Kiel Schmidt and I just got out of the National Charrette Institute course on their NCI Charrette System.  Bottom line:  we’re psyched.  We’re psyched to learn how much we already knew, and psyched to add to our skills the robust planning and management tools that NCI has to offer.  Most of all, we’re psyched to put on a full blown charrette in Fresno, because we’re convinced that it’s a great tool for producing plans in a collaborative way, with good buy-in all around, fewer reworks, and lower costs .  Here are a few highlights from the last few days.  (Check out Kiel’s viewpoint at archop.org as well.)

I came in thinking that a charrette was a part of the design or planning process.  Now, I’ve concluded that the charrette, or the charrette system, IS the design or planning process.  The prep work, stakeholder outreach, public meetings and workshops, production of design alternatives, settling on a preferred plan, and producing renderings and other deliverables at the end — all of this is part of the charrette system.  If you execute it well, you’ve completed 90% of the planning work, and — here’s the real selling point — all with intense public and stakeholder involvement, resulting in a very high chance of successful adoption and execution.

Right at the end today, someone asked Steve Coyle, “If I’m a consultant and I’m telling a client about this, in five words or less, how would I make the case for executing the NCI charrette system?”  Steve answered, “You can’t afford not to.”  Five words – that guy is good!  After hearing from the presenters, and the seasoned planning and design professionals at my table who have been using the system, I’m convinced of its value.  The NCI Charrette System has a track record of producing plans and designs that communities, jurisdictions and developers buy in on and — collaboratively — get behind.

One thing to think about:  As I said in a previous post, our lead instructors, Bill Lennertz and Steve Coyle, definitely believe in the power of public, transparent collaboration among all stakeholders to achieve better plans and designs, better buy-in, and decrease costly reworks.  However, the way they talk about public participation sometimes paints the public or the various stakeholders less as indispensable players in the process and more as obstacles to be overcome.  This may stem from the highly contentious nature of planning – and Steve and Bill have been thrust in the middle of some very contentious situations.

Another thing to think about:  The NCI Charrette system emphasizes preparation for the charrette, and they give consultants a wide range of tools and tips for getting to know the communities where they work.  Bill characterized it as a process of coming to see the “obstructionist neighbor” as a real person with a point of view – and he called on us to spend the time to be able to see that of all the stakeholders.

I’m here in Portland with Kiel Schmidt (aka Archop) attending a National Charrette Institute training on how to do a charrette, which NCI defines as a “multi-day collaborative planning event that engages all affected parties to create and support a feasible plan that represents transformative community change.”  In other words, a charrette is an event in which interested parties can participate in the planning of something (e.g. a revitalized downtown) by sharing design-related desires and insights.  (Coincidentally, while we’re here, the public meetings related to the new Downtown planning process, including a future charrette, have begun back in Fresno.)

Our instructors, Bill Lennertz of NCI, and Steve Coyle of Town-Green, are very experienced and knowledgeable.  They have a habit of answering questions with examples, which enhances my understanding.  At the same time, they’ve done a lot of work to pull out some general principles and best practices behind good charrettes.  They have also developed some great tools to help with charrette planning in particular.

Bill and Steve have made it very clear that they really do believe in the power of public, transparent collaboration among all stakeholders to achieve better plans and designs, better buy-in, and decrease costly reworks.  On the other hand, the way they have posed some of the problems and exercises reveals some indeterminacy in this stance.  For example, at times they have recommended processes of developing guiding principles or alternative plans that emphasize the role unelected powerholders and de-emphasize involvement by the communities that will be affected by the plan or design.

I really respect Steve and Bill’s experience and appreciate their insights, gained over many projects.  But I have come to realize that the charrette methods they have developed truly are their own proprietary version of charrette methods, the NCI Charrette System.  In the framework of the NCI system, the traditional relationships among clients (usually, a jurisdiction or developer), consultants, and other stakeholders still holds.  Ultimately, the consultants work for the client and the implicit focus remains on the client’s needs.  Bill and Steve argue that clients need the collaborative charrette process to achieve transformative change…but the focus is still on the client’s needs.  Hence, the community participates because their participation decreases the chance of failure.

Maybe this is enough for now.  Last day is tomorrow – looking forward to more good stuff.

Steve Coyle and Bill Lennertz

In the past year or so, I have experienced a few things that made me want some more formal training in charrette methods.  One was the Tower streetscape charrette that Kiel and I both blogged about.  If you read our critique, you will see what we found lacking in that event.  (So far, my experience at the NCI training confirms that the Tower streetscape process was seriously flawed.)  Then, last summer, I went to an event held by the city in which firms competing for downtown specific planning gig were introduced to potential local collaborators.  Several firms touted their experience and expertise running charrettes.

At the time, Kiel and I talked about our skills in community-based design research, and agreed that while we had a lot of experience, we could use more formal training in charrette methods.  Since then, Kiel and Shaunt Yemenjian founded Spacio Design Studios, and we have looked for opportunities to bring the Institute of Public Anthropology and Spacio together on community-based design projects.  So, attending the NCI training is part of a plan to increase our capacity to be a local source of excellent design planning and research.

I’ll try to blog more about the training itself and I’m sure Kiel with have a blog post up at some point, too.

What’s fascinating and fun about this is the multidisciplinary nature of the project and the constant struggle to clearly define what we are doing.  The team consists of three librarians, Allison Cowgill, Amanda Dinscore and Patrick Newell, plus myself and one of my advanced anthro students, Kim Arnold.  The librarians know the site best, and they know what students need to accomplish on it.  All have prior experience with library- and information-related research.  I’ve found my own best contributions relate to how to handle live human subjects with both respect and a firm guiding hand.  Plus, I think it’s helpful to the project to have non-librarians around who can probe the rationale behind the various questions.  I have found myself asking, repeatedly, “What are you trying to get at when you ask a user to do this?” – forcing an examination of assumptions and goals.  I hope I always have someone asking me those kinds of questions when I’m formulating projects.

Right now, we’re in the testing phase and the instructions to the users and wording of some of the questions are still up in the air.  We’ve tested the protocol on each other, and on the moderators – five anthropology majors who will administer to the test to the actual subjects.  Each time we’ve administered the protocol, we’ve turned up a new issue.  One open issue we have right now is how to handle the well-known student practice of going off site to find resources that are on site.  For example, we know that some students use Google Scholar to search for resources – a practice that sometimes brings them back to the library website itself.  Another example: in a test session, one of the anthro student moderators playing test subject opened a browser page and used Google to find the requested information, and then tracked back to the library website – “found it.”  So, in the test, do we prohibit users from going off site?

Right now, I’m leaning toward prohibition.  We know students use Google and other tools to make the library’s website work for them.  But this study is a test of the library’s website.  If we’re going to gauge how well it works for students, we need to keep them on the site – even if it means short-circuiting their tendency to exit the site and come back from another direction.  If a user struggles to find something, or fails to find it, then we’ll know that’s an area where we need re-examine the site’s architecture.  If we let them go off site to solve the problem, we won’t be able to record the process through which they try to solve the problem using the library site.

This is an odd place for me to come down, since most of the work I do is highly strategic.  I place a high value on trying to see the world from another’s point of view.  In a different context, I’d really want to let the user go to Google and show me how they would really solve the problem.  That’s real user practice and it’s significant.  But in this context, I keep coming back to the goals of the study:  this is a test of the library website, not a study of student search practices.

I can’t wait will our next workgroup meeting where we can hash out this and other issues.  I suspect some of my colleagues will have different approaches to the issues.  Like I said, these collaborative, multidisciplinary projects are FUN.

Comments and opinions are most welcome.

My talk to the assembled staff focused on the use of ethnography to get at the implicit, contextual level of users’ experience of various product and service areas.  I used some examples I’ve laid out in a previous posting, as well as some drawn from the Library Study we did at Fresno State and a recent advance in hearing aid design.  As Jim and I discussed before my visit, the puzzling thing about this kind of work is: how do you translate strategic information into the actual design of effective, experientially rich products and messages.  In other words, what exactly takes place in the space between the collection and analysis of the design/marketing data and the final product.  The data is advisory: it never actually “tells” you what the final design should be.  So, typically, the creatives, ideally in conversation with the data, work their magic and come up with the final message or design.

I don’t think any of us really know what that “magic” is.  Afterall, this is art we are talking about, whether it’s a carefully crafted radio spot or a beautiful product.  What I can say, however, is that the chances of a smooth and effective shift from data to design get better with close collaboration among project managers, research types and the creatives themselves.  This was what I tried to leave with the folks at JSA:

“Product or account managers, researchers and creatives – we need to keep each other close, perhaps even closer than our own kind.  In the Library Study, we had the interior design students attend the design workshops [on the interior spaces of the Henry Madden Library] to see firsthand how we gathered the information.  Afterwards, we all sat together, anthropologists and interior designers, and watched the video we shot of the students making their designs in the workshops.  We hashed out the meaning of the way they placed the blocks and the meaning of their explanations for their choices.  This was frustrating, puzzling, time consuming, exciting and rewarding.  But in the end, we need to be in each other’s business as much as possible.  There is no substitute for crossing boundaries and hashing things out, together, despite (or because of) all of our different specialties and interests.  I am sure that there is no other way to excellence.”

Thanks to Bruce Batti, President of JSA, and to Jim Lowe, for the chance to exchange experiences with the strategic end of client services.  The staff that gathered was attentive and engaged and we had a lively discussion afterwards.  Looking forward to more collaboration with JSA in the future!

Why?  In short, because we as Americans have developed an enduring set of practices that involve making and maintaining social lives through consumption.  These practices are not ephemeral, and we will not simply slough them off in the face of the “Great Recession.”  They run deeper, and they’ll be back soon enough.

In his short piece, McCracken paints a portrait of “Susan,” a composite of consumers he has known through research.  Susan has a garage full of stuff – so much that her cars are relegated to the driveway.  She just spent $45,000 to remodel her kitchen/dining/living room into a single “great room” so she can better socialize with dinner guests and not feel “like a servant” in her own home, shunted away in the kitchen while her guests yuck it up on the other side of a wall between her and the living room.

Let’s review some ways we might interpret Susan:

Susan is a shallow, grasping materialist whose life is empty and meaningless, and so she is trying to fill it with stuff.

Susan is just exercising her god-given right to spend her (or her family’s) well-earned money however she sees fit, and who are we to criticize her.

Susan is a status-seeking machine.  This is all about display.  Susan is asking us to look at what she has, can afford to have, etc. – and to register her relatively high position on some scale of social hierarchy.

To some extent, McCracken turns away all of these options in favor of a less sound-bitey, but more satisfying, conclusion:  Susan’s consumption practices are acts of personal and social self-definition.  From the garage to the great room, her consumption enables her to enact, socially, the kind of person she wants to be.  (By the way, McCracken focuses on someone with quite a bit disposable income, but this process of personal/social self-definition can hold in different ways all across and up and down the socioeconomic spectrum.)

In an exchange with a commenter to the piece, McCracken sums it up nicely:  “Americans are especially interested, for several technical reasons, in using the object world, their material culture, to [define themselves].”

What I like about this post is that it represents classic anthropology.  McCracken is trying to see things from Susan’s point of view.  He resists easy judgment passing.  He’s sympathetic to Susan; he credits her with being as much a smart, self-aware person as his readers and commenters.

Personally, I do wonder if perhaps Susan is grasping and materialistic in ways that I (again, personally) find disheartening.  But McCracken’s point is that, whatever your judgments are, Susan is so much more than that.  She is an American socio-cultural creature whose life is sensible and meaningful to her given her time and place.  (By the way, I don’t mean “meaningful” in some cosmic sense; I simply mean that that she does what she does for reasons that fit, given the rest of her context.  She is not an idiot or a dupe.)  Morally judge her if you will, but if you want to understand her, leave your judgments at the door.

By the way, McCracken mentions a just-published book called Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What, by Lee Eisenberg.  I bought it and I’m in the middle of it.  If you’re deep into retail, marketing, or the science of consumption, you won’t find much new here.  It’s breezy and a bit over-general.  But, Eisenberg is a fun writer and he’s concentrated lots of stuff in one place, with half the book on the current state of the “Sell” side, and half on the “Buy” side.  I recommend it.  Eisenberg mentions this fun website – check it out, too.

[Anthroguy (Hank Delcore), TheAnthroGeek (Jim Mullooly), and two other Fresnans (anthropology alum Alecia Barela and current anthro major Kim Arnold) are in Philadelphia presenting papers at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting.  They will share a panel with two former Fresno State anthro students, Michael Scroggins and Anne Visser, now pursuing graduate studies at Columbia and the New School, respectively.]

Being Thanksgiving week, many people were gone and others who had planned to come excused themselves due to looming deadlines.  (Jonathan Grudin had accepted an invitation to come but unfortunately couldn’t make it.)  One thing others have noted about MS was confirmed during my visit:  this is a hard driving, “type A” organization where it’s all about what you can deliver.  One designer brought some sketches to work on while I spoke — which I thought was great.  He had a meeting the next day and had to have something ready.

The purpose of my talk was to fill the MS folks in on design anthropology at Fresno State and the work of the Institute of Public Anthropology.  I ran down some curricular innovations we’ve fielded recently and described some recent IPA projects with ArcHop and the Library Study.

My other goal was to gauge how well we are prepping our students — anthro majors, business, engineering, etc. — for design-oriented work at places like Microsoft.  What I heard was that we are doing lots right.  One UX research manager singled out our emphasis on interdisciplinary teamwork as crucial — that’s the reality at MS, but the weakness of many highly capable experts from all fields.  The other important thing we do is to help students, in their IPA-related projects,  make the leap from data to design insight to concrete recommendation.  MS and many other organizations demand you justify your existence by pointing to real impact, which means it’s not enough to produce good research — you have to effect change and drive implementation.

One thing I took away that I need to work sensitivity to product life cycle more into our curriculum and IPA practice.  You have to know where you are in the product development cycle to know what kind of recommendations are helpful — our students need to know more about that.  One product planner also noted that it’s helpful to know how to think about the links between the product and the larger strategy behind the product or even the entire organization.

This was all good stuff.  It was helpful for me to see a slice of how Microsoft works and hear from some people on the front lines.  On the Microsoft side, they seemed excited by the IPA’s emphasis on design research and the rich educational experiences our students are receiving.  We discussed some possible points of collaboration between the IPA and Microsoft — we’ll see how those develop over  the next few months.

Thanks to Nelle Steele for making my visit happen!

I like not to know for as long as possible because then it tells me the truth instead of me imposing the truth. Michael Moschen

TheAnthroGuys spend a great deal of time trying to use and teach the use and limits of analytic induction.  This is more than just a curricular objective; it is an impassioned crusade, a holy war against the zombies of common sense.  This may sound somewhat over-eager for some but the power of common sense is typically unassailable.  Left unchallenged, “common sense” – supported by humans’ penchant for retrospective sense making – claims the final word in most cases.

A case in point is a colleague’s reference to our use of the term “analytic induction” as oxymoronic.  But analytic induction is not an oxymoron.  Rather, it is an effective methodology of managing many observations made in most research contexts.  Deduction and induction can be thought of in cyclical relationship to each other.  With analytic induction, one is able to think outside of the box systematically.  One can approach problems and expect more than the accidental inspiration of the “ah-ha moment”.

In Ethnography for Marketers (2006), Hy Mariampolski references a term he calls “magic”, to invoke such terminology for the very same reason that we are trying to focus on this problem.  In a section entitled, “creating imaginative interpretations” Mariampolski urges readers to move beyond the initial assumptions about what one sees in the field.

Recently published a fine line (2009) further illustrates the power of systematically thinking outside of the common sense.  Written by Hartmut Esslinger, founder of Frog Design, this sort of advice could not come from a better source.  Esslinger starts the book by pointing out how “out of the box” his approach has been and how very successful it has been due to its rigor.

It is not easy to liberate the truth from the burden of one’s own gut instincts or the sense that seems common to all, but if given enough time, time to “not know for as long as possible”, as Michael Moschen states, then the rich rewards of true creativity become available.

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.