WithScotland: Complex Idea – Simple Video

Posted on 22/04/2013 by Fernando Galdino

Design Ethnography is not just about discover, is also about how to communicate findings, insights and conclusions in a straightforward way.

At the Strategic Information Design module our challenge was to get WithScotland message across the a quite broad audience they intent to reach – from academics, practitioners and other professionals deeply involved in child and adult protection to the mainstream public who might be interest in the area.

Main challenges:

Align a very diverse team – 5 people, 3 different courses, 4 different nationalities
Be very careful with terminology due to the delicate field (child and adult protection)
Respect WithScotland brand parameters
Align level of quality, the skills of the group and a tight schedule

This is the final result chosen by the client as the best of the final solutions.

What is WithScotland from Fernando Galdino on Vimeo.

We would like to thank Beth Smith, Director of WithScotland for her trust, support and feedback. We also want to thank Megan Robertson for her outstanding voice, Setuniman and FreeSound for the soundtrack. We also want to thank Flickr and the following photographers: Frank Guido, Davide Cassanello, Adrian Dreßler, Josep Ma. Rosell, Maessive and Stefano Corso.

Thank you very much for your support through Creative Commons.

Soundtrack: Setuniman at FreeSound.org
freesound.org/people/Setuniman/sounds/170914/

Pictures: Flickr.com via Compfight.com

Frank Guido - flickr.com/photos/70973526@N00/5960974663/

Davide Cassanello - flickr.com/photos/dcassaa/395470853/

Adrian Dreßler - flickr.com/photos/38211812@N07/7308405302/

Josep Ma. Rosell - flickr.com/photos/10488545@N05/1865482908/

Stefano Corso - flickr.com/photos/pensiero/389087892/

Maessive - flickr.com/photos/42346519@N00/106440594/

And last but not least, a big thank to our team!

Alina Achiricioaei – Design for services - twitter.com/achiricioaei

Chongyu Tu – Product Design - twitter.com/ewantu

Claire England – Design for services - twitter.com/claireaengland

Ying Zhang – Design Ethnography - twitter.com/arielzhang4

The whole process is described at our blog - sidteam2.wordpress.com

Cheers!

Re-focus Group

Posted on 14/04/2013 by Fernando Galdino

I love Tom Fishburne’s cartoons!

Don Norman and Roberto Verganti are asking in this article “Can design research ever lead to radical product innovation?“and they provide the answer “Yes, but this is unlikely to occur through the methods of human-centered design.”

Going on they say:

The more that researchers study existing human behavior, activities, and products, the more they get trapped into existing paradigms. These studies lead to incremental improvements, enabling people to do better what they already do, but not to radical change that would enable them to do what they currently do not do.

Of course they are not against research – for those who do not know Don is the “Norman” on Nielsen Norman Group - one of the biggest and most influential research institutes in the world and he helped to define what HCD is nowadays.

What I think is that disruptive innovations are not common and organizations need to know, get inspired and connect with people, so research is crucial. However, trapping people into a lab-like aquarium and watch a discussion while eat snacks will not be very helpful.

I have moderated many “focus groups” with a diverse range of objectives. From exploring a very abstract concept and its relation to transportation, to very concrete testing where was hard to tell what was prototype and what was a working product. For me the worst part was always the lack of context. Small comments that in a contextual situation (such as house visits) would lead to a conversation around a pan, a ring or a bible ended or simply never happened because the “hook” for the conversation was not there.

It is not new that “innovation” people hold some mixed feelings about focus grups, lately Gianfranco Zaccai from Continuum wrote on FastCompany that “Focus Groups Kill Innovation” and after a lot of negative reactions he wrote a more a more friendly article “Focus Groups Are Dangerous. Know When To Use Them“.

But why business and focus group live such a happy love story?

According to Jenn Schiffman and Defne Civelekoglu from Gravity Tank at their presentation Re-focus Group there are three main reasons for such love.

Cost effective - You can have a relatively big group of people coming to a facility and giving answers.

Time effective - You can interact with 16 or even more people in a single day, a lot compared to house visits for example.

Proven method - It is somehow traditional and known at the clients side. Way easier to understand than more less traditional methods.

Their proposal is to develop a more empathetic kind of focus group. Do it in other environments, having researchers, designers, participants and clients together in a more natural conversation. Use rough prototypes to stimulate conversations and so on. Have a look on Gravity Tank’s lecture and gather some tips for future focus groups.

The Refocus Group from gravitytank on Vimeo.

What do you think?

Any | The shapeless mobile phone concept for the year 2020

Posted on 03/04/2013 by Fernando Galdino

In 2009 I was living in Curitiba and kind of bored. I found a challange online to design a mobile phone concept for the year 2020. You know, 2020 is the new 2000 in the collective mind for when-cool-things-gonna-happen.

I invited Kleber Puchaski and João Moldenhauer to design it together. After a lot of emails, a good secondary research and few meetings we came out with this concept – please forgive all 2009-ish design style and poor my poor English.

This is just an exploration, a couple of ideas about how things might be in a couple of years from now. I really believe one of the “next big things” for the mobile world will be these “hardware apps”. The smartphone will not be a box with everything inside, but several devices connected that can be embedded in the same artifact or spread in one’s body.

That is my guess. Do you have any?

Norman – Rethinking Design Thinking (again)

Posted on 20/03/2013 by Fernando Galdino

I like his catholic priest vibe.

In 2010 Don “Design of Everyday Things” Norman posted “Design Thinking – A useful myth” on Core77. Now he is rethinking design thinking. Apparently the process of revisiting his book and writing new chapters, bringing more examples and making stronger links to the business side of design made him reconsider the whole argument.

Bruce Nussbaum, a the big responsible for the presence of term design thinking (and by consequence design) in the business agenda in the last couple of years also wrote about design thinking been a failed experiment in 2011.

I think both have a huge point. “Design thinking” have reached such level as a buzzword that it kind of get us tired of it. As I have said other times when I got involved in arguments about design thinking been something new or not, if it is valid or not, bla bla bla. For me it was always about finding people who were doing a better design, more empathetic and human centered than the use of the term “design” (an expression even more misused than “design thinking”).

A more efficient keyword / #hashtag. Just it.

Don Norman talks about “the power of the stupid question” as the main asset designers have as outsiders who can challenge the status quo. In this sense I am really happy to be studying in a place where we call ourselves professional idiots – exactly because we learn to ask stupid questions for a living.

Hartmut Esslinger – Advice For Designers

Posted on 18/02/2013 by Fernando Galdino

Hartmut is my kind of person. Saying what need to be said. Via @MauroAlex

Hartmut Esslinger – Advice For Designers from frog on Vimeo.

In this other video he talks about his book The Fine Line (also in the same straightforward tone).

Meteors, Culture and Natural Selection

Posted on 17/02/2013 by Fernando Galdino

You are probably aware of the meteor falling in Russia this week. You probably also watched lots of high-definition videos of the fire-ball tearing the sky.

As me you probably thought “how did they manage to get all this footage?”. In summary, because of violent roads, corrupted police and skeptic justice system, dash-cameras are a must have in Russia.

A compilation of outstanding Russian dash-camera videos.

As we sometimes forget technology are tools serving people. People inhabit certain contexts that are important for what they choose or avoid to use. These contexts are made of different factors, but the global/local cultures are crucial to understand why certain innovations arise, are adopted and kept, or vanish away. Therefore, the right innovation needs the right context to flourish.

Just like living creatures in nature, new products/services are trying to survive following rules that resemble natural selection. If in Darwin’s theory the environment plays a major role – with predators, mating rituals and food scarcity - at the innovation field the socio-cultural context is the “environment” determining who thrives an who vanishes. In this particular case the Russian historical, social, cultural, juridical and economical context are setting a stage where small digital cameras fit perfectly.

The good thing about it is that using tools from social sciences (such as ethnography) we can study these socio-cultural contexts using findings to design products/services to fit in these scenarios. Is as if species could plan beforehand how they should be to have better chances of success in a certain environment. True intelligent design.

Guess:

Now that we had this deep impact on the culture of visual documentation, maybe the habit of 24/7 footage arise in other countries, both to better deal with lawsuits, or just to be ready in case pure awesomeness knocks at your door.

UPDATE: Why is it not happening in Brazil?

With the famous corrupt police and technology adoption Brazil should be doing the same thing as Russia. Right? Maybe not.

I guess this phenomenon is not happening in Brazil because of the cultural context. Bribing is usually carried by the person committing the infraction, being the least interested on document it.

Talking about traffic fee for example. Usually the owner of the car is the one trying to get out of the situation. The driver would be the one using the famous “jeitinho Brasileiro” (Brazilian workarounds) to bribe the police officer avoiding a more severe fee.

As far as I know Brazilian corruption have a subtle, almost friendly spirit. A police officer will never openly ask a driver for money, instead what happens is a favor exchange. Starting with a small double-sense chit-chat to feel if the other side would prefer an “alternative solution”. This bribe is called “o dinheirinho da cerveja” or just “pra cervejinha“, which means just a change for a couple of beers (of course many times it is way more than that).

Roberto DaMatta is one of the most respected Brazilian anthropologists and wrote a lot about this behavior.

The social animal

Posted on 14/02/2013 by Fernando Galdino

David Brooks talking about how our emotions and social skills should be important than rationality. Interesting, but risky considering what guys like Dan Ariely and Dan Gilbert can say about how irrational and dumb our decision making is.

Extreme Documentation on Ethnography

Posted on 12/02/2013 by Fernando Galdino

Big Data was one of the hottest topics in 2012, and probably will keep trending for sometime.

Maybe what make people so exited about it is the numerical proof of things we sometimes “feel” happening, but have a hard time explaining how we came to this conclusion.

At this post Andy Polaine talks about ”Self ethnography and the quantified life”, referring to the vast range of products and apps helping people to have an Excel view of their own existence. He also links Gary Wolf’s talk “The Quantified Self” discussing how easy is to document our daily lives and how it have being changing the way people behave.

This week I came across this TED talk from the MIT researcher Deb Roy shows how he used powerful cameras, microphones and data servers to turn his house into a laboratory (Big Brother style). He fully documented in audio and video the whole process of how his newborn learned to speak. Amazing!

But where does it lead us? Are we close to a time where qualitative and quantitative data collection can turn our world in a high-tech version of Kitchen Stories?

Probably.

It can be frightening depending on your techno-phobia levels, but can kids who were born with their Facebook profiles care much about having their live documented 24/7? I guess they gonna love it!

Furthermore, I dare to say that somewhere out there someone is already trying this kind of extreme approach with a business/innovation focus.

Illustrated Debate: The Future of British High St.

Posted on 25/01/2013 by Fernando Galdino

Since quite a long time I want to develop some quick graphic representation skills. Something like visual note-taking. As I started attending to the University of Dundee Debate Union it looked like a pretty good idea to illustrate the debates as they go.

Last debate addressed the question “Is there a future to High Street?“. In this case it is not a particular address, “High Street is a metonym for the generic name of the primary business street of towns or cities, especially in the United Kingdom”. Wikipedia

So the debaters were discussing if the government support should be applied to help medium and small commercial businesses against the threats of e-commerce and gigantic retail chains.

And this is my quickie representation:

At the left side those defending a governmental aid in order to save jobs and the British High Street culture itself. At the right side those defending that no aid should be given, and old-fashioned obsolete business models should fail because eventually new ones would take their place.

I felt a “vibe” of a famous Scottish invention, the invisible hand, but didn’t found a way to use it properly. However the idea that some companies must die and others survive in a “natural selection” pushed me to another strong British reference, Charles Darwin.

I with I could think about more icons than the flag… But nothing was coming to my mind ate the moment.

Lets see if I can keep doing these illustrations.

Why Design Ethnography?

Posted on 14/01/2013 by Fernando Galdino

If I had a penny for each weird look I receive for the answer to “what are you studding”…

This post aims to show how getting these two fields together just make a lot of sense.

Firstly, “design ethnography” is formed by two terms. The well known “Design” and the not-as-popular “Ethnography”, which is for the anthropologist a basic method as drawing is for designers. Hence, to talk about this subject it is necessary to talk about both design and anthropology.

1 – Design

The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) defends that:

Design is a creative activity whose aim is to establish the multi-faceted qualities of objects, processes, services and their systems in whole life cycles. Therefore, design is the central factor of innovative humanisation of technologies and the crucial factor of cultural and economic exchange.[emphasis added]

ICSID also list a series of tasks delegated to the design field:

Enhancing global sustainability and environmental protection (global ethics)
Giving benefits and freedom to the entire human community, individual and collective
Final users, producers and market protagonists (social ethics)
Supporting cultural diversity despite the globalisation of the world (cultural ethics)
Giving products, services and systems, those forms that are expressive of (semiology) and coherent with (aesthetics) their proper complexity.

[emphasis added]

As presented by Brenda Laurel’s book Design Research “if they [designers] desire to attract and delight customers or audiences for their work, they need to understand the people for whom they design.” It is also defended that until the 1990’s it was quite simple, populations – people from the same country or region, for example – were, in general, exposed to the same brands, products and media references, hence, sharing the same culture. Well… we know that it is not as true as it used to be…

2 – Anthropology

According to AAA (American Anthropological Association), “anthropology is the study of humans, past and present” and the “central concern of anthropologists is the application of knowledge to the solution of human problems”[emphasis added]. Anthropology can also be divided in four areas: Linguistic, Archeology, Biological/Physical – and Sociocultural.

The AAA describes sociocultural anthropology as a practice which “seeks to understand the internal logic of societies through ethnography”[emphasis added], define in more details they state:

Sociocultural anthropologists examine social patterns and practices across cultures, with a special interest in how people live in particular places and how they organize, govern, and create meaning.[...] Research in sociocultural anthropology is distinguished by its emphasis on participant observation, which involves placing oneself in the research context for extended periods of time to gain a first-hand sense of how local knowledge is put to work in grappling with practical problems of everyday life and with basic philosophical problems of knowledge, truth, power, and justice. Topics of concern to sociocultural anthropologists include such areas as health, work, ecology and environment, education, agriculture and development, and social change. [emphasis added].

3 – Design Ethnography

Given these definitions, it is straightforward to come with a simple logical relation and conclusion:

if designers must understand peoples’ cultures in order to generate relevant and marketable solutions;
if anthropology is the area of knowledge covering this subject;
and both seek to apply their knowledge to create solutions to human problems;
it is reasonable to suppose that designers could – or even should – apply social-anthropology methods – such as ethnography – to better understand the users of their future creations.

As AIGA’s Ethnography Primer summarizes “Ethnography is a tool for better design.”

And I think it is not just that. The extremely applied characteristic of design helps to turn research findings into down-to-earth outcomes as products, services and media.

For me it is this simple. What do you think?