’s well done, quite often takes us toward a deep understanding of another culture.

But wait!  A few decades of STS have shown us that science, like everything else man-made, only works via social and cultural means, and that capricious insights and idiosyncrasies — personal, social, cultural — matter greatly in how the work of science gets done.  Likewise, every piece of (good) interpretive anthropology begins with data, usually generated by fieldwork involving first hand, face to face contact with others.  So scientific and interpretive anthropology both involve data and inspiration.

Sometimes, the criticism is leveled at the interpretive folks that their findings are ultimately based on some mysterious leap of interpretation, and their conclusions are unverifiable and probably hinge on the ineffable qualities or skills of the researcher himself.  However, in my opinion, the masterpieces of ethnographic writing in anthropology have been produced by interpretive-leaning anthropologists, and they succeed in conveying some feel for what life is like in other cultures in a way that science-oriented anthropology often does not.  If deep understanding of another culture — flawed and open to debate, for sure — comes from leaps of inspiration and insight, then so be it.  The result can be beautiful (or well-designed, if you like).  The most recent work of well-designed interpretive anthropology that I read was Steven C. Caton’s Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation.  Caton has data, but he also takes liberties (in my opinion, warranted), and by the time you are done the people of whom he writes are less “subjects” and more “characters,” different but comprehensible.

No wonder design and anthropology go together so well.  In research-driven design work, data and insight are essential ingredients, just as they are in any good bit of anthropology.  If data and insight are in tension, it’s a productive tension — in both fields.

I close with a nice quote from Bonnie McDaniel Johnson in Design Research (edited by Brenda Laurel):

“Design research is inherently paradoxical: it is both imaginative and empirical.  It cannot be simply empirical because the ‘typical’ customers that researchers need to understand are rarely able to articulate their needs.  Design researchers must go beyond what they can find: to see more than is visible, and to learn more than can be heard.  Accordingly, design research is an act of imagination, just as much as design itself.  Yet it must also be grounded in empirical evidence, for no business manager wants to think that the research on which her profits depend is made up in the research department” (Laurel 2003:39).

Serious Play at Dogpatch Studios

June 29, 2009 in design anthropology | Tags: , , , | by anthroguy | 2 comments

On Friday, June 26, the Anthro Guys plus one (IPA research associate, Elfego Franco) attended the Innovation, Design and Serious Games Exchange at Dogpatch Studios in San Francisco.  Billed as an “unconference“, the event delivered on the promise of user-driven topics and format.  After playing an introductory game, A Strong Wind Blows, we had about twenty user-designed sessions over the next six hours broken up by some superb Indian food.

The mix of people was the best you could hope for.  There were marketing types, user experience and usability folks, process people (I learned that CSM stands for “Certified Scrum Master”; see also blog postings by Jeff McKenna and Doug Shimp), programmers, and a few anthropologists (i.e. me, TheAnthroGeek and Elfego).  The focus was on sharing experiences using games to spark product and organizational innovation.  Some of this was great fun.  For example, in one session, led by Dave Blum (aka Dr. Clue, who was in the SF Chronicle today), I was privy to a very lively conversation about games in and for social media which did eventually get down to my big question:  What games can we play with social media that can help inspire product innovation?  One of the best ideas was to adapt the innovation game, Speed Boat, for use on a social media site.  In another session, led by Professor of Game Design, Carrie Heeter, we got a peek at how game design works and I actually feel like I could create some simple games for use in some of the innovation exercises we use in our product development work.

Other things I encountered left me ambivalent.  For example, most participants were familiar with the book Innovation Games, by organizer Luke Hohmann.  Hohmann’s book has been influential in spreading the use of innovation games and the spirit behind the book was the same as the one behind the unconference:  serious play can spark powerful new ideas.  (This is why the Anthro Guys were turned on to this unconference in the first place — when we’re not in the field practicing ethnography, our workshop methods are all about breaking the mold with movement, laughter and play.)  One of the games Luke describes in the book and on one of the handy game cards that come with it is called “Me and My Shadow.”  From Luke’s website:

Shadow your customer while they use your product or service. Literally, sit next to them and watch what they do. Periodically ask them “Why are you doing that?” and “What are you thinking?” Take along a camera or camcorder and record key activities. Ask for copies of important artifacts created or used by your customer while they are doing the work.

I first heard about Me and My Shadow in one of the sessions last Friday, and I immediately recognized it as as stripped down version of ethnography, the basic and distinctive research philosophy of my field, cultural anthropology.  Since I believe that ethnography, with its open-ended, inductive approach to human behavior, is a very powerful tool for learning about human life and for turning up innovative ideas for improving our lives, I feel thankful to Luke for bringing its essence (“go out and be with people”) to a large number of people who may not have otherwise encountered it.  My only ambivalence was in seeing one of the core competencies of my discipline and the focal point of my professional practice reduced to a “game” that neatly fits on a small index card.

I fear this sounds snooty and academic — as in, “how dare you simplify my discipline like that!” — but it’s not intended that way.  The more people absorb the ethos of ethnography (if you want to learn about people, go out and be with them) the better.  Luke obviously gets that, hence, Me and My Shadow.   He also notes the deeper roots of the game in the ethnographic tradition.  It’s just that…it’s a little unnerving to see your life’s work distilled down to one 3×5 card.

All in all, we made some good connections and learned some things.  Thanks to Luke Hohmann, Nancy Frishberg and Kaliya Hamlin (aka Identity Woman) for the work of organizing Friday’s unconference.  We’ll carry some of the lessons we learned back to Fresno and incorporate them into our practice at the Institute of Public Anthropology.

PS. Search twitter #IDSGE for more buzz about this.

Anthropology from Fresno to Las Vegas to Chicago

May 5, 2009 in Library, design anthropology | Tags: , , , , , , , | by anthroguy | 22 comments

Michael Wesch at Kansas State recently blogged about how he and his students run their research class.  The quote that hits home: “First off, we organize it as a research group, not a class.”  The rest of the posting describes how this works in more detail.

For the last two years, The Anthro Guys have been doing something very similar.  We run the Institute of Public Anthropology as an anthropological consultancy at the service of Fresno’s non- and for-profit community.  Our mission is to use anthropological skills and knowledge to improve the quality of life in the Central Valley.  The students in our field methods class work the projects we land.  They get real life research experience and our clients gain insight into how to improve the way they serve their clients and customers.  Win-win.

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From Left: Dalitso Ruwe, Kim Arnold (back), Jamie San Andres, Dave Moore (back), Felicia Salcido, Elfego Franco (back) and Ashlee Dotson. Alecia Barela not pictured.

Some of this bore fruit that past weekend.  On May 1, seven Fresno State undergrad anthro majors and one recent graduate traveled to SWAA’09 (the Southwestern Anthropological Association conference) in Las Vegas to present findings from Institute of Public Anthropology projects.  Four — Ashlee Dotson, Alecia Barela, Kim Arnold and Dalitso Ruwe — talked about the Library Study, two — Jamie San Andres and Felicia Salcido — about the anthro-architecture collaboration on ArcHop, and two — Elfego Franco and Dave Moore — about using anthro in product development, aka “how anthropology can make you wealthy.”  The audience was particularly attentive at that point.

I, Anthroguy, was there and can tell you that they acquitted themselves superbly (and at the early hour of 8am!) with some astute observations, interpretations and reflections on everything from libraries to urban revitalization to iPhone apps.  “Anthropology: we do more before 9am than most sociologists do in a day!”  ;)

Aside from working IPA projects, Dalitso, Elfego and Dave are also in my interdisciplinary anthro-business-engineering class this semester.  The class is actually organized as a start-up venture, and the ten students (three anthros, six entrepreneurship, and one engineer) have been working on developing an iPhone app that will enable electric guitar players to practice anywhere anytime and still have access to all their guitar effects:  “self-expression on the go,” as they say.  The anthro students did fieldwork and design workshops with guitar players to explore how they experience effects pedals and the feasibility of putting it all on an iPhone app.  All the students collaborated to work up a business plan based on the results of that and other research.

So….while the anthros were in Las Vegas, five of their entrepreneurship major classmates were in Chicago at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Interprofessional Projects (IPRO) Day.  IIT requires all students to participate in an interdisciplinary team project centered on an innovative design solution to some socially pressing problem or market need.  On IPRO Day, teams present their projects for judging, and for the last two years I have sent a team from my interdisciplinary class to compete.  Last year, the Fresno State team took the award for best business plan.  This year, the business students from iPhone app team – Jared Apodaca, Jason Tromborg, Donna Dizon, Cesar Sanchez and Lee Vue – presented their business plan.  They didn’t win any prizes, but they were approached by a private investor asking for more financial projections.  (Fingers crossed.)

“Fresno’s “Nouveaux Pauvre”" part 2

April 23, 2009 in Uncategorized | by theanthrogeek | 32 comments

ElicetE made a really good point in a recent comment to the Nouveaux Pauvre posting.

I think the best thing anthropology can do is try to understand the problem.  If we can get to know the homeless community and understand their basic needs, maybe we can start finding solutions for them.

The question then becomes: How can anthropology do this?

Felicia Salcido’s recent posting on this subject illustrates one response that practicing or applied anthropologists can do to begin to answer these questions.

Does the past century of anthropology hold other secrects or applications we have not yet discussed?

How Anthropology can inform Homeless Issues

April 19, 2009 in design anthropology, housing | by theanthrogeek | 43 comments

Guest Author: Felicia Salcido will be blogging with us due to her particular expertise in this area. She is a student of anthropology and a very capable ethnographer. The following is from her:

I began working with the homeless when I received an email from my Professor Hank Delcore, about local architects wanting to build dwellings for the homeless in Fresno. I never worked with the homeless and definitely wanted the chance to be involved with something that would help out the community.

In January I volunteered to help get a head count of the homeless. I spent my afternoon at the Poverello House. The count is done bi annually to help the city and county implement the Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness. If you did not know this already, the count will provide leaders of the county a better understanding of the number of homeless people.

The Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness was adopted because of this rapidly increasing population of displaced persons. It is about time that the city and county established that homelessness is problem, but what’s next? How does the county end homelessness in ten years? I have been given the opportunity to witness first hand how the community is responding to this plan. It is no secret that there is a need for affordable housing. Yes, it is true that housing costs are low, but it is also true that a large portion people living in Fresno County are going into foreclosure. Thus, the community needs affordable housing. Local architects of Fresno recognized the need for affordable housing and therefore designed and constructed a 350sq ft dwelling that would allow the homeless to live in. The dwellings would be built in a vacated lot in Downtown Fresno. These built dwellings would hope to reduce some of the homelessness in our city.

Where does Anthropology come in? The architects were concerned with the efficiency of living space and wanted to know what the minimum amount of space for a successful dwelling was. A mock up of the dwelling was showcased at Archop night in February and it was the jobs of the student anthropologists/ethnographers to solicit, observe, document and analyze behavioral and communicated responses to the built space. Questions in regards to the built spaced were asked, such as “What do you think about this space?” “Can you imagine yourself living in a space like this?” and “Do you know someone who this space would be perfect for?” The answers were analyzed and conclusions were drawn. The research conducted was used to drive the re-design of the space. I may have more on how the data drove re-design at a later time.

This has been my experience working with the issue of homelessness so far, I am motivated to help in anyway I can and I am privileged that Anthropology has given me this experience. What the local architects are doing is only one step to ending homelessness in Fresno, Ca and I encourage everyone to help in anyway they can. Thanks.

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