the gallery of incredible notions
View this presentation on SlideShare.View more presentations from Arvind Venkataramani.
Pecha Kucha presentation given at the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC 2011).
Abstract: I explore opportunities for reframing research methods & practice by borrowing approaches from other disciplines. Along the way, I share examples of recent work that straddles boundaries, and compare existing ways of doing research that are tied into product development/organizational processes with the kinds suggested by the works.
Further, I raise the question of what the role of research in innovation is, approaching Don Norman's recent "design research doesn't lead to innovation" question from a completely different angle - one that is more hopeful and less a fallback to an explanation from technology. I use the conclusions to point towards reasons for collaboration with other disciplines in our professional orbit.
Notes & best practices from the discussion: thanks to everyone who participated and contributed - I merely collected and summed them up. Please share freely.
Problems & Dilemmas
- How do we put more effort up-front, before the project ever begins?
- There's usually a one-way flow of requests (needs/feature statements) from Marketing / Market Research to Product Development.
- Should I be a product manager or a researcher? What's the balancing act? Is it possible to be both? ("Experience Engineer" as one possible resolution, at Intel ESP because "engineer" provides status equality with "Software Engineer"). What should the relationship between a researcher and a PM be?
Best practices
- Target your insights to a particular person
- Mine your client for information about their work, their challenges, their colleagues
- Make the stories defendable (to other disciplines; go beyond just providing qualitative evidence that is sufficient for our standards)
- Design trackability of research outputs into the design process; find ways to tie insights into performance metrics as a way to prove ROI of research
- Find the extra cubicle: developing temporary embeddedness to establish relationships with your client teams. Live with them, become one of them.
- Identity engineering: Shape your identity carefully based on who your client is (or who you're talking with). "Research" might be too closed a label, and it doesn't help people relate to what you know.
- Be humble enough to make the idea someone else's (when other people use your words without realising they're yours, that's how you know you've succeeded).
- Speak like your client, think like your client. (How? See #2 )
- Know your customer's cadence (their cycles of product development; know when to interject and involve yourself, and how)
- After presenting, talk about your client's work. How do the insights impact their work? (Take time to socialise the research).
- Identify the decision makers (both of research budgets as well as product management). Target your insights to them.
- Understand how the clients define success. (How? This is still a sticky problem that generates vague answers. Probably something you constantly should do throughout a research project)
- You don't make the company successful, you make the person who hired you successful. Know what they're trying to achieve.
- Create two kinds of outputs: a. the dog & pony show for impressing the client's clients, and b. actionable/immediate/business-relevant for the client.
- Find about client's work lives (but be an informed blank slate, so you can quickly ramp up the discussion if they think you should know those things already)
- When pitching / interviewing, look up the other person on LinkedIn.
* More discussions at www.journalofbusinessanthropology.com (an Open Access journal).
Also posted on Google+.
Thanks to everyone who participated!
so far, google+ has better UI, but i'm not convinced they actually have better policies in the long run. structurally, in terms of how data / photos / media are shared, this is not significantly different from Facebook.
real innovation would come when they start considering relationships not in terms of what is shared or not shared, but how that accumulates to different forms of knowledge over time, by augmenting or amplifying awareness, by enabling people to stay in touch better, by preserving visibility across people & circles despite differences in posting/update volume, by enabling back-referencing and re-living. i can't repost / share this comment with the rest of my circles; so i'm not having better / more fluid, circle-crossing conversations here, either. this isn't innovation - yet. it's usability.
from a comment on a google+ post.
The Indians Say:
The land has an owner? How's that? How is it to be sold? How is it to be bought? If it does not belong to us, well, what? We are of it. We are its children. So it is always, always. The land is alive. As it nurtures the worms, so it nurtures us. It has bones and blood. It has milk, and gives us suck. It has hair, grass, straw, trees. It knows how to give birth to potatoes. It brings to birth houses. It brings to birth people. It looks after us and we look after it. It drinks chicha, accepts our invitation. We are its children. How is it to be sold? How bought? from Memory of Fire Volume 1: Genesis, by Eduardo Galeano
... on the occasion of Earth Day, ruminating on what happens when ideas of rights and property ownership collide with closed-systems ecologies and resource consumption limits.
I was reformatting logos for a conference's sponsors web page, and a google search on how to standardize logos for visual consistency turned up nothing. So here's how to achieve a clear, consistent sponsors page with logos. (Basic rule: equalize and align logotypes).
- Set maximum vertical size: 100 pixels is a good default
- Resize logotype (the company name text) to be 1/5th of max vertical size: in this case 20px: adjust as appropriate to your logo set. Approximations work, and are not easily visible. This is the single most important step in providing consistency. In case of logos with sub-text or taglines, design for the company name.
- Align logotype to central 1/5th of logo area: or whatever fraction you used in step 2.
- Desaturate: do this and the next step if you're trying to standardize colors to fit into your website theme.
- Adjust brightness/contrast to an apropriate grey/black/white: never tint to anything other color. You may have variations if you have logos with multiple brightness components.
This approach works best when you have a lot of different logos that aren't combined into one image (for display).
From the Flickr camera finder, a graph showing the drop-off in the iPhone 3G as a source of images. Note for a while that the 3GS - the next newer model - paralleled but never exceeded the number of members uploading from the 3G, while the 4 exhibited a delayed but steady rise to where it's becoming the most popular model. It would appear that the 3G is being rapidly replaced in the Flickr user population.
Note that this data doesn't tell us anything about the larger population of smartphone users (and the subset of picture uploaders) - it's possible that images from these Apple and non-Apple phones are being uploaded as often, but to other services, or that if you don't own an Apple smartphone, you just don't upload to Flickr.
Still, as a way to track the death of a product, it's an interesting indicator. Just goes to show that there's lots of opportunities for web-services to exploit the informating capabilities of technology.
Next: find out where all those discarded smartphones are going (China? Poorer populations who just haven't discovered Flickr yet?) and look for evidence of use in corresponding web services (Kaixin/QQ? Myspace?)
50 years of agricultural and culinary innovation has basically ensured that the food we eat today in the "developed" world is less fresh and healthful than what we used to eat as proto-tribal hunter-gatherers 250,000 years ago
demonstrating uses for the exhaust of the main purchase activity (coffee) at the point of sale. all that's missing are clickable links to instructables.
the brutish crudeness of machines addressing humans or, the moment when you hear a *ting ting* and you wonder which iPhone owner in present company has received a text message (the problem of talking to *my* human)
The Arcade Fire want to experiment with memory & vicariousness: in the website for their latest album, The Wilderness Downtown, they attempt to give reality to your empathic imaginations. You start by giving them an address or location (say, the home where you grow up), and they construct a - how to describe this? a video? - of choreographed footage combined with Google Maps street view imagery of that location, with a song from the album as soundtrack. Along the way they let you make a postcard to express your emotions (mine's above).
This is interesting. Vicariousness has traditionally been the silent voice behind the eyes, alone and slightly frustrated. What the Arcade Fire is doing attempts to insert your self-narrative into the authored narrative. “It's not just my downtown”, they say, “this pathos exists in yours, too. See?”
Never mind that the browser's chrome interferes with the visual quality of the experience. Never mind that the Google imagery is either blurry or visually jarring with the carefully constructed sepia footage. Never mind that the visuals are so distracting that you forget to listen to the song (I did). Never mind that the end result is unsatisfying, other than the gorgeously designed postcards, with their aesthetic of dust and age and dereliction. No, what matters is that act of reaching out - the author working to help the viewerlistenerreaderthinker relate to his story, going so far as to claim that it's not just her story, it's also yours. Most artists are content to create a vision and demand consumption. This hints at collaboration, however constrained and tenuous.
Take this a step further: imagine a book where you can rename the characters as you start to relate to them ("Omg, that guy is sooo totally like Srinu, da"), the text changes to accommodate this. Or a song with ‘holes’ in the lyrics (fill up with your favourite memories).
iPad magazines? Yeah, okay. IDEO's ‘Future of the Book’? Meh. Headless cutouts and karaoke? Pooh. Somewhere between Inception, fake digital backgrounds, the Wilderness Downtown and portrait artists resides the horizon of the future of storytelling.
(Thanks to Grant McCracken for the unintended? heads-up)
