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.

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’ . 

Slide 1

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

Slide 2 Coke

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

Slide 3 – God’s Time Newsagent

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

Similarly,

Slide 4  — Virgin logo

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.

Slides 5 & 6 — Sim Card Meat Market

Which this retailer certainly recognized and respects – along with his respect for t-mobile, O2, orange, and Vodafone.  In case you missed it, here’s a detail of the major brands offered at this establishment.

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

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

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

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

Contemplate upon a river, says the old zen master – always the same, yet never the same.  Just keep that image in mind, think about studying a river, really understanding a river, as we talk about service design.

A service is a product

A service is still, in some important ways, a product.  And all products are—also in some important ways–  tools.  A service – like a phone or potato peeler or a Prada bag – is something that people use to accomplish something.  Whether those things accomplished are what was initially envisioned is not in any way a given.

Services are plastic

But on the other hand, one of the distinctive aspects of services is that they are ‘plastic’, that, at least the best of them, have a much better, more adaptive feedback cycle than do hard products, or ‘softer’ products like financial instruments.  Every instance of their delivery is slightly different.  Because they are always being delivered in ever so slightly different situations and because their delivery is interactive, they are neither delivered or experienced identically.

Because of this plasticity, services and their sequelae are in some senses continually redesigned, altered as they are delivered no matter what their designers do.  Any service is always ‘evolutionary.’

And the evolution is two-way:  A product does not simply meet needs, it shapes behavior, changes experience, changes understanding.  People live differently because of what a service enables them to do.  Online banking doesn’t simply allow one to pay bills, it changes the amount of time a person has.  Obviously, it changes where and changes when people do their banking. But rituals change.  It changes how people think about trust and privacy changes, and the concept of “where” money actually is has evolved dramatically.  Money – a social abstraction for some time now –has lost one more concrete connection to the community.  Clear enough now perhaps, but that whole constellation of events wasn’t part of the ‘brief’ of the designers of ATM’s or the early online banking services.

Things to think with

Rather famously, at least among social scientists, Mary Douglas defined dirt as “matter out of place.”  A couple of weeks ago, I was weeding my front garden along with my neighbor (our gardens sort of flow into one another).  We were talking about how difficult it is to know what actually is a weed, and I told her about Douglas’ definition and my belief that a weed is a plant out of place.  Immediately, she said, “And it works for gossip too.”

That’s the power of getting a good model out of research.  One of my advisors in graduate school used to say that a good theory gives you something to think about, but a great theory gives you something to think with.

Making (not simply “discovering’) those things should be what research does for design, the design process.   They continue to have application, to get at the basics even when the original thing being studied has changed – something that just does not happen with a list of ‘findings’ or ‘insights’

Good research helps you to understand not just the specified functional bits, but the way in which any product might affect the dynamics of the life and context into which it fits.  A picture of not just how things work, but how they can be changed, and what that whole experience might change into.

Where research works

Most of us who work at the research & design intersection have argued for years that the right place to do research is at the beginning of a design process.  Me too.  But I think that we’ve been only partially right.

Research for service design is a different beast. Even if it is user centered, or iterative, or participatory, it is by definition dealing with something that is changing, has changed, will change because of what you’ve designed.  So in other words,

It is always the ‘beginning’

If services are being perpetually designed, research needs to be perpetual as well.   Fortunately, there is a model for that.

Fat ties, bell bottoms, sideburns

In the early to mid twentieth century, longitudinal research on social, developmental, and psychological issues was big.  A major tool, generating some of the most important theories of the day.  The Kinsey Report.  Growing up in River City.  Aging in America.  The 30 year Harvard study that resulted in George Vaillant’s classic, “Adaptation to life”.   The BBC’s 7 up, 21 up, 28 up.series.

These studies each followed the same groups of people for years, focusing on continuity as well as change in the areas they were following.  These were theoretically huge efforts.

And big, expensive, and expertise-intensive projects.

Gradually, largely because of how big and expensive and intensive they were, longitudinal research fell out of favor and cross-sectional, ‘representatively sampled’ research became the deeply ingrained norm in all sorts of research.  The idea of watching the same people over time, instead of bunch of different people at the same time, is rarely considered when anyone talks about research design.  But, grasshopper,  think again about that river.

New means new

New technologies and their broad adoption are changing this.  New technologies means new research tools, and new life for some old ones.

Communispace is indicative of this direction.  Communispace projects are each an engaged community, and not a slice in time.  There is a relationship that is maintained over for at least one year, and some of the communities have been going on since the company was founded in 1999.

Flickr, MySpace and the like show that different kinds of data – not just online surveys and focus groups – is also doable at scale – we recently did close to 500 ‘visual stories’ in 3 days – impossible without the new tools.  Still, cross-sectional.

This one:  Noah takes a picture of himself

If you combine the two — add to a constant community a suite of research tools that allow you to build a rich, multi-dimensional picture of the evolution of a community over time, then the effects of unforeseen forces, of major changes in contexts, of introductions and adoptions over time, of life events and cohort change.

Now, grasshopper, we are seeing the whole river.

A Very Good Model

Fortunately, I don’t think that this is just the dream of a frustrated longitudinal researcher.  Blog guru Christian Sarkar, in collaboration with John Rheinfrank and John Hegel, developed a model that I think brings all this together with a convincing argument for the ‘good business’.

The most important bit, form my purposes, is the right hand side.  Start with the communities, and have the services emerge from them, drive the business opportunities.  The focus is on this side, on the arrows going right to left, not the business and product driven cycle you could read from left to right.

Research for service design can look at the process this way, and more importantly, can swap longitudinal for the easier ‘continuous’ (but, a built in assumption) cross sectional model.

Harder, but more interesting, and more valuable.