Often these are great stories.  Inspiring.  Fabulous work.  But as the theme of this conference suggests, there also seems to be something missing—the need for innovation is real.   I’m going to talk today about some of the changes in first, perspective on what brands do, and second, in the way we approach research, that I think will help bring real innovation  in the space a lot closer.   It’s got three big parts instead of four, some nice pictures, probably too much theory, and no spectacular case at the end, but I’m hoping it is provocative and provides you all with some things to think with.  So first, ‘the work brands do’ .

Brand strategy is a very good thing to have, but when brands get out into the world things don’t always happen as planned.

Old & New 'Dynamic Ribbon'

As I’m sure you all know, Coca – Cola recently made a change to one of its key identity elements – swapping the old plain white dynamic ribbon for a new, ‘effervescent’ one .  It takes an incredible amount of time, effort, and money to manage a change like this, everything from delivery trucks to billboards to cans, to vending machines and the cartons for 12 packs had to be carefully thought through

Coke logo in the real world

Just so the Coke logo can eventually end up in a setting like this one, in a London Neighborhood.

Similarly,

Virgin is one of the most recognized logos in the west, and Mr. Branson and his companies have worked hard to make sure that it stands for a level of quality, service and value across markets.

Which this retailer certainly recognized and respects – along with his respect for t-mobile, O2, orange, and Vodafone.

Mobile Brands in the real world

Which is the point I’d like to make here.  At some point, brand strategy has to leave the strategy binders, and go out into the world.  Because the world, with all of its mixing of contexts and concepts, with all of its unexpected juxtapositions, is where consumers interact with the products, the messages, the images, and the services which are constitutive of their idea of the brand.

Those contexts matter.  From our perspective – as researchers, as social scientists, it is just as important to understand the experiential aspects of context, as it is the functional ones.  We’re not thinking of experience as if were a ride in a theme park either.  We are instead, focusing on meaning, and how it is actively constructed in everyday life.

For instance, part of a strategy in the media or technology of home entertainment might involve positioning the brand and the products as central to a family’s time together.

But how well do we know what that entails?  How often is the idea simplified into a few assumptions about ‘family rooms’, media, technologies, and time spent watching media on a technology?  We need to get away from pre-forming the investigations like this.  In a worldwide in-home study we are currently conducting, one of the things we’ve done is to step back from specific questions and ask people to show us what the ‘center’ of their home is, and to leave it open so that they can elaborate on what that means to them – a kind of ethnographic projective test.

Slide 9 – China 01 ‘center’

What’s clear even early in our study is that the idea of the center has an incredible range of realizations.  This first image is from China, while this second one

Slide 10  – Spain 03 ‘center’

From Spain, is markedly different along any number of dimensions.  And if you look, it isn’t really national differences that are being reflected here, not ‘markets’ made up out of geographical boundaries, but differences in value, in expression, in the kind of story that is being told about what matters to the folks who live here.

People use brands, they don’t simply receive them or perceive them.  More specifically, people use all kinds of products, embedded in contexts to tell important stories about themselves, and brand is only one – though an important one – of those dimensions.

In the work we’ve been doing to study the domestic context around the world – marrying an ethnographic, visual survey with a large scale worldwide consumer survey – we’ve been seeing this range in some detail.

Slide 11 – Lovely London main room

Yes, sometimes a living room can look like a shot from a lifestyle magazine, where the direct influence of culturally proffered aesthetic values is pretty clear– this flat in central London, for example, clearly  exudes a “good taste” that we all recognize because we’ve seen the elements so often –

Slide 12 – teddy bear couch

But far more often, in ways that are interesting and varied, they look something like this living room in Moscow.   Interesting enough.  I’m sure as you look at this you begin to get some ideas about who lives here and what they might value.  But what is even more fascinating to us is that a room, like this one

Slide 13  Ornate Russian Bedroom

Is from the same household.  The level of variation, the range of contexts, the mix of styles, uses, and patterns of consumption vary even within homes.  And yet, to the folks who live here, it is all of a piece, it fits, it works, and it matters.

When we say that people “use” brands, we’re not just talking about so called “aspirational” or “lifestyle” brands:  the conspicuousness of a Burberry Plaid or the ubiquity of a Nike swoosh, – in fact, explicit “brand consciousness” is only a small part of the way in which people use brands and products.

Slide 14:  Kitchen with refrigerator

Consider this nicely appointed kitchen – cooktop, stainless hood, side-by-side refrigerator complete with Mona Lisa magnets.  It could be a suburban kitchen almost anywhere in North America.

Nothing really stands out about it unless you know that it is actually in a suburban area of Beijing.  Then you realize that it is in fact saying something – saying ‘western’, saying progressive –to the friends and colleagues who visit this home.

But let me stress again that what we’re talking about is not a one sided interaction, it is not consumption but construction, it is in fact, a dialogue with the companies who provide and produce the brands and products that people can use to say things that are important about themselves.

Just as it is important to understand that people are not passive recipients of brand messages, it is equally important to understand that brands, companies, and products actively shape the ways that people interact with and understand their worlds.

This is where the other side of the dialogue comes into play.    As individuals, we look for two things:  a suggestion of what’s possible to say, and someone in whom we trust and have confidence to make that suggestion.

And here’s the nice part:  brands have increasingly become one of the most important places where people look for those suggestions about what they might be.  Great brands are the ones where people trust that the brand knows the complexities and possibilities of the situation better than they do.  They help people do both expressive work, and instrumental work.

Let me give you a pair of examples to make this point in a bit more detail:  if I ask you, “what time is it?”

Slide 15  Clock face

You won’t run outside and see how high the sun is in the sky, or where your shadow is cast on the ground.  One of the “Consequences of Modernity”, as the noted social theorist Anthony Giddens puts it, has necessitated that we all – around the world, across cultures, — have a shared understanding of this experientially fundamental thing, time, BUT what we all use to make sense of that experience are essentially a collection of abstractions – time zones, the international date line, “am” and “pm” ,12 or 24 regular units named ‘hours’ — to be able to work together, to keep trains and planes and markets moving.  The watch on your wrist, the clock on the wall are simply the technologies through which you participate in this complex, global abstraction of what, long ago, was concrete and local.

More and more parts of life are, or are becoming like that.  And in many ways brands are the tools people trust to help them through the complexities of anything from their health to getting to work and back each day.

Do you know, really, how an airplane works?  But you get on it, you look at the flight attendant’s smile, the shiny surfaces of the wings, the purposeful activity of the ground crew, and – despite how far any of these things might be from what really makes it work, you say, “this will fly”

Brands matter in this.

Slide 16  BMW kidney grilles and nose badge

Most of us would be unlikely to buy a new car from someone named bob who was going door to door selling cars that he designed and built in his garage.

But a company like BMW can successfully deploy something like “adaptive cruise control,” a technology which adjusts the car’s speed to the density of traffic around the vehicle — that folks like me have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER about how it actually works.   and we will buy it.

Brands are things we trust not in a blind faith kind of way, but in the same way that we might use a map to find our way through new territory. Brands, products and services are  an intimate part of the stories that we are all constantly in the process of telling about ourselves – to ourselves, our closest friends and family, our peers, and to neighbors and passers by and to the larger world.

Knowing what people are saying with your brands, knowing the way in which products are used in the real world is an essential part of realizing a brand strategy.  And the only way to do that, is to pay attention.  Deeply, globally, and in context.

Slide 17 A research problem

I’d like to step back and come at some of these same issues from a slightly different direction now.   I think that there are two necessary keys to enabling the kind of fruitful collaboration between research and design in the Brand Strategy space that has marked so much of industrial and product design and development over the last decade.  As I’m sure many of you know, prior to the early ‘nineties, research was often understood as antithetical to design, and especially to innovation.

Amsterdam DMI anecdote

It took a shift in perspective (from product centered to user centered)  as well as a change in tools (the widespread acceptance of ethnographic techniques) and in research framework (direct collaboration/integration of research & design teams)  to change this kind of thinking.

So what might those two types of change (perspective and research approach) look like in the brand space?   The shift in perspective – is what I’ve started to outline in the first part of this talk.   It needs to be a bit more pragmatically drawn though, for it to become clear both what to study – the all-important question of the research object – and how to study it in a way that makes it actionable for strategists and designers.

Slide 18 Shannon-Weaver

The Basic Shannon-Weaver model of communication

I was hoping for at least a few miserable groans from the audience on this one.  Yes, it is the venerable Shannon-weaver model.  But I’m not going theoretically medieval on you, I’m just using this as a jumping off place for a short, historical story.

We can’t really escape the fact that this space – understanding the effectiveness of brands, increasing their value and the efficacy of brand strategies – has at its base a pretty simple, triangular relationship.  And in the middle of last century, the Shannon-Weaver model was adopted from communications/signal theory as a way to represent this relationship.

Slide 19 SW w Noise

Adding 'noise' to the arc

The original intent of the model wasn’t simply to describe sending and receiving, but to provide people working in the communications field with a way to focus their attention away from too few points where things could go wrong, and to start to see the entire communication loop as needing attention.  This was a good thing.

Slide 20  Interpretation

Intention and Interpretation

Over time, branding theory got a bit more sophisticated, and a little less message-centric.  The notion of mediation, the impact of different media and channels on reception, all came to play a critical part in thinking about communication.  Moreover, breaking out the ideas of intention and reception (under many different names) enabled companies to pay close attention to effectiveness by looking at how well the reception matched the intent.  An entire industry was spawned around doing this, at least in relationship to  advertising and communications.

Slide 21 more brand things

At the same time, more and more brands were getting to be bigger, or at least more complicated, than single products.

Slide 22 competitors

Combining that proliferation with the core issues of positioning a brand (and the various things that carry it) vis a vis competitive products and companies, and the field starts to look a little more complex.   But the direction of those arrows is still pretty much all one way.

Slide 23 Agent Change

Which brings us to the shift in thinking about the consumer.  I know that for years, people have studied the consumer, have tried to understand motives, attitudes and ‘needs’, and have dissected endlessly the impact of various demo- and psycho- graphic factors on all of the above.

However, paying attention to who people are or what they value isn’t the same as assigning them a different, more critical role than recipients or decoders, nearly as passive as wind vanes, or the needle on your car’s speedometer.

By  shifting the role of the consumer in this model, you necessarily add a whole new set of relationships.  Important ones.

Slide 24 The social field

As important as this relationship (the central arc) is, from a consumer’s point of view it is still nearly incidental to everyday life, though it is there.

More central is the social field in which people live, work, and play.  And that gets us back to a couple of points I was trying to make in the first half of the talk.

First, the notion that a big part of the brand dynamic is the communication not between the brand and the consumer, but between the consumer and  his or her social field, the ground against which the “presentation of self” as Berger and Luckmann so aptly characterized it, takes place.  A BMW or a Previa?  Zegna trousers or blue jeans?  It is not always a matter of what you can afford, but of what you want to say about who you are, to the people you interact with in ways that matter to you.

Slide 25  Activity

Second, and just as important is the role that brands play in providing access and confidence to the tools and systems that are a necessary part of doing what one does, in enabling people to engage in meaningful activity – this is the instrumental counterpart to its expressive role, the trust we have in technologies that let’s us drive at 75 miles an hour – remembering that when the first locomotives were being tested scientists warned that human beings could not survive moving at speeds above 30 miles an hour.

Slide 26 The sliding of categories

Something else interesting happens to this central arc when you re-conceptualize the role & the context of the consumer in this way.  The range of choices that will help a consumer accomplish either an expressive or an instrumental task might no longer defined by a product category.  A bike might not be arrayed against other bicycle options, but against running shoes or a week on a backcountry hike.   Take, for instance, the emergence of energy drinks, which realigned not just the soft-drink category, but coffee as well, especially in the critically important Gen-Y group.

Slide 27  bottom of the loop.

Finally, is the phenomena that may make you sound like a freshly minted graduate student for saying it, but it’s the right word:  disintermediation, or the removal of ‘middlemen’ whether those be channels, institutions, or — most salient to this discussion – vehicles for messages such as ads, brands, and products.  Consumers now have tons of opportunities to see the behavior and values of whole corporations directly, to address them directly;  and companies can and do spend more time communicating directly with consumers on more levels.  This means that there is yet another influence on the way in which anything you (as producers) do is understood and interpreted.

It’s pretty messy, isn’t it?  It looks much more like a diagram of a social or political system than it does a transmission model.   Which is good.

Slide 28  red lines model

Its much easier to study something circumscribed, something of which you can ask, “do they get it?”  than it is to study this – the process of constructing not just ‘getting’ message and meaning.   A shift in the central research question from the  objects – which are always shifting anyway – to the processes.  To focus on the how instead of the who or the what.

Still, in some ways, though complex, this picture isn’t actually all that much of a methodological stretch.  We can figure out how to figure this out.    But now multiply this by 10, or by 20 or by 50 countries, and all their subcultures and subgroups.  Far more product lines, more brands, more companies are trying to come up with products in not just their home markets, but in large numbers of  very different markets around the world.  You do that, and this complexity is multiplied, not just enlarged.

Slide 30 Break –global scale

Any of you familiar with me or the work done at E-Lab and Xmod over the past decade or so probably assume that this is all just a longwinded buildup to announcing that Ethnography is the answer.

Were that it were so.

Slide 31 Margaret

Not that ethnography isn’t a good thing.    By looking closely at the places where people interact with brands everyday — which is what a good ethnography would do –  it can  provide a description of these contexts and systems, and an interpretation or understanding of how those systems work.  Good ethnography isn’t just about the data gathering techniques that provide direct access to these contexts, though those are critical, it is also centrally concerned with making a useful interpretation of that data, a story about how experience is organized from the users point of view.  When we are doing research on brands, we’re building a model that describes the ‘conversation,’ the dialogue, between the brand and the consumer, as it is played out in everyday life.

Ethnography is a great approach for this.  And as I’ve argued ad nauseum elsewhere, an approach that has a natural affinity with the way that designers work.

But the scale of the problem has changed, and to work at that scale –

globally, multi-nationally, etcetera-ly, the way ethnography has been done in the past no longer offers a big enough hammer.

I’ve used this old stock photo of Margaret Mead in Samoa for years to talk about some of the critical components of ethnography.  But looked at again in the context of the problem we’re talking about today,  it cuts both ways – an ethnographer talking to one or two people at a time, in a single country, and taking a very long time to turn those interviews and observations into something that the rest of her colleagues can engage with.

Slide 32 Lotsa margarets

Even a couple dozen margarets wouldn’t meet either the scale or the time tables most of you are faced with.  And thinking of three or four ethnographers – the average size of an ethnographic research group these days — doing the project is no long practical or effective or even that smart.

Just as there was a shift in how the research was done when social scientists started to work with product design or ad planning groups, there is a clear need for a rethinking of research in relation to the demands of global brand strategy.

And (I swear that this will be the last one of these)–once again, I think there are two parts to such a re-imagination:

First is for ethnography – really ethnographers –  to shift its position from insisting on the  personal experience of the ethnographer, on ‘directly observed (by me)’ as a necessary condition of the work, and thus go from focusing on the first hand collection of data to a focus on the work of interpretation.  Which still means that  someone, somehow, has to  provide data at scale.  Who knows how to do that well?  Survey researchers.

Slide 33  qual v. quant

So the second point is to get rid of this divide

Slide 34 qual v. quant with the red circle thing

I think we need to reinvent the model for ethnographic research, again.   To lose the qual quant distinction.

Slide 35 interp quant?

This is work that needs to bridge both of those ‘us and them’ divides:  research and design, as well as qualitative and quantitative. I’m not exactly sure where this will end up, or what it might be called — Interpretive quant research?  Statistical ethnography? But I know it’s the right direction.  Here’s what  we’ve been trying.

Slide 36 emerging approach

We’ve started to tie very specific ethnographic data – at the household level — to globally-scaled databases on behavior, values, demographics and more.  We’re developing scalable processes for keeping ethnographic data in addressable databases rather than having every study be a one-off, an island that never gets revisited.

We think it is important to plan methodologies and fieldwork at a global scale, but also to integrate local expertise  — so we’re developing a global network of senior researchers the tools and project processes to co-ordinate across continents, languages, and time zones.

Divide and conquer – ethnography has almost always meant “custom” research, with little leverage available because of the specificity of the questions.  By working closely with our quantitative research colleagues and paying attention to the models of syndicated research, we’ve begun to figure out how to split the problems up in ways that allow for some work to be done as analyses of existing data (even while we are building those datasets), while others are tightly focused new investigations.

Finally, we think of the whole enterprise as a longitudinal investigation.  We know that there is immense, untapped value in being able to compare and contrast over years, not just across groups or countries.

We’ve been working on this for almost two years now, and it isn’t easy.   The data is fabulous.  We need some more problems to throw at it, some more experience in working with different kinds of issues and questions.  But that will come.  Several of the companies represented here at the conference are some of the brave early adopters helping us work our way into this new model.

So.     It isn’t the pretty new version yet.  It’s got all the warts and wrinkles of  a work in progress actually.  But we think it is the right direction.  We’d love feedback, comment, and engagement on it.

thank you



How can interactions with embedded systems engage users in Broaden and Build responses?

The concept of interaction aesthetics (Lim et al. 2007) (Djajadiningrat et al. 2000) (Gaver & Dunne 1999)  has played a pivotal role in redefining the paradigmatic concerns in HCI. Historically, HCI began with the goal of human-machine coupling in high performance environments such as fighter jet cockpits (Sengers et al. 2007). With the invention of the computer, HCI shifted towards optimizing efficiency in task completion (Sengers et al. 2007) (Stivers 2004). Over the past 15 years, this paradigm has shifted towards understanding how to produce computationally supported experiences that engage users through embodied interactions, defined as interactions that situate users and computation to construct meaning that leads to new understanding of one’s self and the world (Sengers et al. 2007).

The role of interaction aesthetics within this paradigm is to critically evaluate the various forms/shapes interactions can take and how those forms/shapes effect user experience (Lim et al. 2007). In 2007, Lim et al. introduced the notion of an interaction as a gestalt. The notion of a gestalt implies a collective of elements used to construct the whole. Previous interaction aesthetic studies have explored multimodal engagement (Nguyen & Masthoff 2009) (Brotman et al. 2008) (Sinha & Landay 2002) and clarity of interaction as such elements (Brotman et al. 2008) (Gaver et al. 2003) for designing user engagement. Design of multimodal engagement determines what senses (visual, audio, haptic, etc.) a system generates feedback loops with. Clarity of the interaction refers to the degree by which the system explicitly reveals the method and the purpose of the interaction. This study will continue to use these two areas of interest, treating them as interaction variables capable of changing the interaction gestalt.

The purpose of deconstructing these interaction elements into testable variables is to understand their potential for generating Broaden and Build (Fredrickson & Losada 2005) (Fredrickson 2001) cognitive responses. Fredrickson proposed and developed evidence of the Broaden and Build theory as an explanation of the evolutionary relevance of positive affect (2001). The theory argues that while experiencing positive affect, a person’s ability to generate novel possibilities for future actions increases (the broadening) and over time, as a person makes choices based on these possibilities, a person increases the diversity of their skill sets (the building). Since the theory’s introduction, researchers have conducted qualitative (Fitzpatrick & Stalikas 2008) and quantitative (Fredrickson & Losada 2005) studies that suggest it enables human flourishing (Fitzpatrick & Stalikas 2008) (Little et al. 2007) (Fredrickson & Losada 2005). Positive psychologists argue that human flourishing determines psychological well-being through measurement of a peron’s abilitity to seek out and solve problems (Fitzpatrick & Stalikas 2008) (Little et al. 2007) (Fredrickson & Losada 2005). Hence, the significance of understanding how to design interaction aesthetics is two fold:

• Designers can make embedded system interaction more compelling by eliciting positive affective responses and;
• Designers can use interaction as a tool to improve the well-being of end users through the design of interaction aesthetics that engage users in Broaden and Build experiences.

This study will contribute to the domains of:

• HCI design by adding to the body of literature on interaction aesthetics through introduction of guidelines for engaging users in interactions that foster human flourishing;
• Positive psychology by revealing if interaction can be treated as an independent variable capable of eliciting Broaden and Build responses and;
• Embedded systems through the use of the Game as Life – Life as Game (GaLLaG) (Burleson et al. 2009) embedded system as both a technology platform capable of delivering compelling user experiences and a research tool for furthering ubicomp knowledge. Figure 1 presents a conceptual framework of this study.

This study tests several hypotheses implicit within the conceptual framework. These are:

• Interaction, much like other artistic mediums, can be deconstructed into base forms or primitives to form guidelines for designing embedded system interactions.
• Interaction, not only facilitates delivery of information, but is information in itself with the capability to sway the affective responses of users.
• Designers can sculpt embedded systems interactions that promote Broaden and Build experiences, increasing human flourishing and improving the well-being of users.

Bibliography
Brotman, Ryan, Kelliher, Aisling, and Spicer, Ryan. 2008. Well how would you do it? – Facilitating the transfer of knowledge in collaborative design environments. Paper presented at the annual national conference for the Industrial Design Society of American, September 10-13 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Burleson, Winslow, Ruffenach, Collin, Jensen, Camilla, Bandaru, Uday, and Muldner, Kasia. 2009. Game as life – life as game. Paper presented at the 8th annual international conference of Interaction Design and Children for the Association of Computer Machinists, June 3-5 in Como, Italy
Djajadiningrat, J. P., Gaver, William., and Fres, J. W. 2000. Interaction relabelling and extreme characters: methods for exploring aesthetic interactions. Paper Presented at the 3rd annual international conference of Designing Interactive Systems for the Association of Computing Machinists, August 17-19 in Brooklyn New York.
Fitzpatrick, Marilyn, and Stalikas, Anastassios. 2008. Positive emotions as generators of therapeutic change. Psychological Integration. 18: 137-54.
Fredrickson, Barbara, and Losada, Marcial. 2005. Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing. American Psychology. 60: 678-86.
Fredrickson, Barbara. 2001. The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden and-build theory of positive emotion. American Psychology. 56: 218-26.
Gaver, William, Beaver, Jacob, and Benford, Steve. 2003. Ambiguity as a resource for design. Paper presented at the annual international conference of the SIGCHI Human Factors and Computing Systems for the Association of Computer Machinists, April 5-10 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Gaver, William, Dunne, Anthony., AND Pacenti, Elena. 1999. Design: Cultural probes. Interactions. 6: 21-29
Lim, Youn-kyung, Stolterman, Erik, Jung, Heekyoung, and Donaldson, Justin. 2007. Interaction gestalt and the design of aesthetic interactions. Paper presented at the annual international conference of Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces for the Association of Computer Machinists, August 22-25 in Helsinki, Finland
Little, Brian. 2007. Personal Project Pursuit: Goals, Actions, and Human Flourishing. Philadelphia: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Nguyen, Hien, and Masthoff, Judith. 2009. Designing empathic computers: The effect of multimodal empathic feedback using animated agents. Paper presented at the 4th annual international conference of Persuasive Computing for the Association of Computer Machinists, April 26-29 in Claremont, California.
Sengers, Phoebe, Harrison, Steve, and Tatar, Deborah. 2007. The three paradigms of HCI. Paper presented at the 25th annual international conference of Computer Human Interactions for the Association of Computer Machinists, April 28-3 in San Jose, California.
Sinha, Anoop, and Landay, James. 2002. Embarking on multimodal interface design. Paper presented at the 4th annual international conference of Multimodal Interfaces for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, October 14-16 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Stivers, Richard. 2004. Shades of loneliness: Pathologies of a Technological Society. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Working title: Complex Adaptive Systems, Heroism & Disruptive Innovation in Multinational Corporations
Tony Salvador

Abstract
This paper reframes innovation practice within large multinational corporations through a merged lens of systems theory with mythology. There are several reasons for this reframing: First: the structure of innovation in a large corporation is theoretically and practically the same as the structure of heroism across mythology – the monomyth — as outlined in Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. In both cases, the Hero must escape his/her current system, enter into, create and/or operate within another, and eventually establish a resolution with the old system. Second, both journeys happen within the greater context of extant social structures that infuse the respective systems. Third, societies and corporations are usefully and revealingly well described as complex adaptive systems, whereby the innovation applies tension to the stability & balance (homeostasis) of the extant, often profitable, reigning (corporate) system. The monomyth illuminates the stages of the hero’s journey and the resources needed at each stage, respectively; from our work and experiences we can re-interpret these resources in the context of systems theory for today’s corporate environment. Based on three years of experience with a business unit tasked with disruptive innovation (though implicitly), we examine the nature of Christensen’s notion of innovation in the joined context of complex adaptive systems and mythology. We offer an early explanation for why disruptive innovation is so hard — it threatens the existing system, it does not account for the distribution of power in the social structure and innovators fail to secure the appropriate resources that are only apparent by considering the context of systems and social structures. We propose that for disruptive innovation to be more probable, it must become an explicitly designed part of the system.

Corporations as Systems
People still do the work in corporations. Even when machines are doing some of the actual labor, at least for now, it is the people who tell the machines what to do. It is the people who are accountable. It is people who identify problems, think of solutions and make decisions under uncertainty. It’s the people who do the work.

Perhaps as obvious, but less often highlighted, people comprise corporations. People fill out the organizational structures of various hierarchies. In setting policies, making decisions, answering calls, arguing with their colleagues, people are engaging is various ritual practices that reflect the social structure of the corporation. That is, corporations of people are usefully viewed as social structures comprised of people who happen be organized in a particular way, following particular policies, adhering to particular internal and external strictures, etc.

A social structure is an analytical frame that describes the culture of the corporation and any one corporation may be usefully described by different social structures as warranted. Social structures, therefore, provide the framing context of the peoples’ interactions. Different social structures can be used to highlight or reveal different elements of the complexity of a corporate culture. I will return to this later. At this juncture, however, what’s relevant is that corporations operate in an inherently social context. I will argue that the context of the organization, and especially the social structure itself, strongly affects the peoples’ individual and collective responses to events, especially innovative events.

Corporations are also complex (sometimes adaptive) systems. A complex system can be described as a set of entities and rules such that given some input, there’s some output. That output may have a highly probable output. Corporations strive for highly probably outputs. However, more often, outputs are less probably predictable. A complex adaptive system responds to the output and adjusts the input in a continuous attempt to increase the predictability of the output given the input.

Complex (adaptive) systems also seek stability, what’s technically referred to as homeostasis, which is a measure of balance between inputs and outputs. the system, that is the corporation, strives to maintain homeostasis in all its endeavors.

A final relevant point here is that corporations are complex (adaptive) systems each with a level of “fitness” relative to other corporations in its landscape, or, in its value network. For example, the corporation with the highest profit margins may be the most fit corporation and you can bet your boots that the corporation is going to a. want to remain at the highest level of fitness with highly predictable inputs and outputs c. at a high degree of homeostasis.

Thus, a corporation is a complex (adaptive) system at some level of fitness at some level of homeostasis, comprised of people characterized by one or more prevailing social structures. Furthermore, no one corporation is the same as another. Although there are clearly shared characteristics, just as clearly is the fact that corporations differ in their “corporate culture”, which, in this paper is reflected in their systemic constructs. The point of differentiation will be very important at a later point.

Whipped by market forces, corporations must continuous expel the damned spot of inefficiency at every turn and strive with all their might to maintain or improve their position on the fitness landscape through ruthless optimization of their production and delivery of goods and services. Indeed, a good corporation will continuously innovate to keep the corporation on track, maintain fitness and homeostasis.

However, there are not one, but two types of innovation. A first is what we just discussed: innovations that further optimize the efficiency of the corporation along its current trajectory. This type of innovation, let’s call it continuous innovation, can be of immense value to the corporation, increasing productivity, reducing costs, etc., overall increasing its general fitness.

A second type of innovation offers alternative trajectories or challenges or threatens the current trajectory either directly or indirectly. This second type, let’s call it discontinuous innovation, offers possibilities less clear in how they propel the corporation up the fitness landscape, or how they otherwise maintain or improve stability and predictability of the corporation. Rather, these second types of innovations may suggest new entrants to the fitness landscape or new fitness landscapes all together. These types of innovations also suggest changes in the technical or social (or both) structures of the system defining the corporation; moreover, these types of innovations may be very difficult to comprehend in the context of the extant system and social structure – a system & structure that’s been highly evolved for a particular purpose, within a particular landscape – a system and structure relentlessly seeking homeostasis.

Both types of innovation can be of immense valuable to the corporation. Continuous innovations lift or at least maintain the corporation’s position on the current fitness landscape. They do not disrupt, or minimally disrupt corporate homeostasis. The suggestions are comprehensible; they fit within the frameworks and “black boxes” of the people making the decisions. They are recognizable for what they will achieve – and importantly, also for negative effects, if any, they would have. Therefore, continuous innovations are a part of the system, dependent on clever people and an amenable social structure, to be sure, but overall, happen within the context of the extant system. There is no conflict here, nothing particularly challenging and we shall spend no more time on continuous innovation.

On the other hand, discontinuous innovations do challenge the corporation’s fitness, and this is where our interest lies. We suggest the general notion that whilst we value discontinuous innovation as individuals and as expressed in corporate rhetoric systems and social structures abhor innovation by default. That is, complex adaptive systems continuously seek homeostasis at higher and higher levels of fitness, challenges to either (homeostasis or fitness) are increasingly less tolerated. We propose, therefore, that the hidden strength of the system and social structure of the corporation exceeds the strength of explicit individual and corporate statements. As a result, discontinuous innovation from within is so nearly impossible that successful innovations are nothing short of heroic.

But not impossible. It would however seem nearly insurmountable for all the books, advice, rules and research on innovation in general and discontinuous innovation in particular. In all of this work, the emphasis has been on the nature of the business environment in which innovation takes place, the skills sets requires, the location within the organizational structure, the sorts of actions required, e.g., lots of planning, and how all this differs from the standard business. We suggest the problem is not with the business environment at all, but with the system environment and the social structure embedded within and constitutive of that system.

We’ve been participant observers for three years in the Emerging Markets Platforms Group, a business unit of Intel Corporation. The stated charter of this group is to increase the total available market for Intel Architecture in emerging markets with new platforms. In English: Grow new markets with new products in developing countries. More translation: Grow new businesses for Intel microprocessors by creating new, sustainable markets in developing countries and emerging market countries across the globe with new products and new kinds of products that Intel’s not made before. On the face of it, it also doesn’t seem like anything other than reasonable, if not challenging.

But in reality, it doesn’t get much more disruptive than this. What’s not stated in the charter are the hidden caveats discovered over the past 3 years.

• Thou must not conflict with any of our current business endeavors anywhere in the world or undercut any of our current products.
• Thou must not conflict with any of our current customer’s business endeavors or undercut any of their current products.
• Thou must embark on something Intel can do uniquely and that Intel should do uniquely.
• Thou must be more profitable than anything anyone else at Intel is doing for the same investment in the same amount of time – regardless of future possible growth.
• Thou must be relevant on a global scale, not just regional or national.

Taken together the innovator working under this charter can not now be seen as nothing less than heroic. The innovator is “fighting the system”, even as the system is articulating friendship and cooperation. There is no enemy; the enemy is us – but not “us” as individuals or even us as a group of individuals, it’s “us” transformed as “the system”. We comprise the social structure. We give life to the system. In turn, the system animates us.

First, “We the system” assume a non-trivial and increasingly strong measure of control correlating to our position on the fitness landscape and the energy required to maintain homeostasis. Innovation endeavors threaten those positions. Discontinuous innovations endeavors apply pressure and inject tension within the otherwise stable social structure(s) that defines the extant (corporate) systems, often suggesting if not resulting out right in the creation of new systems – meaningfully apart from the extant system, the submission of the innovation to the extant system or cessation of the innovative attempt. We apply Bateson’s general notion of schisomogenesis in this regard. The foundational point is that successfully accommodating innovations in the context of a strong, homeostatic system is very unlikely if one fails to recognize the power of the system. Indeed, heroically unlikely. It is then left to answer the question of how one innovates within a systems-based conceptual framework of innovation.

In Joseph Campbell’s influential work, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, he outlines the general structure of the hero’s journey. More interesting (to me) than the remarkable analysis of global historical mythology, is that Campbell talks about the hero’s journey as transitioning between two systems – the common-day and the unfamiliar. As the hero journeys, he/she draw on different internal and external resources, acts under different rules, relies on different “colleagues”. The resources, rules and colleagues are, handily structured not only in terms of two distinct systems, but also in terms of time – as related to the journey. The structure over time is useful to innovation as it outline what’s needed when.

The Hero

The mythological hero, setting forth from his common-day hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend into death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition of the father-creator (father atonement), his own divination (apotheosis), or again – if the powers have remained unfriendly to him – his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride theft, fire theft); intrinsically, it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold, the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of the dead (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir), p 211.

The prolific inventor Thomas Edison suggested that “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” I’d rather like to adapt his phrase to propose that innovation is one percent ideation and ninety-nine percent preparation.” If innovation is about the nature of systems and system power and social structure and power within these systems, then it’s clearly in the beginning and end where the system pointed. Campbell talks about three main parts of the hero’s journey: Departure, Initiation & Return. It’s in the preparation that innovation in won or lost and it’s these brackets where context is set and it’s getting the context right that sets the Hero on the right path. In this paper, I want to focus on the beginning (Departure) and the end (Return) of the Hero’s journey as it’s where I think we have the most to offer in the framework of this paper, although I will have a few words about the middle bit (Initiation).

Departure
Call To Adventure
How does the call happen. The call comes in context. It’s not random. Campbell’s analysis is Freudian – that it represents the deepest parts of our collective unconscious. Too often innovators think that what’s happening is random. In a corporation, the “insight” can be seen to represent the collective unconscious, the deep seated fears of the corporation – the competitor, a source of angst. The competitor threatens the system directly. The system has built systemic defenses for just this purpose. Continuous innovation maintains the fitness of the corporation. The system must survive. The “insight” is a call to adventure, can be seen as a discontinuous means to beat the competitor tomorrow by going outside the system today.

Too often, for entrepreneurs and innovators, it’s a chance event… something happens. In myth it surely does. However, if we consider the systems…it needs to be intentional. At least, that’s what we’ve found. There needs to be intentionality about it. It needs to be adaptive, surely. But it needs to be intentional. Chance can catalyze. But intentionality must set in. Answering the call must be intentional. I discuss some specific elements of intentionality below.

Refusal
Not everyone responds to the call. Some actually refuse. What’s revealing is the reason for the refusal. Campbell: “The myths and folktales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one’s own interest…The future is regarded…as though one’s present system of ideal, virtues, goals and advantages were to be fixed and made secure,” p 49.

This is what the system is expressly designed to do – to seek its own interest, privilege the current virtues, advantages and goals, and to make them secure! The non-hero, refusing the call is hearing the call of virtue, advantage and security. In a corporation, the social structure rewards a response to the system’s siren call. The social structure rarely rewards the innovator answering the call of disruption. Campbell points out that should one hear the call to innovation, but not embark, the result is “Walled in boredom, hard work, or “culture”, the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved, p49.

In our own work, we note informally two types of cynic, the one who tried and failed and the one who never tried. We’ll see about tried and failed below. Never tried, or had the chance and refused the call, are those that refuse, and they become the inertia in the system, to be avoided by the innovator.

Supernatural Aid
At some point after answering the call, the hero is presented with some “surprise” assistance. In mythology, it’s always a bit of supernatural, magical aid – a charm, an old woman or man. The charm protects the hero as he/she enters the new system. Moreover, at this point, the “charm” is a sense of peace, “…a benign, protecting power of destiny. In innovation or entrepreneurial discussions, there is some reference to this “charm” being a “mentor”. I don’t think it’s a mentor; that’s different. Thinking systemically and heroically, what we find works is less a mentor and more someone with relatively immense power who doesn’t have to use it. Someone removed from the day to day of the current system, but whose power can be used, especially benignly, in the system. Someone like the CEO or Chairman of the Board.

In our work, we’ve seen two specific examples of this related to the creation and establishment of two new business units, The Digital Health Group and the Emerging Markets Platforms Group. Andy Grove, Chairman emeritus, was the “supernatural” with the former, and Craig Barrett was “supernatural” of the latter. In both cases, the nature of their aid was based on personal relationships with the hero of the story. Yes, they acted as to some limited extent as mentors to the hero, but it was less of what they said and more of who they are that matters. Moreover, that others knew of the special relationship also mattered significantly. Finally, the two also acted on their own to incorporate the interests of the two new groups into their daily activities and into their relationships outside of the each group that also mattered. Finally, the “charm” of their presence, relationship and extra-group actions continues and must continue throughout establishment of the group. Therefore, one might well imagine that discontinuous innovation should seek (I daresay requires) the presence of and relationship with this sort of benign, but power systemic presence.

Crossing the First Threshold
Gandhi had a series of phrases: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. For disruptive innovation, the first threshold is when they fight you, for that is the point at which the disruption threatens the current system balance and homeostasis. Prior to this, there is little threat to the system, and the system does not respond as its fitness is not threatened. As was said of one GM: “They’re [executives] are not afraid you won’t do something; they’re afraid you will.”

In mythology, there’s a keeper to the first threshold at which the hero crosses, amulet/charm in hand, from the regular world into the “…zone of magnified power,” p. 64. When embarking on a disruptive innovation, the hero and his/her group is entering a zone of magnified power – power bestowed on the group by the system itself; i.e., the hero now has the power to disrupt the system, which is not perceived as benign, nor is it perceived as weak. The goal of the innovator/hero is to mitigate the relative challenge of the threat such the system does not perceive the endeavor as significant (accurately or inaccurately). That is, the system will respond according to the threat to its fitness on the landscape. The challenge for the hero in the corporate system is to dissipate the impact of the challenge to the system, such that the threat to the system is only mildly perceived.

In general it is right that the system responds to threats to its fitness. In mythology, the hero’s adventure begins when the society is ready for the teachings/change/adaptations the hero will bring. Corporations must also adapt, or they will perish as has been shown repeatedly, most convincingly, perhaps by Christensen. Therefore, the innovator/hero is embarking not only from one system of power (the current system), to a zone of magnified power, but he/she is also embarking in time, at the cusp of system change that would otherwise be driven from the landscape, and not by the corporation, which could change its relative fitness, even if this point is not clear in the beginning. Therefore, the hero must account for both a sense of power in the form of threat as well as a sense of time. Too often, the innovator talks about the “strength” of his/her business or innovation. Rather, it might behoove the innovator to play it down, to be less bold rather than more bold, to rely on the amulet as a sign of hidden strength.

Intel is a multinational corporation optimized to make and sell high complexity, high volume microprocessors. At the formation of our group three years ago, we did actually mitigate the threat to the system, albeit not intentionally. Rather than set out with a grand global vision (commensurate with Intel’s extant system) we initially set out to establish four different design centers in Bangalore, Cairo, Sao Paulo & Shanghai, each chartered for innovation in its own region. Thus, there was no central challenge anywhere, and the system didn’t perceive any significant threat. The result is, arguably, rather different. A point to which we will return.

The Belly of the Whale
Crossing the threshold is simply a step; passing into the new system requires a passage. In mythology, the hero sojourns in bellies of whales, elephants, monsters, wolves, other entities, and “…undergoes a metamorphosis. “…The passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth…,” p 74. The hero’s former self is demolished, “annihilated”, and “ceases to exist”. In our corporation, the hero must cease to be a part of the corporate system and represent the new system. This is the point at which a new system is forming, the beginning of Bateson’s conception of schismogenesis or the start of seeking autonomy, as Govindarajan & Trimble suggest is necessary.

In our business, what’s relevant is to recognize two key points: first that the disruptive endeavor has reached the point of forming the new system and second, that one must be intentional about it. In this case, Thurston (2008, personal communication), argues for an explicit inventory of the attributes available to the new system, through an exhaustive RPP analysis in advance of the endeavor. (See Table 1). If, following Bateson, the disruptive innovation calves-off a new system, then the chances of its success can only be aided by not proceeding randomly, but by considering explicitly the boundary conditions possible around the new system to be formed.

These boundary conditions, shown in Table 1, express the possible nature of the formal systemic relationship between the extant and new systems. However useful it is, it does not address the nature of power and social structure overlaying the two systems. As such, it’s sufficient to plan the ideal case, but insufficient to assess the probability of reducing systemic resistance to the innovation. We return to this point in the Implications section.

Initiation – Ultimate Boon
Feeling all refreshed from the belly of the whale, our hero is finally ready to slay some dragons and achieve some boon. Put another way, after significant preparation, the innovator is able to navigate both the old system and the new, to begin the long, tough propulsion of his/her endeavor up the fitness landscape. The preparation is crucial, as in mythology, the earliest stages set the course of the hero’s adventure through hardships and perils of every sort. In terms of innovation practice, much has been written, and there’s little more I can add except to make some simple points about the relevance of the departure phase. The 10 Rules for Strategic Innovation (Govindarajan & Trimble) is quite a handy guide that we’ve found rather useful for navigating this phase of the hero’s journey.

In our endeavors, we’ve found this to be quite more difficult than imagined it would be. The ubiquitous phrase we used was: “We need to fight Intel at every turn”. It was all the more frustrating in that in our naiveté, we imagined it was the company that should be helping us, not fighting us. It’s only by understanding the systems nature of the two entities that company’s “resistance” is entirely sensible.

Govindarajan & Trimble (and others) argue that the new endeavor requires autonomy. However, while some autonomy is necessary, what this paper suggests is rather a notion for how the systems will coexist, and what parts of the existing system will yield to the new endeavor, and vice versa. It’s not autonomy that’s sought, it’s adaptation that’s forced upon the highly fit system. Hence, the preparation – intentionality, release of cynicism, secure supernatural aid, etc.

In some work we did in Egypt, it because clear that a high publicity introduction of Classmate PC’s directly into a couple classrooms in the school provoked more negative backlash regarding questions of utility, teacher rules, student work, the timing of student work, administrative control, parental control, etc., than it did inject excitement and enthusiasm. Indeed, whenever any “important” people came to see the classroom, the classroom “put on the show” for the visitors, such was the reception of the machines. On the other hand, in some subsequent work looking specifically at the education system and more importantly, the power distribution and meaning of each element of the overall social structure, it became clear that we went about this pilot all wrong. We should have secured the quiet support of Suzanne Mubarak, wife of the current president. And we should have rolled-out the pilot very quietly, not with fanfare. And we should have determined the system and social structure adaptations necessary to incorporate the Classmate PCs into the classroom. In other places, a highly visible pilot reveals the adaptations. In Egypt, a sensitively silent pilot would have worked to the advantage of the endeavor.

In a separate case, we worked with Sri Satyan Mishra, from Delhi, the founder of Drishtee in India. Here’s a case where the local entrepreneur was quite capable of understanding the power distribution in the social network that infused the government systems at the District level. At the time, Drishtee was an information kiosk company – one of the first – that provided government services to rural villagers through an arrangement with the District Offices in the small cities that served as the headquarters for the District which is administered by a District Collector, the chief of the district. Drishtee not only helped the villagers, but it also helped the District Collector serve his/her rural constituents. However, many constituents also are served directly through the district office, in person, through which flourishes a small but significant informal economy. Drishtee’s activities were a minor adaptation to the current system without being (too) threatening. Mr. Mishra was quite clear that the two most intensive elements of initiating his business in the villages was finding the right information kiosk entrepreneur and securing support (ultimately with a handshake) from the relevant District Office.

In both cases, the labor of the endeavor was severely impacted – negatively and positively, respectively – by the preparation, or by the hero’s “departure” phase. The hero passes through various trials, meets with and is exalted by various key roles along the way. Much of the work and the resources for achieving that work have been discussed elsewhere. One last point, however, is that the work that’s done, while it must be done in the context of highly adaptive complexity, is done with the goal of creating a new sustainable system. This new system is the “ultimate boon” of the hero’s adventure – and we know how difficult that is.

In terms of this paper’s contribution, securing the ultimate boon is an exercise in understanding the nature of complex adaptive systems and social structures as much or, perhaps more than it is about understanding the business tools and technique to enact the innovation. However, it’s the latter that remains the focus of the vast amount of work on innovation. Securing the boon of a new “system” is the goal, however, we will see now that in the Hero’s journey, the return is as important as the departure in terms of the extant system that is the corporation.

Return
“The full round…requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet or the ten thousand worlds,” p167

The innovation needs to offer hope to the extant system and to the people in the extant social structure. So even as we begin the return, we return to the beginning where preparation is required to arrange for, to plan for hope to the system. That is, how will the extant system learn, grow, develop – become stronger – as a result of the innovation endeavor regardless of outcome? The only way heroes will not refuse the call is if there is some good he/she can do – however reluctant the hero may be.

Often new endeavors have an “exit strategy” and business people talk explicitly about the exist strategy from the beginning. But this is too confined a purview. For a venture capitalist, the exit strategy might be only about the business; but in the context of a multinational corporation (a large complex adaptive system) the endeavor must also be of concern to the system and its extant social structure. To be sure, the caricature of the hardnosed businessman [sic] would demure (if hardnosed businessmen can demure) at the thought of new ventures being about anything other than the financial return. But the presence of one hard-nose is no match for the power of the system to squelch that which diminishes.

In both mythology and business, the hero’s journey is intended to bring back a boon greater than what can be gained through the regular day to day world of the extant system. The hero knows it; as innovators, we forget it. It’s crucial to plan for the return from the beginning – whether the innovation endeavor is a financial success or not: “The myths of failure touch us with the tragedy of life, but those of success, only with their own incredibility. And yet, if the monomyth is to fulfill its promise, not human failure or superhuman success but human success is what we shall have to be shown,” p. 178.

There are two several ways to return…willingly or unwillingly, with the support of the “goddess” or against her will.

Magic Flight
The hero/innovator leaves the “real world” to embark on the adventure in the “other world”. At some point, the hero/innovator has reached his/her goal. Or, perhaps the goal has been reached. The hero is faced with return. For any innovator, the adventure reveals much about themselves and the world than was previously apparent. One path for the innovator is to return to the corporate system. The question is how.

Many entrepreneurs must “run away” from their creation…the cliché is that their temperament is not suited to “running the business”, only to starting it. (They work better in the highly adaptive phase, not the stable/homeostatic phase.) But how do they come back? What, if anything, do they bring back to the organization? Do they leave a trial of destruction, carnage?

Jason absconded with the golden fleece due to his collaboration with Medea, King Aeëtes’s daughter, who had fallen in love with Jason. As they were sailing away, the king’s ship was gaining. To delay the king, Medea convinced Jason to hack her brother to bits and throw his parts into the sea so Aeëtes would need to collect them for burial, and thus escaped to return with the fleece.

A multinational corporation is if nothing else a large adaptive system. The innovator/hero needs to plan for and bring back to the corporation that which he/she has learned. The learnings need to become a part of the “society”, to prepare for the next adventure. In our work, we’ve found it constructive to consider our innovation activities as both businesses and experiments. By being “scientists”, we take a critical eye toward both the old and new systems. We’ve not been nearly as explicit as we should be, but are improving.

Rescue From Without
Sometimes the hero doesn’t want return: “Who, having cast off the world would desire to return again? He would only be there. [original italics] And yet, in so far as one is alive, life will call. Society is jealous of those who remain away from it, and will come knocking at the door,” p. 178. Here Campbell talks about the society as an entity, society as a “force”, a force

One significant recent innovation endeavor at Intel was stopped rather abruptly. The GM, by his own admission, was fairly disaffected with the “whole thing” and considered leaving Intel. He was “rescued” by his mentor. Though the innovation was not a financial success, the hero/innovator was brought back into the system, to strengthen it.

In another example of an innovation of some years ago, of which Intel divested, the key innovator/hero did return to the larger system, willingly, but he also brought with him new social structures, new perspectives and has for several years now begun collecting others with similar experience and begun infiltrating the extant system, like a virus, moving the behemoth that is Intel slowly, inexorably. It may not be enough, or fast enough, but that’s a landscape question.

The system needs to keep an eye on its heroes. The system needs to hold the hero accountable to it – not just for the financial success, but also for the impact to the extant system. The hero’s journey is an expensive endeavor, its risk can be mitigated, and thus far more palatable to the extant powerful system, by actively considering how the system can benefit independent of the financial risk and probability of success.

Crossing of the Return Threshold
At this point, the hero crosses back to the real world. Campbell so uncannily, presciently and perhaps a bit dramatically, captures the experience of the innovator returning to the system, that I quote the entire passage:

Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold. The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrow, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes. The easy thing is to commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock dwelling, close the door and make it fast. But if some spiritual obstetrician has meanwhile drawn the shimenawa across the retreat, then the work of representing eternity in time, and perceiving in time eternity, cannot be avoided. p. 189.

The innovator, returning, finds that he/she comes with experience, knowledge, purview and capabilities foreign to most of corporate individuals but moreover, to the system as a whole. The innovator must find his/her way; and must find a way to “…teach again…what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand times…”, p. 188. The goal of the innovation is not to diminish the system, but to raise it higher on the fitness landscape. This vital point is often lost or missing in the innovation endeavor, and hence sets the innovation more at odds with the system than perhaps is warranted, increasing the system’s negative response while demanding ever more of the innovator and the innovator’s supernatural help.

“There must remain however…a certain baffling inconsistency between the wisdom brought forth from the deep, and the prudence usually found to be effective in the light world.”, p. 188. In the end, the system must do everything it can to survive the onslaught of innovation from within as well as from without. In the end, the system must act prudently to maintain its fitness, stability and social structure. It must. It can act no other way; it would defy its own nature as a complex adaptive system. The hero/innovator must bring the boon – the capabilities and outlook – from the innovation to the system. In the end, the innovator becomes a master of the two worlds , possesses the ability and “…freedom to pass back and forth across the world division [from the day to day to the extraordinary] not contaminating the principles of the one with those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other.”, p. 196.

The cycle is now complete and the foundation laid to establish a culture of (disruptive) innovation, of actively embarking on a path of schismogenesis, of learning, establishing and returning.

In Closure, Two Implications
First, we can define innovation as creating new systems and/or new landscapes within a shared social structure. Furthermore, we can refine Christensens’ notion of disruptive innovation more specifically as creating new systems at lower fitness on existing landscapes or new landscapes challenging existing landscapes within a shared social structure.

Clearly, innovation is hard. But this analysis suggests that it’s hard not because ideation is hard, or necessarily because we lack business skills. Rather, our work suggests that collectively, we’ve failed to recognize the innovation necessarily increases tension in an extant, often powerful system – as system designed explicitly to reduce and eliminate tensions due to uncertainties. Thus, innovation is antithetical to the survival of the system, even if individuals recognize the value of the innovation. All things being equal, the probability of success of any disruptive innovation within a large multinational corporation is at least as much about the system as it is about the idea – if not more so.

Disruptive innovations must recognize the tension they are injecting into the extant system. They must also recognize that the system will resist, even if individuals are “on your side”. There disruptive innovation must spend as much or more effort on the “context” as on “the idea”. A systems focus shifts the context from the “idea” and the “strategy” to the landscape and to the competing systems on that (or the new) landscape. In this paper, we explored the various elements of context – the system attributes expected to be available to the new innovation – for example, the need for supernatural aid, the strong need to provide tangible value back to the system as a result of engaging in the innovation journey, etc.

Second, the innovator is on a hero’s journey. The hero’s “job” is to embark on journey for the express purpose of bringing value back to the society from whence he/she came, whether the society was aware of the need or not. As such, the innovator requires the tools and resources of the mythological hero of Campbell’s monomyth. This is especially the case in the context of a large multinational corporation where the innovator is defacto challenging the supremacy of the extant system by creating a new system on an existing landscape, or by creating new landscapes. The system will resist. The hero, by careful preparation, by securing all the tools and resources and actively managing them, will address the system through its social structure.

Addressing the social structure means understanding the nature of power distributed through the system and using it. It means understanding the personal proclivities and interests of specific individuals, but also their role in the system, and the nature of their power – both positive power as well as resistive power. Put another way, the innovator needs to understand how the innovation is good for the system, much the way the hero needs to understand how the prize of his/her journey would aid society.

We return now to Table 1. These conditions are the “business tools” available to the innovator that attempt to identify the relationship systemic between the old and new system. However, unless there is collective – that is, systemic – agreement to the character of this relationship, individuals or groups in the extant system can easily energize the standard system response to any threat. Supernatural aid may not be enough. In this way, disruptive innovation requires a significant manipulation of – not expression of – power to limit the systemic response.

My hypothesis is that if we were to review successful disruptive innovations that occurred within corporations, we’d see that the innovator successfully manipulated the power distribution in the organization. This may be a significant reason innovation is so heroic (and therefore so hard). It’s exceptionally difficult to manage a social structure to support purposes for which it was not defined. It’s requires a spectacular individual to achieve such ends.

Closure
Just as the hero/innovator must be intentional about the innovation journey, the system also can and should be intentional about how it will react to disruptive innovations. That is, the social structure of the corporation/system can choose the extent to which disruptive innovation is tolerated by the system. That is, disruptive innovation must be designed into the system. Low tolerance requires both the good idea as well as the truly exceptional person to drive the idea through the corporation; it will be a continuous, heroic fight, as it has been for nearly all disruptive innovations at Intel. A system with high tolerance can institutionalize (i.e., systematize) the system response by gaining collective acceptance to specific formal relationships tolerable to the organization, pre-managing the power through the social structure and making the whole engagement just a little less heroic. Disruptive innovation, often sought, much lamented for its difficulty, valued for its rarity and preciousness, must become a part of the system to have any greater chance of success than currently reported in the literature.

It seems to me that “practice” is a predominant notion upon which much ethnographic and human-centered design work in industry sits. Theories of practice have provided ethnographers in industry a theoretically nuanced yet empirically resonant object of analysis by which to frame and ground their work. I think it grounds the work of human-centered designers too. Even when practitioners themselves may not draw explicitly (or knowingly) on this trajectory, the general framing of the applied ethnographic research, design and strategy enterprise in industry centers attention on the “everydayness’ of what people do, on the apparent messiness and, sometimes at the same time, sublime order of what they do (or say or think), on the way things “actually” transpire.

So, what have we learned about “practice” in the context of this corporate encounter? We may have different maps of the field of practice, but its likely Bourdieu and de Certeau, perhaps Goffman, and maybe Knorr-Cetina would appear on many of those maps. Likely Suchman, for some Schon, and more recently perhaps Postill and Schatzki would too.

So what does our work offer to this illustrious mix?  Can we name things, specifically, that dispute or advance the ideas that emerge from these trajectories? Does the practice frame remain a generative one for advancing conceptualizations and understandings of what we do?

But lets keep this simple:

• Do you (still) like the notion of practice for conceptualizing what you do?  Why (or not)?
• Where does it have limits?
• Is there some other concept(s) that you find yourself drawing on that approximates a similar terrain, but does more work for you?

I don’t have a pat answer.  I think that thinking about thinking in an open-source sort of way does entail some risk of a form of idea piracy.  That’s not without basis, given the fact that a great deal of work in the design/research intersection has been ‘citation-free,’ largely, I think, due the perception among all kinds of practitioners that they need to be able to claim uniqueness in order to offer value, and that uniqueness has been understood as pure invention.  Differentiation is seen as the offer of value to clients.  In a  practitioner-heavy field, that becomes the dominant ethos.

We started pulp because we think the field will grow more robustly if it is more open, if the contest of ideas happens with the ideas rather than in marketing claims.  But if the zeitgeist of the space is going to change toward an everyday comfort with saying, “We got this idea from Dr. X, and man is it cool”  two things have to happen:  Dr. X has to put his idea out beyond the margins of his own practice, where it may have huge holes poked into it, and the folks who use it, build on it, have to be willing to say that Dr. X works for their arch-competitor, Xcorp.

I think that’s worth it if I get to see more of Dr. X’s stuff in return.  And if I’m Dr. X (which really, I’m not.  Honest.  But I’ve met him), I would like to be able to tell my next prospective customer that the model or the method I’m suggesting for their work has been raked over the intellectual coals and turned inside out by the entire field, and remains standing.  My apologies for the terribly mixed metaphors, a habit I picked up from John Cain.

Here’s why I’m putting this up as a strand:  I may well be wrong about the idea of having readers, as well as writers and critics.  Maybe the only way to get the kind of depth of engagement, quality of interaction over work in progress is to wall the garden, to make the space only available to folks who have put something in.  I’m trying to avoid a game/sports analogy here, folks.  I’ll leave it at that.  I’ve gone back and forth on this a thousand times during the floating of the idea for pulp and the building of it, and have come down on the side of thinking that the folks out there who read, but don’t contribute are for the most part not pirates but instead nascent writers and thinkers themselves.  And the best thing to do is set the example of being open about the work and equally committed to citation, acknowledgment.

So I’d like to open it up.  Get comments, points of view.  It’s early in the life of pulp, and we could change the way it works.   Or see where it goes, how it goes.

I think that there is a connection in that notion to Bourdieu’s ‘doxa’ description (from Outline of a Theory of Practice) in that the use of a ’single register’ implies either a choice or an unawareness of the full range of possible registers.  So, the producers of “America’s Got Talent,” for example can really think that there is good material there, or they can be conniving bastards, just in the same way that the author of “Mutant Message from Down Under” may be either as limited in her understanding of culture(s) as say, Carlos Castaneda (or as Ayn Rand’s unsubtle political economics) (admission: part of this is motivated by trying to understand why I, at 17 or 18, found Castaneda and Rand brilliant and am now somewhat shamed by that)), or that she is just working in cartoon to hit as much of an undiscriminating audience as possible.  In any case, complexity and flexibility come in as values.  In a sort of disturbingly absolute way.

Anyway, “No Logo” and its sisters come to mind.  And William Gibson’s character Cayce Pollard’s allergic revulsion to major icons.  It would be nice to find something a bit deeper than Klein, some better than average thinking about desire and discrimination.

I’ve got an outline of this idea, below.  but it may be completely outdated.  So pointers would be appreciated.

Cantare amantis est “Only he who loves can sing”   St. Augustine

WORKING WITH STYLE

How hard is it to convey the essence of the work we do?  I’m talking here about particular instances of work, work in projects, in cases, in fieldwork and findings, more than the more generic process, method, and overview blurbs and slideshows that get used to ‘sell’ or introduce the work.  It’s hard.  We rely, often, on close collaborations and shared experiences to bridge across organizational boundaries and disciplinary backgrounds.  We don’t expect folks to “get” the work by reading a report, and probably with good reason. At last year’s EPIC an entire session was devoted to rethinking representations of our work in media and practices other than writing (Sunderland, 2008).  Writing’s role in our work sometimes seems like an ancillary skill.  There are of course the bullet points in the PowerPoint files and the notes which accompany talking-head video snippets and internal ‘DO NOT CIRCULATE’ research reports.  Occasionally a case study will find its way to a company website, comprised of the (unfortunately) near-standard formula: problem-method-insight-solution, “real people,” and a product glamour shot.  And there are the four years of EPIC and its proceedings, which, for as good as both are, are still a long way from the scale and variety of the AAA or ACM journals and proceedings. I’m willing to go a bit retro in this paper and suggest that writing, more than anything else, continues to be the most important vehicle for communicating among ourselves and especially, to wider audiences and other interested parties.

Discussed in person, and for some researchers presented from the podium ethnographic research work comes alive. But as a rule with few exceptions, it is hard to say the same of research writing.  Picked, not quite at random, from an EPIC proceeding (2007):

Our research objectives were to uncover the needs of non users in the low income community, how they might use or adopt mobile and Internet services, and how to design technology based on people’s needs, constraints, and aspirations.

This is not “Call me Ishmael.” Nor is it exceptionally bad.  It’s our normal for proceedings and journals. We learn to write this simply and clearly, this unostentatiously.   We are, for the most part, taught to avoid “Call me Ishmael” in professional writing, to understand style and personal voices as violations of the objective, scientific frame.  Were we only reporting results, there would be good reason for such a limitation.  But we aren’t only reporting.  We are creating alternative interpretations, opening up ways of thinking differently, imagining new futures.  We have good reasons to understand what style brings to communication and to learn to work with it in the work we do.

We can do better than reportage. We should do better, not only for ourselves and for the field, but for those for whom we create the work in the way that we do; for the participants whom we must respect, and for our ‘clients,’ whether internal or external, immediate or imagined.  There are other models out there which can help with this.  And peer-reviewed science journal writing is not at the top of that list

WHY “HOW FICTION WORKS” WORKS

Last year, I had occasion to remain prone for most of eight weeks, during which time I read a lot of fiction, watched a lot of movies, and listened to a lot of music.  I came out of that with a renewed energy for work that I could not put down to the surgeon or the medications.  A month or so after that, however, I began reading literary critic James Wood’s “How Fiction Works,” (2008) and light broke through the clouds, bells rang, pennies dropped, and scales fell away.  It is a brilliant little book.  It is, as one might expect from a New York Times literary critic, beautifully written; at once authoritative, playful, and subtle.  Smart. It made me think differently about much that I had already read, and sent me to the bookstore to find novels I’d passed by.  But I carried it around, dog-eared its pages unmercifully, and underlined it with the abandon of a first-year graduate student, because I read How Fiction Works as a figure of thought, an analogy for much of the work that we do.  It made me think, hard, about why research reports don’t absorb you the way that fiction does, about why we rarely sing at conferences. In the reading and watching and listening I’d done I was often moved, but hadn’t thought very deeply about how and why that was.  What Wood brings beautifully to the fore is that the core of the novel form isn’t its fictive or imaginative nature, but the way in which style particularly connects reader, author, and character.  How that works for the work we do, is the focus of this paper.

Wood is a scholar-critic.  He isn’t writing a “how to” for novelists, but rather elucidating both why some fiction is so much better than others, and how the technical means to make it so have developed over the history of the form.  The “Works” in the title is as much evaluative as it is mechanical.  Wood’s encapsulation of the central tradition of the novel is the grounding analogy for me:

Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are […] cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life sameness, but what I must call lifeness.  Life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.” (Wood, 2008, p. 247 emphasis original)

Replace “realism” with “ethnography” and it is hard to conceive of a better description of what most of us would most like to achieve in our work.  “Truthfulness to the way things are” gets nicely to all of the important moments of what we do—observation, description, inscription, interpretation.  But in that last, crucially active phrase, “brought to different life by the highest artistry,” there is perhaps more room between author and page than we are comfortable with as scientists, as researchers.  Most of “How Fiction Works” is focused on that gap, for although the creation of a slight mismatch between what character or narrator understands and what the reader should understand is the very definition of irony, (according to Wood, at least), it is also where style is embodied, where the work of fiction “triples” to encompass a reality, its immediate perception, and reflective commentary on both of those.

I’d like to move ‘style’ up the ladder of importance in how we think, write, and talk about the work we do.  Like most of my generation, I was trained to understand ‘style’ (in writing, at least) as something to be followed, to be adhered to. First, Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style”, then Kate Turabian and the “Chicago Manual of Style” as finishing school.  Turabian was, after all, the head of my university’s Dissertation Office, through whom every thesis and dissertation – whether in Cosmological Physics or Cognitive Psychology, had to be processed, scrutinized, and approved.  Style in this sense isn’t connected to ‘reality’ but to readability, to enabling communication through formal standards.  I am not suggesting that we abandon good punctuation or citation formatting (and why, after all, would we?  There are free websites such as bibme.com that will take a fragment of a title, hunt it down, and format the citation in APA, Chicago, or MLA style in less time than it took to write this parenthetical observation).  Style in the sense Wood intends does something different for us.  Wood’s question, “What distinguishes great work from grinding genre prose?” (Wood, 2008, 196) seems perfectly applicable to the work of research communication.

Wood opens up a different approach to how we write about the work that we do, how we “get down to business” among ourselves and for all the readers we could have: the notion of style applied to the work of ethnographic description and communication. Wood’s book provides us with a clear and often beautiful set of constructs for not only understanding “how fiction works,” but also to see the gap between simply conveying “findings” (our version of basic genre prose) and great writing.  I think it allows us to see how the work of design and the work of understanding are, in ways both substantive and formal, creative. It provides us the structure and the latitude to do more with our material.

This paper is an examination of what the notion and the elements of style can do for ethnographic communication: an argument in support of doing the hard work of communicating not just with clarity and fidelity, but with some of the flair, imagination, and voice of the best in fiction.

IRONY AND STYLE

Irony is usually a subject of investigation; a topic, a potential explanation.  Wood offers it to us as the central structure of style, and through it, an intriguing notion of discriminating reading and writing.  For me, Wood reclaimed irony from the reduced circumstances it found itself in after the debilitating period of time it spent linked to consumption in the ’nineties.  Shockingly, it seems that the work of irony is not always wry, or mocking or superior, nor was it invented only late in the last century.

“[In] free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language.  We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once.  A gap opens between author and character, and the bridge—which is free indirect style itself—between them simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its distance.  This is merely another definition of dramatic irony: to see through a character’s eyes while being encouraged to see more than the character can see.”  (Wood, 2008, p. 11)

Especially wonderful is that Wood follows this definitional passage immediately with a perfectly chosen example not from Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace, but from Robert McCloskey’s classic children’s story Make Way for Ducklings.

McCloskey places us in Mr. Mallard’s confusion; yet the confusion is obvious enough that a broad ironic gap opens between Mr. Mallard and the reader (or author).  We are not confused in the same way as Mr. Mallard; but we are also being made to inhabit Mr. Mallard’s confusion.  (Wood, 2008, p. 12, emphasis original )

“To inhabit Mr. Mallard’s confusion.” I think this is when I began to understand that How Fiction Works is if anything, larger than its immodest title suggests.  Wood characterizes the tension between a represented reality, the experience of that reality (by characters & narrators), and the interpretation of the whole which we read in the discrepancies or the parallels between the two, as the ground upon which style builds “life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.” Irony, understood this way, is what creates the tension that holds a novel together.  The figures which create an “ironic gap” do double duty, encoding a part of at least one reality while they point to a gap between it and other positions in and outside of the work itself.

Isn’t this what we purport to offer to our clients, to our audiences?  A level of understanding the subject that is so close as to “inhabit” their way of being in the world? Coupled with a way of reaching directly for our clients, knowingly and carefully bringing confusion (or joy or shame or habitualness) to life for them?  Allowing them to consider it, know it, and ultimately, to value it, respect it, even as we offer to change it?

The different ways in which that structuring and skinning gets done are the ‘technologies’ of the novelist.  I’m not suggesting we appropriate them wholesale.  But the clarity of the relationship between the elements of style Wood illuminates can certainly be a model for the delivery of ethnographic work to design, business, strategy, product development – any of our central audiences. Understanding and reflecting on the tensions between reality and its perception: if that is not our business and our value, I’m not sure what can be.

Issuing some sort of edict—“Write with style!” is not particularly helpful.  The style guides we (ought to) keep ready to hand while we write are probably less than half of the vocabulary we need to master.  The constructs of our disciplines are another.  And the concerns of our clients and the language they use to express them are more yet.  Style is not, in the way I’m reading Wood here, reducible to any of those.  Let’s think of style, in our context, as the control and expression of ironic tension.  That kind of style is clearly more than either individual expression or flair devoid of substance.  It is instead, a kind of structure, a requirement, a framework requiring that we give each of those tensional corners clear and distinct treatment: in detailing in what this particular reality consists; in the curation of specific and consistent voices for the characters we represent; and finally, in the development of a voice for the person, the team, or the company behind that analysis – one specific to the research goal(s), and which is clearly rooted in– and articulates if need be — the values which inform every research undertaking.

But I think it important to look briefly at why we haven’t been working more explicitly with the notion of style all along.  An omission particularly odd in a field that counts design and designers as both central practitioners and important interlocutors.

WRITING, READING, AND STYLE

The blurb from the New York Times on my 1979 copy of The Elements of Style says, “Buy it, study it, enjoy it. It is as timeless as a book can be.”  Reading it again, I found this bit to be especially timeless:

The special vocabularies of the law, of the military, of government are familiar to most of us.  Even the world of criticism has a modest pouch of private words (luminous, taut), whose only virtue is that they are exceptionally nimble and can escape from the garden of meaning over the wall.  Of these Critical words, Wolcott Gibbs once wrote, ‘…they are detached from the language and inflated like little balloons.’  The young writer should learn to spot them — words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning but that soon burst in air, leaving nothing but a memory of a bright sound. (Strunk & White, 1979 pp. 83-4)

“Escape from the garden of meaning over the wall.” We have more than a few of them: once-useful terms such as “text,” insider turns of phrase like “always already” and maxims like “speak truth to power” have been sanded very thin by master and apprentice writers alike. Granted, most have not been so harshly abused as to be entirely empty (or empty and wrong as, say, how “fleshed out” is constantly rendered as “flushed out” in business jargon), but we are close to it in this field’s most completely burst term, “insight.”  Strunk and White included insightful in the “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused” chapter with the following note more than 50 years ago:  “The word is a suspicious overstatement for “perceptive” … usually, it crops up to inflate the commonplace.” (p. 50).  Despite that warning, there are entire corporate departments denominated with some form of the word, and the gods only know on how many PowerPoint slides it appears (One need not be a god to find that it gets half a billion hits in search engines).

What happens when all of the useful language has gone over the wall?  We get what Wood wonderfully calls the “ruined argot” of a debased language.  In trite phrases like ‘user need’ or ‘consumer insight’ we are dangerously close to ruining our argot, despite the equally dangerous fact that we haven’t yet fully developed it. The style figure gives us an option other than ascribing this to bad writing or a lazy sink into marketing jargon.

I began work on this paper with the idea that it would be about bad writing.  I started to work through conference proceedings and abstracts looking for papers that bored me or that bulged with jargon and trudged unhappily along with voiceless, monotonous, prose.  I know that I’ve skimmed many a journal page and written, under the guise of note-taking, letters to my college roommate in the rows of a conference auditorium – so I was sure bad writing had to be there.  But it wasn’t. Or at least not much of it. It takes work to find really awful work in the proceedings and journals for this field.  But the good writing is good writing within, as Wood has it, a single register, and that register is the personless objective voice of most research writing and of academic journals.  Rather than bad writing, it seems that the style question, at least in part, is a question of audience, of the readers we imagine.  A painter friend of mine recently told me that she finds grant applications difficult because there is no clear person for whom she imagines writing them (In an academic journal, I’d have to footnote this as a dated personal correspondence).  That’s the core of it. In a slightly paradoxical fashion, exceptionally good writing such as that in Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish’s collaborations make this more clear than bad writing does.

Compare:

In the urban sphere, the user is pitched against a hostile world; in the domestic sphere, people find and celebrate a nurturing environment. […T]echnology has a lot of hard-wired assumptions about where danger lurks in our complex world. To us, that seems dangerous. (Bell and Dourish, 2006, p.  39,)

With:

In their work on information infrastructures, Bowker and Star [41] discuss the International Classification of Diseases, a common infrastructure for the collection and comparison of mortality statistics worldwide. Like other boundary objects [42], though, the ICD is less a stable platform upon which everyone can stand, and more a means by which different interests, groups, concerns, and activities can be brought into temporary alignment. (Bell and Dourish, 2007, p.8)

The first is for the (quite cool) design/engineering magazine Ambidextrous; the second, for the peer-reviewed journal Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.  In the magazine article, the tone is different, the language warmer (despite the topic).  In it Bell and Dourish are present and they have opinions.  In the second; they recede behind cool objectivity and lots of citations.

We come to this honestly. In the opening chapter of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, (2009) Alain deBotton writes about the passions of “Ship Spotters” who keep detailed records of observations of the comings and goings of cargo ships in major ports around the world.

In converting a passion into a set of facts, the spotters are at least following a pattern with an established pedigree, most noticeable in academia, where an art historian, on being stirred to tears by the tenderness and serenity he detects in a work by a fourteenth-century Florentine painter, may end up writing a monograph, as irreproachable as it is bloodless, on the history of paint manufacture in the age of Giotto.  It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naïve question of how and why we have been moved. (deBotton, 2006,  p 27)

Style, I think, requires that we do not bracket the passions we find in our work; that when we are stirred, when we observe the stirring, we make space for it in how we write.  Writing for an academic audience removes, implicitly, the opportunity to create characters and implies that the authorial viewpoint is an objective one, a scientific one, rooted in description and shying away from the explicit expression of values, or the imagination of futures.  The first move in developing styles for our space then, is to considerably broaden the notion of who our readers might be.

STYLE AND REALITIES

One way to tell slick genre prose from really interesting writing is to look, in the former case, for the absence of different registers […] a style that is locked into place. By contrast, rich and daring prose avails itself of harmony and dissonance by being able to move in and out of place.   (Wood, 2008, 196)

We do not have the option of inventing the reality we write about.  But the requirement that we stick to what is true does not put the ability to be ‘really interesting’ or ‘rich and daring’ out of reach until we switch careers.  Non-fiction has its share of writers with enviable style: Atul Gawande’s Complications (2002), Tracy Kidder’s  Mountains Beyond Mountains (2004), and deBotton’s “Work” book are all essentially ethnographic works; closely observant, broadly and deeply informed, and intelligently interpreted.

Gawande and Kidder both have ‘characters’ around which the books cohere.  In Complications, it is Gawande himself, although other physicians and patients are as vividly drawn as are his own experiences.  Opening up the specialized vocabulary of the profession to a wide audience, Gawande enables readers to inhabit the confusion and the cares of a surgeon, just as McCloskey did with Mr. Mallard.   Kidder, on the other hand moves back and forth between his ostensible ‘subject’ Paul Farmer, and himself.  Farmer’s work and passion infects him, moves him from reporter to something more than that- a witness perhaps- but in any case, we understand that Kidder has changed, seemingly as we read. In Kidder’s conveying of a life’s work first hand, we understand Farmer but also Kidder himself, and how Farmer brings Kidder to ‘inhabit’ a different stance toward the world.

For some time, one of the points of tension between some of the constituent groups in applied ethnography has been the relative importance of being a first person observer in primary research, of being able to vouch for the verity of an observation by saying, “I was there.”  What I think goes wrong with this well-intentioned stance is brought forward by the notion of ironic tension and style: when we choose from great mounds of field data the specific informant’s words which convey the researcher’s findings, we are collapsing at least two if not three points of view into one.  Quoting a participant with “I like to read and sometimes send a text” immediately after one writes, in the academic objective voice: “People are reluctant to enter information into devices, or to learn new skills,” is at the least, redundant, and somehow disingenuous, giving subject and author the same voice, having one speak through the other.   “I observed” or “we noticed” are not the same as “he said.”  And they are not, either, “It was troubling to me to observe” or, back to Bell and Dourish, “To us, that seems dangerous.”

The worlds of our subjects are strange.  It is the very distance between our clients’ ways of seeing the world and way it is understood and experienced by, as Jean Lave (1988) so plainly put it, “just plain folks” that makes the work we do valuable.  In collapsing voice into findings, in searching talking head snippets for the moment which provided ‘the insight,’ we take out both the richness of style and the values that might live in the distinctions between those differences.

If writing of the “Our research objectives were to uncover…” variety is not “Call me Ishmael, neither is it “They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair.” the opening two sentences of William Gibson’s Count Zero (Gibson, 1987). Gibson is often cited for the effectiveness with which he invents future realities, realities in which we nod along in appreciation of the truthfulness of the social, technological, and psychological dynamics on which the novels are laid, even as we are astonished by the elements he creates to populate them.  Whether it is the distant future of Neuromancer or the eerily and indeterminately closer worlds of Spook Country and Pattern Recognition, Gibson does for an imagined future what Dickens or Flaubert or Proust did for their contemporary or near-contemporary worlds: inhabit them fully while just as fully subverting them– critically, lovingly, but still creating that slight shift that lets us see the difference between reality and what could or, more powerfully, should be.

By the end of the first five or six pages of Count Zero, the alternate reality is completely immersing without a sentence that is uninflected and omniscient.  Simple descriptions embody the tensions of the style Wood calls “free indirect style:” “Something Midwestern in the bone of the jaw, archaic and American” (p. 3) or “how she lived alone in one of the ramshackle pontoon towns tethered off Redondo” (p. 4) They open the distance not between an innocent character and a knowing reader, but between the world as we know it and a potential future as Gibson has imagined it: the archaic jawline, the tethered town—words and  images that are neither burst nor empty. Gibson sets up the rules for an alternate future and then plays by them.  It isn’t just Gibson’s imagination we should be excited by, it is the discipline with which he takes premises laid down in our social and technical reality and develops them in ways not at all necessary or obvious.  It is the kind of subversive act of art that Herbert Marcuse (1978) put at the center of critical understanding.

Fiction is the narrative imagining of invented worlds. We are not in the business of inventing data, but we are in the business of imagining futures every bit as much as we are in the business of representing realities.  How we choose to do those is a matter of voice and values.

STYLE AND CHARACTER

Bell and Dourish (I’m making them stand in here for a–not insubstantial, but still a minority– of writers in the field) can and do shift voice and register depending on their intentions, the context and on the readers they imagine.  This isn’t waffling or unscientific of them.  I’d probably rather read the prose of the Ambidextrous piece, but my trust in them as researchers is predicated on their corpus of journal articles and on knowing them, hearing them speak at events like this one.  We are, variously, researchers, designers, and strategists.  And also students, parents, confused car shoppers and fashionistas.   We don’t need to hide these various and varying identities, but we do need to understand the role they play in the work that we are doing. A character can be how we control who we are and who we need to be in a particular piece of research work or its communication.  Shifting domains slightly, I think Alain deBotton characterizes this consideration perfectly in The Architecture of Happiness when he begins his reflection on how we are affected by our surroundings with,

Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places—and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be. (2006, p.13)

In design and design research, it is not an uncommon practice to create “personas” as vehicles for conveying fieldwork (and personal experience) to clients and project teams.  While in general, the sophistication of persona representations has come a long way from the twentieth century advertising agency practice of creating mood boards out of images and words clipped from magazines (many of which had been created by “creatives” looking at mood boards), they are still shallow, simplified, and static when compared with the imperfect messiness of just plain folks.  Like just average academic writing, they are characterized by a lack of multiple registers and a decided absence of tension.  Again, we can do better.  Quotes and talking head snippets of video don’t bring subjects to life as characters.  They point at the distance without ever enabling the ‘habitation’ of it.  Style requires not just a voice, but a deep appreciation of other voices, even as that original voice frames and stands off from its partners.

I have a friend who is a writer (another personal communication, n.d.). Right now, he is working on a collection of short, lyrical essays that hover between memoir and poetry. All of them are written in a very close first person, and all of them are ‘true’: I know because I am a character in a few of them, and they startle me always with how much I’d forgotten, but how recognizable those forgotten things are.  So it came as a surprise to me that he talks about how difficult it is to create the right voice for “the narrator.”  Not “me” but “the narrator.”  He is working with “the truth,” but he is careful to step away from reportage and neutrality, taking the care to create the two clear voices, and the relationship between them.  Ironic structure, bent to the creation of value.  The hard work of style, for the payoff of communication of reality.

Wood talks about a number of techniques (or ‘technical advances’) which create the tension between author, character and narrator.  One central one, which he argues was invented or at least perfected by Flaubert, is the notion of a “flaneur”, a character whose main role is to notice things:

This figure is essentially a stand-in for the author, is the author’s porous scout, helplessly inundated with impressions.  He goes out into the world like Noah’s dove, to bring a report back.  The rise of this authorial scout is intimately connected to the rise of urbanism, [...] to the fact that huge conglomerations of mankind throw at the writer – or the designated perceiver—large, bewilderingly various amounts of detail.  (Wood, 2008, p. 48)

The “designated perceiver”—how incredible a role is that!  And how close the notion of “large, bewilderingly various amounts of detail” to the experience of trying to bring some order to a roomful of fieldwork documentation. But rarely do we allow that bewilderment to show through in research reports. “We don’t know yet,” does not seem to be an acceptable response to bewilderment, even when it is true.  Reading reports, case studies, and proceedings, one would think that we are a profession of perfect perceivers; that we have no confusion for our readers to inhabit. Unfortunately, what we rule out along with bewilderment and confusion are the values that shape everything from how we conduct the fieldwork to the conclusions we draw and the recommendations we make to colleagues and clients.  Instead of our own voice, we substitute an objective distance. Our flaneur explains instead of noticing. As if by removing all the first person pronouns, the author’s voice is magically removed, leaving objectivity.  Yet from St. Augustine to Stephen Jay Gould, the combination of clear, critical thinking with passion, with personal experience and explicit values, has created work that is as stirring as it is persuasive and reasonable.  Style is reason’s partner.  It does not need to be stripped away to let objectivity and truth come through. What the work of fiction does, or at least that the intelligent criticism of it proposes that it does, is to show us how to craft a distinct voice for both character and author, and define the relationship between those voices in the work of creating the narrative.  Maintaining that relationship consistently is the work of style.

FIGURES AND IMAGES

Almost a decade ago, Tony Salvador opened a talk at an interaction design conference with a very simple line drawing of a daisy-like flower.  Tony is, I’m sorry to say, only slightly better at drawing than I am.  I remember it not because of its stunning artistry, but because of how perfectly it worked as the underlying structural metaphor for his talk, and more importantly, for the experience of the folks he and his colleagues had studied in an extensive, multi-sited ethnography.

As a field, we use metaphors, similes, and analogies constantly: consumers “journey” through life stages or car purchases, and so many everyday activities are presented as “cycles” that the newest version of PowerPoint can turn any list into a broad–arrowed and brightly colored cycle at a click.  But we tend to use them in specific and isolated forms.  To make specific points, rather than to create structure or invest a report on work for hire with style.  Salvador’s “Flower of Spain” figure did more than that because it was the figure through which an Intel Corporation organization, specifically interested in inventing and applying new technologies, made sense out of hundreds of hours of observation, interview, and conversation.  It connected the seemingly mundane (average area in square meters of urban apartments, the making of coffee, the running up of cafe tabs) with the core of the participants’ experience in a way that made the distance between Santa Clara or Hillsboro and southern Spain something understood rather than measured; that provided both research team and readers with something to think with.

In Mountains Beyond Mountains, there is a recurring image that does much the same kind of work for Kidder, but which is selected, chosen, from the years of interaction between the two men, rather than one created by Kidder as explanation. Paul Farmer is a physician and researcher whose work is global and epidemiological; who has tackled the societal factors contributing to epidemic diseases both by reframing the medical understanding of “resistance” (in more than one disease) and by mobilizing organizations on the scale of the United Nations, the World Bank, and the pharmaceutical industry to take action in dozens of countries, at enormous levels of expenditure.

But several times a year, crammed into short holes in crazy global itineraries, Farmer returns to Haiti and goes to see individual patients, in their homes.  The hike to see two patients which Kidder describes in most detail takes 11 hours.  Of hiking.

It is a journey between two worlds, and a metaphor which works on many levels, which Kidder returns to deftly throughout the book.  Farmer doesn’t just move between rural Haiti and the centers of global policymaking, he connects them,  walking from one to the other, and taking what each gives him back to inform the other.  In that journey, we can see starkly the complex relationship between economic and political structures and an individual illness, recovery, or death.  The real hike is used not only to re-register our way of thinking about something removed from our reality –how many of us know someone who has died of tuberculosis?– but to make the role of an individual interpreter’s re-registering as vivid as any fictional one.  Through that shift, Kidder hands his readers responsibility and a moral choice: knowing that a different reality is possible, and is within the realm of individual agency, we choose between doing nothing and doing something.

Making real events do the work that a brilliantly imagined metaphor can do as well as this one does is no mean trick, but it is work. In ethnographic research and in design, representations, models, and frameworks are often metaphorical.  My point here is not just that they could be more so, but that in writing to create the distinct tensions and voices between what is, how our subjects understand that, and what ought to happen, we can create in compelling style, as well as in truth.  As Wood has it, “in cases like this metaphor is doing what it is supposed to do; it is speeding us, imaginatively, toward a new meaning.”  (p. 204)

CONCLUSION, WITH MUSIC

I’ve been approaching the notion of style mostly from the point of view of writing and writers.  Considering the work (in all the senses I’ve been using it) as it is embodied by authors in communications on the scale of talks, articles, and books.  But I think that there is more potential for the idea of styles than what I’ve glossed so far.  Again, Wood started me on the particular approach to the issue, but it is one that the social sciences and the design world long considered—the idea of practice and the related notion of communities of practice.  The development of the novel and in particular the development of “free indirect style” is an historical and, as the flaneur passage shows, also a material evolution, with originators, experiments, students and masters.

In this strange little intersection between research, technology, design, and strategy, we haven’t quite understood ourselves to be engaged in that same sort of social/technical search. We should.  We can develop distinct styles of analysis, differing sensibly between what we’d use for close interaction analysis and the ones we’d use to build a large strategic plan.  Or that are identifiably of the voice and values of particular organizations or affiliationsWe can begin to develop styles as different approaches to communication, representation, and value.  The notion of style can be a basis for the evolution of the field in something other than methodology.

Music has both the kind of individual artistry that we admire in great writing and the sort of collective creation that we want from vital communities of practice.  Like writing and corporate work, it has its share of hacks and dross to make great work stand out and be valued.  It has for its entire history lived on the tensions between high and low, innovation and tradition, creation and interpretation, genre and canon.  We can learn from style in music, too.

In 2006, Bruce Springsteen released We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions which included a documentary of the album’s making, and which was followed by a tour with 18 musicians playing at least 40 different instruments.  The material underpinning the album is American, Irish, and English folk music, standards of the folk genre long in the public domain such as “15 Miles on the Erie Canal” and “Jacob’s Ladder.”  Springsteen and an assemblage of musicians play it all not from scores, but from a combination of recollection, intent listening to old recordings (the “Seeger” part of the title is a recognition of folksinger Pete Seeger’s decades-long efforts to find and record folk music and musicians.), conversation, rough notes scribbled on legal pads, and trial and error.   As Springsteen says to the camera at one point during the documentary, this is “music being made, not just being played, which means that opportunity and disaster are both close at hand.”

Fieldwork and analysis, done well are both a lot like that: Planned and executed with extensive but informally represented expertise, we talk a great deal about opportunity, but we acknowledge disaster less than we should. It is a live recording of one of the songs, “Pay Me My Money Down,” that connects style back to communities of practice for me.  The song deserves the appellation ‘rollicking,’ and is, like most folk music, noticeably subversive.  You’d have to have a pretty tinny ear and no sense of humor whatsoever to not end up smiling at the political innuendo and singing along.  Between the second (traditional) and the third (newly added) verses, Springsteen leans back from the microphone and says to the band “Let’s bring it up to b flat.”  There’s a beat, and then the music brightens:  all of it. 18 people, playing loud, hard, and fast switch from one key to a new one.  It is the kind of virtuosity that makes you laugh with astonishment, the way that an amazing fireworks display can.  And this moment comes from understanding styles deeply, from exploring the space between the source and its possibilities. Springsteen brought together a group of talented musicians who were steeped in at least two traditions: one substantive (the music) and one performative (also music). What they do during the performances is not just improvisation or riffing, though they do that, but working within one style to extend a different one.  The music doesn’t recreate the choir loft or the campfire singing of its sources, but reinvents it, understands it anew, and does it in a way that connects, viscerally, with a new audience.

That’s what a virtuoso research practice can do, should to, in getting down to its business.  In literature and in music, style is not surface, not decoration.  It shouldn’t be in the work we do either.  Style is commitment, is passion.  We work regularly in that ‘ironic tension’ between reality, experience, and intelligent analysis. And if it weren’t so limiting “Life brought to different life by the highest artistry” could be the tag line for our industry.  After all, we’re bringing the future to life too.

NOTES

Acknowledgments – this paper benefited (I hope) from critical readings by Maria Bezaitis, Donna Flynn, Katie Boyd McGlenn, and Brian Rink.  Ari Shapiro told me I needed to read Atul Gawande, and he was right.  Ken Anderson provided the very useful distinction between ‘assemblage’ and ‘group.’   Jill Scipione suggested the St. Augustine epigraph, which connected things so well that I felt like singing.

REFERENCES

Bell, Genevieve, & Dourish, Paul

2006               Is the house of the future a dangerous house?  Ambidextrous, Issue #4 (Summer 2006), 37-40.

Bell., Genevieve., & Dourish, Paul

2007                Yesterdays tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11(2), 133-143.

deBotton, Alain. D

2006                The Architecture of Happiness. London: Hamish Hamilton, New York.

deBotton, Alain D.

2009                The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. New York: Pantheon.

Gawande, Atul

2003                Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. New York, NY: Picador.

Gibson, William

1987                Count Zero. New York: Ace Books.

Gibson, William

2000                Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books.

Gibson, William

2005                Pattern Recognition. New York: Berkley Books.

Gibson, William

2008                Spook Country – A Novel. New York: Berkley Books.

Kidder, Tracy

2004                Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. New York: Random House.

Lave, Jean

1988                Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Marcuse, Herbert

1978                The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Urbana and Chicago: Beacon Press, Boston.

Salvador, Tony

2000                The flower of Spain.  Conference presentation.

Springsteen, Bruce

2006                We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.  CD and DVD.

Strunk, E. B & White, William

1999                The Elements of Style. Malaysia: Pearson P T R.

Sunderland, Patricia

2008                Representation in Practice: Utilizing the paradoxes of video, prose, and performance.  In Cefkin, Melissa and Martha Cotton, , EPIC 2008 Proceedings.

Turabian, Kate

1985                The Chicago Manual of Style: The 13^th Edition of A Manul of Style Revised and Expanded.  Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Williams, Joseph. M.

1999                Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. New York: Addison-Wesley.

Wood, James

2008                How Fiction Works. New York, NY: Picador.

Rick E Robinson has been developing and applying research methodologies for application in industry for nearly 20 years.  His Ph.D. is from the University of Chicago, Committee on Human Development.  Currently, he is a research fellow at Continuum, and editor of pulp.

Rick E Robinson, Ph.D. rickerobinson@gmail.com 312 543 3970

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By cool, I do not necessarily mean the latest Phillipe Starck table lamp, or the 3DO video game.  I’m more concerned with things like the wheel, or McDonald’s restaurants, of Federal Express of Good Grips kitchen tools – things that are so right that they become nearly invisible, part of our daily lives in a way that a product like the Print Vac never could.  It has turn signals, an odometer, and most impressively, a tiny printer that prints out everything you’ve sucked up.  The Print Vac is just one extreme example, (admittedly mythical) of a kind of design where something gets made just because it is possible.

It is what we call “technology centered design.”  Technology centered design has several distinguishing characteristics:  it is engineering-led, the capabilities are developed before the use is defined, and the products which result can only use the ever expanding range of features as a means of differentiation in the market.

There have been things as downright weird as the Print Vac over the years, such as a robotic shaving machine.  But more centrally, it results in things that we are all expected to use, to understand, like incredibly complex TV/VCR remotes.  They, and thousands of consumer products like them, rely on features to differentiate themselves, and quite obviously, in a case like this, the features begin to overwhelm the use of the things themselves.

At a near diametric opposition to technology centered design are things like a lovely console television finished in genuine simulated wood grain, an example of what might be called, “market driven design.”

Market driven design is what happens when the development process too slavishly responds to the opinions of everyone and their aunt as to what they like, what they want.  Its evils are many, but the results are knockoffs and “me toos” and things that just are not as innovative, as interesting, or as good as they could be.

The alternative to market or technology-centered design is an approach with the slightly misleading label “user (or human) centered design.”  The misleading part comes from the fact that, in the best examples of the work, the focus is no only on people, but on how people and things are connected, how people come to use and to understand what things to.

Understanding that connection, defining the space in between people and technology is not as easy, actually, as being either market-or techno- centric, but in the long run; it’s a far more valuable effort.

Three ways of getting there
Be a genius.  If you could be – or hire – someone like Thomas Edison, who registered more than 1000 patents in his lifetime, you’d be pretty sure of making that connection from time to time.  This is not an entirely flip assertion.  Great, user-centered design inventions that fundamentally connect what things can do to what people need have been around for nearly as long as there has been some form of technology.  But for the longest time, an inspired connection was almost always the work of an individual like Edison.  Edison invented the incandescent light bulb in 1879.  He didn’t invent the parts, he didn’t discover electricity, but he looked at what was possible in the technologies he was fooling with and connected it to a need.

Be very intuitive. This connection can be, and often is, made by people who are decidedly not geniuses.  Deep intuitive insight is another time honored, but still rare, connector of people to things.  On the one hand, it is evident if fads, like the Rubik’s Cube or the Hula Hoop.  Rubik was no genius, but the cube certainly tapped into something out there.

The other hand in this case are more profound examples of intuitive approaches that more self-consciously sought to make the connection, to meet or understand a need.  High on that list would be something like Paul Rand’s 1961 UPS logo.  As the probably apocryphal story goes, this nearly timeless piece of work was the result of an half hour meeting with the UPS president and Rand’s daughter acting as test audience:  “It’s a package Daddy!”

Have a method.  Take something like the nuclear powered missile submarine, one of the more awesome technological achievements of our day – clearly, not developed by relining on either genius or intuition.  What made the first nuclear subs possible was, in large part, Admiral Rickover’s invention of the PERT chart, which coordinated and organized thousands of tasks, problems, and schedules over years of time.

Method has come to be a scary word.  To many, it sounds controlling, antithetical to design.  Methods do not have to come with manuals, diskettes, and years of training to offer powerful and reliable ways to make the connection between people and things.  Some of the best are exceptionally simple in practice, even though the might have taken years to develop.

For example, McKinsey & Co.’s justly famous “seven S” model of what makes an organization tick is as much of a method as it is a description.   It gives McKinsey consultants a way to look at the problem, a way to work through what they find out there at be sure they’ve examined, investigated, all the right pieces.  On a different but equally useful scale are things like notation languages and representational conventions.  These provided a common ground for groups of people working on complex issues.

Methods like these don’t automatically generate answers – which is too often the fairy tale claim of bad methods – but the y do something more important:  they structure the problem and provide ways of structuring the information that can lead to a solution.  Unlike management consulting or programming or nuclear engineering, design as a discipline is too often seen as without methods, and worse, without the need for them.  User-centered design is not just about paying attention to “needs” or “human factors,” but about having a method for making that connection between people and things.

A method must have focus and definition.  The methods we’ve mentioned above are not defined by their steps, but by what they take as their focus and by how they define the nature of that connection.  Rickover understood that the key to the problem of building a nuclear sub was convergence and coordination, not solving the individual problems – the focus.

In user-centered design, the focus has to be on the connection between users and things, not on one or the other.   The definition of the connection is probably the trickiest part of all this.  Most people think that need is the best way to describe it.  (I really need sneakers that light up when I walk.) I define this connection somewhat differently.  The connection that is most important for design is not need, but how people use things to make meaning in their lives.  People interpret the world and their place in it through the things that they use.  To ourselves and to one another, what we use to make sense of our lives grows out of the material conditions of our lives.

Making meaning

A five thousand year old guy was found frozen in a melting glacier in the Alps in late summer 1991.  Forensic anthropologists were able to reconstruct approximately what he looked like and build a reasonably lifelike model.  Fascinating, in a morbid sort of way, but what does that really tell us about how he lived, about what his life was like?  It wasn’t until archaeologists excavated the whole site and found his tools, his clothes, his equipment, that they were able to tell a more complete story about him.

Arrowheads and dagger points are one thing.  Beepers and other paraphernalia of modern culture do not tolerate the simple equation of meaning with function.  What they “are” depends on a whole lot more than what they do.  Beepers, for example, first emerged into the culture as an exceptionally handy gadget for physicians.  Not too long after that, in urban neighborhoods across America, there seemed to be a sudden explosion of 13 to 17 year old doctors hanging out at street corners and near public telephones.  And finally, we are used to them, are, as a culture, accepting and extending them.  The pager is being transformed again into a basic part of the personal communications infrastructure.

The same artifact, but with different meanings, based in different uses; conversely, as the uses expanded, it meant different things to the people who saw it, who thought about using it.

Where this all comes down is in the choices people make about what they buy.  Two artifacts as simple as two flashlights offer profoundly different options for what someone wants to say about what is important to them.  One (red and white plastic) costs less than two dollars at the corner drugstore, the other (blue anodized aluminum) costs about seven and can be found in upscale catalogs like Sharper Image and Hammacher Schlemmer.  A purely functional analysis might say that the Maglite is “better” because it has more features, is more durable, and comes in a wider range of colors and sizes.  Yet for some people, the cheap one tells a better story, a story more amenable to their own values, their own sense of what is important about a flashlight.  There is not, obviously, a single continuum along which one of these is better, one worse.

Making it work

How do you figure out how to make things that people will want to use, that people will value as tools for constructing their lives?

This is the basic framework we use for doing it.  Basically, it is a series of models and concepts that, in a progression from the concrete to the abstract and back again, are tools for understanding the connection between people and things.  It has two major components: the first is about moving from what’s out there up to structures that make senses of it.  The second, which is moving from structures to new things, we’ll go over further on in this paper.  We rely on our clients to tell us what they can do, what the nature of the things we are dealing with is.  The real challenge, especially once you move away from needs, is understanding the people, because what you are looking for is not what people say, but what they do, what they use to understand the world.

Anthropology is the discipline most concerned with doing that, with connecting culture and people and artifacts into a system.  Margaret Mead, and the other pioneering ethnographers had two main tools – a notebook and an “informant.”  Classical anthropology was built on these tools.

Just as beepers are more complex than arrowheads, our tools have gotten a bit more complex.  Our fieldwork comes through the rather new discipline of “video ethnography.”  Once we decide where the best place to watch people using things is, we take a bunch of cameras, a bunch of computer controlled video decks, miles of cables, microphones, and small gray computers with little colored logos out into the real world.  For hours at a time, for days and days, we videotape people doing the things they do, without interference, where and when the usually do them.

When we get all these hours of videotape back to the office, we use a set of computer programs we’ve developed to help us log, analyze, and structure the material.  What we are looking for are what we call ”particulars.”  This is a very “thick” description of what is happening in the places where our client’s products are being used.  In the same way that McKinsey “7S” model helps them, we’ve developed a model with the catchy acronym AEIOU, which stands for Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects and Users.

If you break your description of just about anything down into activities, environments, interactions, objects, and users, you can be fairly sure that you’ve hit all the particulars.

Activities are goal-directed sets of actions, things that people have to or want to accomplish, like filling up their car with gasoline.

Environments are where activities take place.  These need to be considered in fairly broad terms: we also need to keep the activities in mind as part of the definition of the environment.  A convenience store is self-contained, but an airport control room, where all of the radio connections between pilots and planes and FAA centers effectively extends the environment beyond the room where the controllers sit.

Interactions are, unlike activities, always dyadic, always between a person and someone or something else.  Interactions are the building blocks of activities.

Objects are the building blocks of environments, and key players in the activities and interactions.  What is interesting is that you have to see things in use to really describe them.

Finally, there are the Users themselves:  Who comes there?   Who does what ? How do they act?

Add all of this detail up, and what do you have?  Nothing, until you begin to look for patterns, for the regular connections between users, activities, or interaction and the environment and objects.

Take the example of a gift shop.  A person takes a look into the aisle, but doesn’t really move into it.  We came to call this behavior the “end of aisle lean.”  I’m sure you’ve seen it, and probably engaged in it without too much thought about it.  But it is interesting where it led us.  Our client had asked us to think about re-organizing their stores, to give some thought to how they should word their signs, where they should place them.  What this pattern revealed to us was that thinking about the words on the signs was the completely wrong idea for how people find stuff in this environment.  Our clients had assumed that people came in with a specific item in mind and needed help finding it, and that they read the signs to do that.  Instead, what we realized they do is come in with an idea of the kind of thing they want, and that that is defined, for customers, in terms of the visual language of greeting cards.  So what these people are doing looking into the aisle, scanning not the signs, but the look of the displays.  You look, you see a bunch of pastel colors and gig gold foil letters and you don’t need to read the categories to know that this just isn’t for your 15-year-old nephew.  What patterns eventually reveal, once you begin to figure out where they come from, are the most important, most abstract level of thinking about how people interact with things.  We the things that lead to patterns structures.  Now, there are lots of ways to characterize structures – anything from rational choice economics to unresolved Oedipal conflicts – but within our approach, the most valuable and generally applicable one is the notion of frameworks.

The idea of a framework is one that has roots in both literary theory and cognitive psychology.  But the idea can be illustrated fairly simply.  Take a billion or so stars visible in the night sky as the raw material of a perception.  A framework is the set of biases, assumptions, and knowledge that influences what you see when you look at them.  A framework is what explains, or at least describes, the difference between how Galileo looked at those stars, and how Vincent Van Gogh saw them.  Objectively, the same sky, but seen through different frames, not the same sky at all.

Frameworks are not simple, nor monolithic, nor even stable.  They are quite complex, permeable, and dynamic.  What is most important to know about the concept though is that there are three distinct kinds of influence on them, three ways in which the world (and its artifacts) affect how people understand things: individual, social and cultural.  Take a simple (albeit fairly cool) object like a pair of shoes.

My friend Julie bought a certain pair of shoes because she likes them.  They are comfortable and they fit her style and image of herself.  They make a nice alternative to her green Doc Marten boots.  Those kinds of reasons, those kinds of choices, result from an individual level of a framework.

But the choice of a shoe is also constrained, influenced by social factors, but what particular kinds, brands, styles and colors mean to the people with whom the wearer associates (works, hangs out, wants to impress, and so on).  In New York, in Chicago, in LA, shoes have an important role in gang life.  They aren’t just personal choices, they are emblems, currency in a language of identity and membership.  Wearing Nikes (or certain kinds of Nikes) means you are part of one group and decidedly not of another.

Finally, that shoes can mean anything at all is a cultural matter.  “Clothes make the man” makes sense to us.  It doesn’t to a lot of people in the world.  And certainly, that there is a meaningful difference between Thom McCanns and Doc Martens would be ludicrous notion to the rather large portion of the world for whom shoes are either not an issue or purely utilitarian.

Making it real

The second (downslope) side of the “user centered” process is the move from describing the world to building, or perhaps re-building, the world.  You’ve gone out, described the particulars in mind-numbing detail, noticed, identified, and cataloged the patterns, and made sense of those patterns by figuring out how people’s frameworks make the patterns happen.

This is where the fun starts.  When you know the structures, you can manipulate them.  You can use them to offer alternatives to people.  The world you’ve described is built on what is already out there, but the world you can build can be abased on the new technologies, new capabilities, new things that have been sitting waiting on the sidelines while the people of the equation has been being filled in.

Here’s the difference in a quaint midwestern homily:  My mother was a classic late 1950s, early 1960s cook.  Betty Crocker was her goddess.  She cooked step by step, with precise measurements, times, and temperatures.  But every once in a while she would call up my great grandmother and say, “Gram, how do you make those biscuits?”  And my great grandmother would respond with something on the order of, “well, you take some flour and soda and salt, add enough water, mix it until it is the right consistency and then bake them until they are done.”  This drove my mom nuts.  But my great grandmother understood the structure of baking.  And she could make anything – even things that had never been made before – because she was working with what happened to be in the kitchen that day.  This is what great design can do once it has a great structure to work with, once it knows how things affect each other.  Maybe not as fattening as Grandma Ethel’s spice cake with penuche icing, but just as tasty.

The move from these structures out to real things isn’t my forte.  That’s why I work designers, architects and programmers.  But let me walk, very quickly, through the steps that come out of structures:  conceptual models, designs for things, and prototypes of those things.

Going back to the gas station, one of the structures we developed was about the way in which people oriented themselves, how they found the places they needed to find.  We also found that there was a consistent mismatch between what the attendants used to locate people and cars and the framework that customers used to locate themselves and the other important things on the lot.  This conceptual model was one of the directions that came out of that.  It developed the notion theta there needed to be a common point of reference and easy visual access between the attendant and the customer.

One of our product designers developed this as a design direction in a document that we gave to the architects we were working with on the project.  It is not a spec drawing in any senses, but it did clearly turn the model we had sketched out into something the architects could work with.  Which they did.  Not all of the design concepts are as robust as this one was, but they all, because they are so well grounded, are as clear and as useful to the people who make things as this one was to the architects on the project.

To reiterate the process:  start with describing the world that is out there, use methods to get to useful abstractions about it, and then use those abstractions to put things back into the world.  Then start all over again, evaluating and watching the results.

What cool things do

Because we use things to make sense of the world, when you put something out there that is different, you change the way that people think about other things.  What you change, actually, are the frameworks.  And if you do this well, and do it in directions that are strategic, you begin to control the rules of the game and leave your competitors in the dust, not because you’ve got more features than they do, but because you have redefined what is valuable about the thing and they are still playing by the old rules.

Frameworks change as the material of which they are made changes.  And those changes can be powerful and long lasting.  For example:  helicopters were one of the key symbols of the postwar Red Cross, symbolizing the marriage of technology and humanism.  But the development of the Cobra gunship and its widely televised use in Vietnam changed all that, changed what they could mean to people, changed what their primary meaning was for almost everyone.  And helicopters – no matter how often they are used to deliver aid or rescue children – will never really be a good symbol for the Red Cross again.

What does it take to do this work?  Four things:  data, patience, teams and iterations.  And some cameras.  But these are the more important elements.

Data You need lots of data to look for patterns.  Margaret Mead spent more than three years in Samoa.  You’ve got to be able to sample widely, got to have situations to look at when you’ve got a hunch about a pattern that you are chasing down.  And although we think it works best, data doesn’t have to be videotape; it can be interviews, photos, notes, whatever.

Patience One of the things that Freud strove to teach the early psychoanalysts was what he called “evenly hovering attention.”  What he meant by this was that it is important not to discount anything.  That you can’t really listen if you’ve got too many hypotheses going into it.  This is probably more important than having lots of videotape.  You’ve got to let the patterns emerge.  You can’t force, can’t hurry it.  We sometimes spent hours going over 30 seconds of tape, and weeks thinking that there was nothing there to discover.  But there always is.

Interdisciplinary teams We could not do this in an office full of anthropologists.  It would be even worse in an office full of psychoanalysts.  Designers and architects and clients all participate in the fieldwork, in the analysis.  Different people – with different frameworks – notice different things.  Different disciplines bring different sets of skills to the party.  We also use teams to supplement the basic fieldwork by bouncing those results off of those generated by other methods and other kinds of data.

Iterations As much as I’ve tried to make this all sound like it moves smoothly from one stage to the next, it doesn’t.  The first set of patterns always turns out to incomplete;  the first set of structures never can explain all the patterns.  You’ve got to be willing to throw out those efforts when they are not coherent or far reaching enough to be useful.  Moreover, the concepts, designs and prototypes themselves have to be part of an iterative process, working out bugs and kinks.

Finally, I want to be clear that this approach is not a panacea.  It is not an approach that will solve any and every problem.  It is particularly well suited for issues in product design, interface/interaction design, and environments – in short, whenever you can watch someone doing or using something that you are interested in rethinking.  We’ve also used this approach successfully in less obviously suitable situations, such as understanding and redefining processes that work groups use, or figuring out how an as yet uninvented product might work.

Conclusion

Design, broadly defined, is fundamentally a part not only of everyday life, but also of the dynamics that make our world constantly changing, constantly evolving.  What I’ve been outlining here is not a method for designing things, but a methodical approach to understanding that world, those dynamics, so that design can play a more important, more profound role in it.  WE can talk all we want about “profound change” and “understanding users,” but it requires something more, some really good tools to thing with, to develop a design –centered approach to doing that.  We believe that these ideas, these methods, are a big part of getting there.