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After Ethnography

Rick E. Robinson Iota Partners

Iota is a new venture that John Cain and I have just started with some other colleagues of ours. We are doing some new things with user experience research and new kinds of data. Today Im going to talk to you about the philosophy we are bringing to the research work we do through this new business. Im not going to talk about specific projects, but rather about how we think, and mostly about where we think the research side of the user experience world is going all set in the colliding of new contexts. A Short History of Market Research I begin with some of the past decades big changes in applied research. I call it market research for wont of a better term, but I really mean the things that research has brought to design, and vice versa. I want to put a certain little spin on this because I think there has been a series of slightly discontinuous turns, and I want to set up my argument that we have reached a new turn, right now. And as with other kinds of collision, it is as much an opportunity as it is a danger.

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Opinion Research // Advertising Research // Segmentation Models // HCI // User-Centered // Now What?

So. Market research, when I first encountered it as I was coming out of an academic context twenty years ago, was mostly based on opinion research. The big dominant players had all been opinion pollsters. As that the work of market researchers moved more into the product development world, maybe in the 1950s or a bit earlier, the big consumer concepts were attitude & awareness or intention as in intent to purchaseall things largely developed to support the work of advertising, rather than the work of product development. Then, when segmentation models first came out in the mid-1980s, large-scale ones, they really changed the game again. They conveyed information that had already been available, but there was a new framework brought to it that made it more useful for a broader range of business applications. So segmentation was a tool built on top of research data, demographic data, and it broadened the interplay between product development and research because now you had these useful characterizations of people. Just about then also came the first beginnings of product research in the computer and communications world and particularly the beginnings of usability studiesvery lab-based, but again, it was for new devices, to solve all the problems of, How do you try to understand the likely performance of a product that hasnt existed before? This was really the first time in computer science that people started trying to deal with future product performance as a market research question, as in Will this be adopted? and Is this a good feature? You couldnt just ask attitude and awareness questions because nothing like these products had existed before. Now weve gone so far along that path, however, that these questions have really become everyday existence for researchers. Its no longer about trying to get responsive information, but trying to understand or draw some structure and framework around things that dont exist yet. About fifteen to twenty years ago, user-centered research really picked up the ethnographic approach from social sciences. That was another shift. Ethnographic research was not new as an approach in social sciences, but it was new in its application to the product development world and it really shifted things. It brought the users perspective into multiple development processes, not just in acceptance after the fact. So you had a whole different notion of who you needed to pay attention to. And over the past twenty years, the development of approaches, the development of language, as well as methodologies to understand the users point of view have all been brought firmly into the development process. Weve been talking at this conference about how integrated that approach now seems to be, and yet there is a feeling among some within the field that maybe this once-exciting work has plateaued. Okay, an analogy: When segmentations were first available, they were enormously differentiating. Just having a segmentation model was a competitive advantage. Now, everybody uses and works with segmentation models, so the particulars of a segmentation model are what make it valuable or not. Just the fact of having one no longer matters as much. We are in the same situation with ethnographic research and user-centered approaches. Once upon a time it was very differentiating and extremely valuable to have that information, as opposed to competitors that were technology-driven, but nobody is purely user-centered or purely technologically driven anymore.

What Comes After Ethnography? I started doing ethnographic research and working at the intersection of research and product design development because I liked the way it could change the world. I liked the way it could change everyday experience for people. If its no longer having that impact, if its no longer a disruptive tool, then I want to figure out whats next. So heres what I want to talk about today: Whats after ethnography in the user-centered approach to product development? When I say product development, I mean it extremely broadly. Ethnography wasnt supposed to be, and isnt necessarily defined as, fieldwork. The core of the work has always been the ability to translate the future through some abstracted model back into a picture of the current reality. So, speaking in terms of traditional anthropological and sociological methods, using the tools of going out to understand the other (other societies, eras, strata) and then bringing back that information so that it was comprehensible to your peers, has become, in the applied world, understanding what a future experience might be and making that accessible in the current context. This next diagram is a simplification of a whole process of ethnographic work that I have used for a long time, and that Jane Fulton-Suri at IDEO and other people use, because it is actually derived from Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist. Its a simplification of his model.

abstract

(less messy) model of reality

messy reality concrete present

the model youd like to have (strategy)

future

Now at the top of this is what ethnographic practice has tried to producemodels of something, useful representations of something. I think that perhaps the ur-model of the twentieth century (and hopefully into the twenty-first) is the double-helix structure DNA. There is a famous picture of Watson and Crick with the model that they builta physical model out of sticks and balls and pipes and lab equipmentin the stairwell behind their lab. Despite the fact that the double-helix model that they built doesnt look like what you can see under a (modern, powerful) microscope, making the physical structure apparent and

James Watson and Francis Crick with original model of DNA in 1953

testing out how it might work was very important to them, both as scientists, but also in seeing if the construct mattered to other people. And if you think about the kinds of things that people do with DNA as a model, now, I think were looking at that same sort of connection: the abstraction of reality into something that makes it apprehensible by other people and gives you the ability to change it. Thats what is really important here. Models At Iota, we use a very basic definition: a model is a useful representation of the organization of _____. Whatever that blank might bean experience, a process, a structure. Space. Whatever. People also call them interpretations, narratives, and frameworksany of those are ways of making sense of the world from a users point of view, and thus all of them are forms of explanation. Explanations are ways that you make sense of phenomena in a new framework. Where hard science research and social science research have gotten into conflict with some applied research, especially design research, is at the rational, logical part of building a model out of the data on user experience. Most of us are really good at that; we can take what we see, the kind of observations weve made, and put them into an order that makes sense, that is rational, that is logical. But when all anyone asks you is whether those models predict future behavior, you are bound to start to come into conflict with the goals and practices of other parts of the organization, other ways of doing science. And interpretive approaches are usually seen as soft rather than useful. Louis Menand is a historian of ideas who has written a lot on the American university, and on the social organization of universitieshow they get funded, how they evolve, why there are different tiers, what separates different universities both in the United States and in the rest of the world. Earlier this year, he published a book called The Marketplace of Ideas, which is a summation of a lot of work that hes done over the past five or six years. And one of the pieces that Menand talks about is Three Ways of Knowing the World. He explains that there are people who want to know the world by describing what things are (science), and at the other end of the spectrum are people who want to understand what things mean (art), and in between is trying to determine how people behave. At the core of this middle pursuit, one is trying to connect the way things are to what they mean. So when Menand talks about this as a coherent system, he says that science and knowledge of the world has all of these components. Theres science (how things are), theres art (what things mean), and theres what people do with those things. And the interesting part, to me, is that he talks about entire fields, how entire domains of knowledge, as they evolve over time, shift, and not just from one end of this to the other. Its not just a progression from interpretation to hard science that happens as a field grapples with different problems that are differently knowable, because the relative balance of whats valued in each field will change.

There have been times when the leading edge of natural science was truly an interpretive one, and then, perhaps at the other extreme, a time when people thought that the future of science was going to just be completely descriptive, as clearly mapped out and as straightforward as anatomy; all we had to do was finish off the litany of how all the parts and pieces worked. But recombinant and epigenetic technologies have now made even this seemingly bedrock aspect of biology open up again, because we have new tools and new ways to know the world. Whether or not we should recombine these things has become as much a question as whether we can combine these things. What genes mean is a fiercely contested area of knowledge again. The construction of meaning is at the center of why we study human behavior. I dont think there are any people who study behavior just to describe it anymore. You have to get to meaning and to the question of Why? What things in the world mean, what implications they have for us, necessarily involves social structure as well as human interpretation. 5 That is the point weve reached in this kind of research. It would be very nice to know all of these things (what they are, how they behave, what they mean) about everything that we are engaged in, but it would take lifetimes and millions of dollars. The point is not to say, We should be able to know all of these things, but rather as an organization, What should our goal be? As a research practice, or as an applied practice, to what end are we developing our knowledge of the world and of people? This question has become more important than the hows of methodology. You have to ask, Why are we doing this? Changing the World The main reason, in the applied world, that we do things is to change the world. I mean that quite humbly. Its not simply to respond to whats already out there, or to address so-called user needs. (User needs is one of my least favorites terms because I think needs is a very passive construction of the point of research.) The idea that we are trying to change behaviors is a central, important aspect of our approach. There are two big things going on right now that are changing in the world and having an impact on research. One of them is pervasiveness. Im going to talk a lot about the role of sensors and how sensors have changed what is knowable and what qualifies as a good thing to do research on. The other big change is the continuousness of data. These two things together bring us to a critical new shift. I think the word of the decade will be instrument, because it has this nice double meaning (at least in English). There is the instrument, which is a noun, a thing. It can be a scalpel, a musical instrument; it can be a document of state, something that establishes something. Instruments are things in the world that affect structures, that affect systems, that affect relationships. Instruments are things that act and things that enable acts. But theres also the verb sense of the word, to instrument, which means, in one sense, implementing a structure, so you can instrument change, you can instrument a process.

The other, more common usage is instrumenting as to make apprehensiblea thermometer makes temperature differently apprehensible from the physical manifestation of temperature, which is just being warm, or hot, or chilly. There is a quote from Max Weber that Clifford Geertz made famous: Man is an animal, suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun. The that he himself has spun part makes it social structure. But once you start talking about webs of significance, youre talking about meaning at very different levels than individual meaning, right? Individuals have been the target of much user experience research. But social structures, groups, communities are the target of research today. And I think that in the near future we are going to be targeting the experience at the cultural level, not just the cultural as seen through the individual, but the true effort to understand cultures. When you think about networks, or webs of significance, there are of course social structures: communities, groups, families. There are all kinds of ways of describing how people are connected to one another. And theres also what my friend Andrew Sather calls that interweb thing, the connection of a bunch of machines. And what is really the focus today is the internet that has become many more things, including mobile devices and different platforms, as well as the internet. We are on the cusp of starting to look at what Danny Miller, among others has called the internet of things or the internet of stuffthe notion that in addition to the platforms that you might have, your home is also going to be fully connected; that objects, things formerly considered dumb objects, are becoming connected; that sensors are out there, everywhere. Walking through the airport, you can scan with your smartphone a crazy number of QR codes on billboards, posters, luggage carts. Work being done today in health-care research includes instrumenting not only bags of blood but also all of the different surgical instruments, to start to track how tools move through a hospital. It started out with the logistics people, this idea of instrumenting simple things. But the idea that you can tag and track things has made much of the physical, everyday world apprehensible in that sense of instrumented. Going back fifteen years or so, to the work of Bruno Latoura French sociologist who studied the production of science what makes science sciencewho sort of really started that whole field of looking at the interactions among stuff in the material world, meaning everything, from devices to furniture, clothing, and people. Latour coined a way of talking about this: Actor Network Theory. ANT addresses that web of significance. It says we can talk about human actors, but importantly we can also talk about nonhuman actors, and we need to see the network as a thing capable of being changed by all the actors, and not taken as a given.

Actors

Network

Context

So Actor Network Theory really threw into question what constitutes an actor and what is changeable.

When you start thinking about the kind of modeling that has been donefrom the kind of experience models that were built in US groups ten or fifteen years ago, to what is happening now the dimension of time becomes extraordinarily important. The very existence of always on changes the nature of the data beast entirely. The work used to be sort of a slice in time, because it purported to be structuraland I did this as much as anyone, probablybut calling a model structural, claiming it was structurally a reflection of reality, usually ignored the effects of time. And the new kinds of data that we have available now are making the explicit change of things over time very important.

I am rethinking the old model of building models vis--vis the purpose of doing user research. Once upon a time, we talked about the description of reality as if, if you did enough work, and you used the right approaches, you would have the description of current reality, and that you would get to a structural, eternal model that you could use. Such a model would then help you predict the future. Now I think that what we predict is a possible future, and what we can do if we get a messy model of reality and lots of data is predict multiple possible futures. I think that now we say, if we produce a product that does x, peoples experience might be this, but we could also produce a product that does this other thing, and thus change their experience in a very different way. The important question becomes how do we make that choice? This goes all the way back to that underlying philosophical notion that we cant just predict what a product should be, rather we are making value-informed decisions, driven by what we think is important as to what it ought to be.

abstract

(less messy) model of reality possible future models

messy reality concrete present

the model youd like to have (strategy)

future

When you start to think about the different ways that the user experience guys talk about the research, theres all kinds of things that, once you reflect on them, have a great deal to do with time. The famous early frameworks work, exemplified in articles such as Schank and Abelsons Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understandingall that stuff has inherent in it, the human default toward trying to understand what the future is going to be like. But scripts arent permanent. If you think about scripts or plans or goals, all of them are dynamic. But do we have a good way to represent how they change? Or a way to represent the way they will change in experience modeling? I dont think we do, and I think thats one of the things that we really have to work toward as a community.

Explanations are almost always sequential. They almost always have cause and effect, or at least correlation. They can be backward-looking, or they can be forward-looking. Models can be models of or models for something. You can build a model of the Roman coliseum, or you can build a model of a house that has yet to be built, and those kinds of things are very different enterprises. I think we need to start being much more clear about which one of those modeling projects we are engaged in. So when we talk about time, there are a couple of different scales. One is the notion of time in a second-by-second, minute-by-minute sense. Experience has always been organized on that level, but there are also all sorts of timescales more on the order of evolutionary. The way that things change over much longer stretches of time. For example: If I ask you what time it is right now, how many of you would first think, Im going to run outside real quick and see approximately where the sun is? Once upon a time, the notion of the time of day was an extremely concrete experience of the physical world: the sun rising, the sun directly overhead, the sun setting. Now the notion that it might be 8:42 in the morning is mediatedand its not just that we dont apprehend where the sun might bewe use watches, we use clocks, we see the time displayed on our devices, through a system rooted in a cultural agreement. Noon local, is not necessarily noon in the celestial mechanics sense; the sun might not be directly overhead because we have systemically agreed on notions like time zones, a twentyfour-hour division of time, and the way in which we divide minutes into seconds. All of those are cultural constructs that we have used to help connect us to a phenomenon of human experience that is thus more abstract than it used to be. We know that the sun is shining outside, and even though were sitting in here, we all know its morning. We share this through technology. A British sociologist named Anthony Giddens wrote about this access really beautifully in his book The Consequences of Modernity. Giddens talks in very dense but beautiful language about how many different social experiences are moving from concrete to abstract. And unlike most of his peers at the time he wrote, who saw this shift as a terrible downfall of modernity, Giddens views it as the thing that technology enables us to do better, and argues that technology is what gives us access to (and trust and confidence in) those abstract systems. It doesnt necessarily give us access to where the sun really is, but it enables us to feel it, to trust that everyone else thinks its the same time of day that I do. Now the notion that at the level of what seems like basic human experience, we are moving from very concrete experiences to more abstract notions, is a very different kind of scale than we normally study as part of user experience. Similarly, think of how deeply Cartesian notions of representing space affects our everyday experience of place. And Id argue that social media Twitter and Facebookare yielding abstractions of interpersonal communication, of face-to-face communities and relationships that are being represented and interacted fundamentally differentlyall of this adds up to a new need for technology to provide us with basic trust and confidence in the continued presence of the systems we surround ourselves with. We used to have interpersonal cues to do all of it for us, but they are yielding to our embrace of technology. That dynamic is a really interesting lens for looking differently at new stuff in the world. The evolutionary timescale gives us another intersecting set of terminology to work with. Joseph Schumpeter, in the 1930s and 1940s, wrote about bringing an evolutionary perspective to the industrial world, to how to think about social and technological consequences in business. What

Schumpeter did was talk about Creative Disruption and Destruction (emphasis mine). So if you think about what Darwin did, he really moved the perception of the order of the world from its a natural order to its a dynamic: evolution. But that was still something that just unfolded. We were included in it but we didnt drive it. What Schumpeter did, through his work on Creative Disruption/Destruction was say that we (humanity, societies) have a role in that change. That we are now actively changing the evolutionary pattern, asserting that all of these thingscompetition, selection, disruptionall of this evolutionary-scale terminology can now apply to business, to systems of technology, and to social structures. But once we do that, we are getting back to consciously choosing which path were going to take, and thats really difficult to do. Much Bigger Samples So how might we actively engage in selecting which future were heading to, given that technology can now provide data at a different level of granularity, all different kinds of things are now apprehensible, and the data is continuously available? We can start to think, instead of studying five people, or twenty people, at a population level. We can start to think about the billions of readers/users. We can start talking about doing research on significant subsamples of those, and not at a purely speculative level. We can start to think about closing the gap between projecting from samples and descriptions of actual behavior at the population levelalmost impossible before big data, but something that we can actually contemplate through an instrumented world. One of the things that I think is most interestingly headed that way is the emergence of proprietary online communities. Companies like Communispace and Passenger are creating very particular groups, much more interesting than demographic slices, and following them with a really intriguing combination of online and off-line sources over an extended period of time. So you have a thousand cardiac physicians being followed to find out how they are reading science journals, what kinds of drugs theyre prescribing, what kind of procedures theyre discussing with their patients, and how they see their particular populations. You have new levels of granularity available now, not just the scale that ethnography made possible in seeing one person day after day after day, but by seeing much larger groups of people continuously available in multiple parts of the world. Sensors A sensored environment that tells you everything from the movement of toilet paper on the roll to the consumption of food in the fridge, to whether the windows are open, gives you an extremely different picture of the experience of people in the home than you can get from asking them questions or even from coming in and observing them for a day or so. The key, I think, to making sensors really productive for product development, is to move from simply building a sensored environment, because what good does one sensor reading, one moment give you? You have to use the data as it unfolds over time. And we need better models of ways of doing that. Longitudinal research was extremely important in the 1940s and 1950s for psychology, for epidemiology, but it got to be extremely expensive because it was so labor-intensive. Now, thanks to technology, its coming back into affordability again. There are ways to study large groups of people over a long period of time with significant granularity that dont cost you hundreds of thousands of hours of the time of even graduate students, let alone professionals. That all sounds very serious, and it sort of comes back to well, if we could have a perfect mirrorworld model, meaning that if we had some sort of data on every aspect of daily life then we would know exactly whats going to happen.

I dont think that will ever be the case. Its the wrong thing to expect of research. So we come back to the meaning of instrumentation, and to my other candidate for word of the decade: play. It Might Get Loud, a film by Davis Guggenheim, the maker of An Inconvenient Truth, is a documentary that looks at three different generations of electric guitarists. Its an incredible film about the balance of expertise, the nature of the instrument itself, and what it means to explore and play. These guys are playing music, but theyre also playing with musical structure, theyre playing with pop culture, and they are taking themes and twisting them as they play. In the film, they talk at length about how the actual physical guitars affect their world and affect the work that they do. Whats really remarkable is how structurally similar that relationship is to what new techniques and science have enabled people to do with genes and genetics. You think about the kind of play thats been made available for inventing new species, and you get back to something thats really important in thinking about research work: its not as simple as description that leads to prediction. There is always inherent, in the best research work, a sense of play, of something driving the choices made in thinking through multiple possibilities and taking some responsibility for what it ought to be, not just what it will be. Thats very difficult and very different from Mission, Vision, and Value statements. You cant just say, We want to develop a good user experience. Those kinds of nostrums are not as valuable now that we know how much products affect daily life. Ethnographic work, I think was the last big choice, the last big shift, in user experience research because it said, Go see people. It urged developers and designers. Dont just imagine from yourself what it must be like to use this technology; go see it in action. And I think whats happening now is the advent of an ability to create instrumented worlds, and then treat them truly experimentally. But what I want to urge is that when we do that, we think very carefully about what were choosing to do, and how we are choosing to do it, and why. Thats it. Thank you.

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