News

Can you talk about the work you do?

I manage a small team responsible for conducting research into how our users (formerly “readers”) interact with the Times, both online and in print. We work closely with our design and product team to evaluate new product ideas, and to identify opportunities for improving the user experience.

In addition to traditional user testing, we also use a range of other research methods like ethnography, surveys, community panels and A/B testing, among others. I have also had the chance to do some design work (e.g., on the NYTimes iPhone app), and to write an occasional piece for the paper.

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The 2010 UPA conference (Munich, Germany, May 2010) takes this just a bit further: design is now ‘experience design’ and the European regional conference theme of “cultivating diversity” has turned into a global “embracing cultural diversity”.

It’s nice, and somewhat funny, to notice how ideas influence one another.

Editorial: Interactions: Time, Culture, and Behavior
Jon Kolko
Over the past 10 issues, interactions has, with a great deal of conscious repetition, investigated themes of global influence, sustainability, temporal aesthetics, behavior change, and the design for culture. These issues are at the heart of the human condition – whether exploring, solving, or celebrating the relationships between people and society. These themes continually combine to offer a glimpse into designing for interaction – the ability to forge connections and bridge gaps between experiences, people, and technology.
This issue of interactions is no different, but it exemplifies a new and subtle duality: impending doom and slight optimism.

Cover story: The Waste Manifesto
Victor Margolin is professor emeritus of design history at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is a founding editor and now co-editor of the academic design journal Design Issues. From this position, Margolin offers us an informed and historically grounded manifesto on the nature of garbage. Deemed The Waste Manifesto, Margolin describes the economics of waste, and offers a call to arms. As he writes, “At stake in attempting to create a sustainable waste economy is the issue of whether or not we can avoid social obesity, something that can paralyze us logistically, physically, and economically.”

“At The End of the World, Plant a Tree”: Six questions for Adam Greenfield
Adam Greenfield is Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user-interface design, as well as the author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing and the upcoming The City Is Here for You to Use. He is also a compelling speaker and articulate blogger, and has become an authority in thinking about the impact of future ubiquitous technologies on people and society. In a lengthy interview with Tish Shute recently published on UgoTrade.com, Greenfield covered numerous topics including augmented reality, Usman Haque’s Pachube project, the networked book, the networked city, and what to do at the end of the world. The interview is dense and rich, with many of the questions raised relevant to our audience. We asked Greenfield to expand on some of his answers for interactions.

–> Although not publicly available on the Interactions site, this article (which I facilitated and has clearly inspired Jon Kolko’s thinking, as becomes clear in the above editorial), can be found on Adam Greenfield’s personal site. Make of his introduction what you want.

Column: Designing the Infrastructure
Don Norman
“It is time to work on our infrastructure, which threatens to dominate our lives with ugliness, frustration, and work. We need to spend more time on infrastructure design. We need to make it more attractive, more accessible, and easier to maintain. Infrastructure is intended to be hidden, to provide the foundation for everyday life. If we do not respond, it will dominate our lives, preventing us from attending to our priority concerns and interests. Instead, we’ll just be keeping ahead of maintenance demands.”

–> Unfortunately the online version of the article comes without the figures that Norman refers to in his text.

Column: The Golden Age of Newsprint Collides With the Gilt Age of Digital Information Distribution
Elizabeth Churchill
Churchill is “screaming for a better news-reading experience on my desktop and mobile devices.”
“Certainly I love having access to so much information, but the reading experience is just not the same as the structured, well-designed experience of newspapers. News websites are like buckets of Internet storm-drain runoff, all laid out in some distorted version of their print counterparts.”

Column: Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
Steve Portigal
In Part I Portigal looked at some different approaches to design that do or do not succeed by omitting research. Here, he examines some of the limitations of doing research without design. His conclusion: “Rather than treat research and design as separate activities (sometimes performed by siloed departments or vendors), I would encourage all the stakeholders in the product development process to advocate for an integrated approach in which design activities and research activities are tightly coordinated and aligned.”

Column: On Hopelessness and Hope
Jon Kolko
“A number of individuals -a group that is small in number but significant in its contributions- have managed to deliver on projects broad and deep. They do act as renaissance individuals, and they do manage to tackle problems that are complex and whose solutions result in important contributions.” In working with and observing these types of people, Kolko sees several commonalities.

How to find insights from your research
You did the interviews, got the photos, and compiled the reams of data. Now what? A Steelcase experience could guide your next innovation project.
Jessie Scanlon – Fast Company

“The four-member group based in the Grand Rapids (Mich.) headquarters of the office furniture giant was studying the experience of cancer patients, and had spent months interviewing and photographing doctors and patients in oncology units at nine hospitals across the country. [...]

Standing before all of this material, the Steelcase health research team faced the challenge of every innovation team after the initial research stage: how to tease useful insights out of all of this disparate data.”

Workspring & the workplace of the future
John F. Schneider tries to understand how Workspring, a recent offering from Steelcase that gets to the heart of the collaborative meeting and events space, can be seen as a physical reflection of their research into the workplace and into meeting dynamics and interactions.

“There seems to be a unified focus at Steelcase on user centered design and the development of holistic systems informed by thorough observation and research. This informs the ways in which Steelcase engages its customers and partners to result in greater value creation, and relevance in an industry that works hard to rise above a commodity mindset.”

Also take note that Steelcase just published the ‘Office Code‘, a research about ‘building connections between cultures and workplace design’.

“As multi-national organizations increasingly employ workers from a variety of countries under one roof, they are often faced with culture clashes between employees rooted in their national differences. Upon completion of a three-year exploration study on the relationship between national culture and office space, Steelcase, a global office environments manufacturer, releases the “Office Code”. This book is designed to help companies successfully integrate workers who think differently at work.

The research spans six European countries – the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy and Spain – and shows that national culture and physical office space are not always in harmony, due to pressing economic constraints or the adoption of traditional office configurations. From the impact of meeting start times – for example in Germany it is essential to be on time, whereas in Italy, being late is acceptable or expected – to the message of a closed door signalling a need for privacy or nothing at all, the “Office Code” addresses how the nuances between different cultures under one roof can inform space planners to maximize collaboration and communication.”

“There is a wealth of information available, and most of it these days is digitized. I feel that we still don’t have good ways to know what information may be available and what is relevant to whatever we are currently doing, to be able to access information, especially while we are in the middle of something. The current computers and the interfaces that we use, they are not really the ideal information-accessing devices.

Today’s hardware devices, the iPhone as well, they all assume that you completely shift your attention to the device if you want to access some information. You have to basically completely drop what you are in the middle of and redirect your attention to the screen and use a pointing device, whether it’s the mouse or your own fingers, and then use a keyboard to enter information. It’s very disruptive.”

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(via InfoDesign)

The report, which is sponsored by Johnson Controls, “predicts that as workforces get more mobile, technology will ensure that everything an employee needs is available no matter where they are.”

“The report posits a situation in which, from the moment someone wakes, the world is aware of their needs and uses any and every means to keep them up to date.

Walls could become screens showing diaries, documents or video conferences. Homes and cars would measure mood and tune surroundings to, for instance, soothe a worker if they were feeling stressed.

The number of offices in use could shrink as smart scheduling software ensures that they maintain maximum occupancy.

A tiny smart mobile, with a folding screen and a powerful pico-projector could be the gadget that co-ordinates the way information is passed on, speculated the report.”

- Read full story
- Download press release
- Download report

“What I found surprising all through this process was the lack of any kind of standard process for managing key escrow as part of estate planning. Military-grade crypto has been in civilian hands for decades now, and yet every lawyer I spoke to about this was baffled (and the cypherpunks I spoke to were baffling – given to insanely complex schemes that suggested to me that their executors were going to be spending months unwinding their keys before they could get on with the business of their estates, and woe betide their survivors, who’d be left in the cold while all this was taking place).

Meanwhile, I’m left with this conclusion: if you’re not encrypting your data, you should be. And if you are encrypting your data, you need to figure this stuff out, before you get hit by a bus and doom your digital life to crypto oblivion.”

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The article, which also describes two emerging design practices (catalyst design and performance design), is a highly recommended read.

A few quotes:

“We have been operating under the assumption that the primary challenge is to convince businesses to focus on fulfilling user needs with higher quality products, with more meaningful experiences. But what if the ‘users’ themselves are the problem? What if users represent not a coherent set of needs but a messy mix of desires and influences? What, ultimately, is the role of the designer in sorting through these desires to determine which should drive our design decisions? And what frameworks, other than intuition, should we use to make these judgments?”

“What we are beginning to appreciate is the degree to which user behavior is ALWAYS subject to influence. We should not assume that our role is to somehow remove those influences so that the user can act in a free and unconstrained manner to achieve their own needs, as that is impossible. The user is not a self-contained actor in the system, but one who is largely and continually open to influences, the most important of which he/she is generally not conscious of. Our design decisions are just one influence among many, not categorically different, and often not the most effective in motivating the user to achieve their desired aims.”

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“What impressed me most about TEM is its staff members’ multidisciplinary backgrounds. In addition to computer scientists and engineers, TEM also includes experts in the areas of ethnography, sociology, political science, and development economics, all of which help Microsoft understand the social context of technology in emerging markets like India. [...]

By leveraging its multidisciplinary talent, TEM has developed some amazing solutions designed for emerging and underserved markets, both in rural and urban environments.”

Radjou sees this as an example of Microsoft’s new direction in terms of research and development:

“Undoubtedly Microsoft is pioneering the R&D 2.0 model that I discussed in my last post — an organizational model that relies on anthropologists and development economists to first decipher the socio-cultural needs of users in emerging markets like India and then use these deep insights to develop appropriate technology solutions. And it’s telling that Microsoft picked India as the epicentre of its global R&D transformation.”

He concludes with “some operating principles that [he] can offer to senior managers in other multinationals who wish to deploy the R&D 2.0 model in their own emerging market units like India.”

Navi Radjou is the Executive Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge.

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Abstract
Businesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The nature of such work, as described in this volume, raises crucial questions about potential implications to disciplines of critical inquiry such as anthropology. In addressing these issues, the contributors explore how researchers encounter and engage sites of organizational practice in such roles as suppliers of consumer-insight for product design or marketing, or as advisors on work design or business and organizational strategies. The volume contributes to the emerging canon of corporate ethnography, appealing to practitioners who wish to advance their understanding of the practice of corporate ethnography and providing rich material to those interested in new applications of ethnographic work and the ongoing rethinking of the nature of ethnographic praxis.

Introduction

Chapter 1. Business, anthropology and the growth of corporate ethnography – Melissa Cefkin

Encounters with corporate epistemologies
Chapter 2. “My customers are different!” identity, difference and the political economy of design – Donna K. Flynn

Doing anthropology in organizational contexts
Chapter 3. Participatory ethnography at work: Practicing in the puzzle palaces of a large, complex healthcare organization – Chris Darrouzet, Helga Wild and Susann Wilkinson
Chapter 4. Working in corporate jungles: Reflections on ethnographic praxis in industry – Brigitte Jordan with Monique Lambert

Refractions of anthropological ways of being and knowing
Chapter 5. Writing on walls: The materiality of social memory in corporate research – Dawn Nafus and Ken Anderson
Chapter 6. The anthropologist as ontological choreographer – Francoise Brun-Cottan

Epistemologies, Part Two: Culture and the corporate encounter
Chapter 7. Emergent culture, slippery culture – conflicting conceptualizations of culture in commercial ethnography – Martin Ortlieb

Another look: commentaries from the academy and corporate research
Chapter 8. Insider trading: Engaging and valuing corporate ethnography – Jeanette Blomberg
Chapter 9. Emergent forms of life in corporate arenas – Michael M. J. Fischer

Melissa Cefkin is a cultural anthropologist with experience in research, management, teaching, and consulting for business and government. Currently based at IBM Research in the area of services research, she earned her PhD from Rice University and remains dedicated to pursuing a critical understanding of the intersections of anthropological practice within business and organizational settings.