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.

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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

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.

It doesn’t take a lot of research to understand that design is a powerful tool in contemporary business thinking. Nor is it difficult to notice that design is increasingly central to an escalating number of parts of everyday life: more kinds of companies in more and more varied sorts of endeavors are using design, design processes, design partners, and design thinking in their work. And because design work has, in most of those applications, taken deep and considered understanding of the people who are going to use, inhabit, or experience what design makes, we tend to think that a broadening portfolio for design is a good thing. To most, it is nearly self-evident that something designed is better than something that is not. Saying that something is ‘well-designed’ is a compliment for anything from a kitchen tool to a strategic plan. We use the term “good design” almost reflexively as evaluation and often, as explanation. When something is tabbed as “good design” (by a magazine or an award from a professional association) we agree or not in the instance; but we accept, usually tacitly, that good design is different from indifferent design or bad design.

Despite all that, we don’t usually think of ‘good’ in its moral or ethical sense, as in “good vs. evil,” as the sum of choices made against choices not made. Positive, thoughtful, or responsible design has included in it not just a final form, but a large number of distinctions understood and choices about those distinctions made in a particular light, with particular reasons for them. A child’s toy, perhaps, can be safe or unsafe, educational or mindless, responsibly made or using the worst but cheapest materials available. It isn’t a toy made to be bad, but in each of the moments where choice matters, the choice made has been, in the current context at least, toward something less than as good as it could have been.

In this paper we’ll argue that this particular sense of ‘good’ in good design matters not only in the end product, but in the way design works in general, in design processes, in design thinking. We’re not arguing for any one moral or ethical position, but simply that we, collectively as a discipline, as a field, have a responsibility to acknowledge the role that values play in the work that we do. By knowing that that articulation needs to be done, and by using it to anchor the forward end of the design process, we do better work; we do good work. And with that, we can speak more clearly to other interests (customers, users, management, investors) about what ‘good design’ means.

Good Design and Design Research
When we take hold of a powerful tool and use it to shape the daily lives of real people, we are laid under an obligation, a responsibility, to understand not only how that shaping could affect those daily lives, but how it should do so. The “good” in “good design” has, in the last twenty years or so, migrated from the relatively simple appreciation of an end-product’s formal properties to include the ways in which a product becomes what it is: the process of designing. In the course of that migration, “users” and “experience” have become central to the way design works, to how the things which it produces are evaluated. Under any number of labels (“user-centered design research”, “ethnographics,” “anthrojournalism” and so on) the (largely) social sciences-derived research which informs the work of design has grown into a small industry of its own. Taken as a whole, design research has resulted in a collective paying of more attention to people rather than less. That’s a ‘good’ in pretty much anyone’s book. But it is also, in practice, a bit like supposing that because an M.D. is doing rounds, looking into patients’ rooms and signing the charts, good medical care is being practiced. If designers have been less than explicit about the values that inform the choices they make, it seems that design research as a whole has been even less so. The most widely accepted ‘point’ of design research is to inform the work of design. To provide a basis from which the work of design, development, and strategy can proceed. It is a bit circular: we do research to inform the process of design, which requires that we understand the users. Circular or not, it would be just fine if what was required to “inform” design were no more than a scan of current conditions. A pH strip dipped in the pool. A thumb licked and held up in the breeze. But the best design work doesn’t need the thumb in the air; good designers or teams or practices are usually plugged in and working at the ragged front end anyway. What we need from research is more than description, and especially, more than a list of “needs,” explicit or implicit, met or unmet. Although description is an essential moment in the work of ethnography, relying solely on description, and the simplified-empirical position that we are only reporting “needs” is a kind of responsibility dodge which lets research work go forward without taking up the side of the implicit bargain that requires us to say why we are interested in knowing what we want to know. The work of design research too easily takes as justification that we are describing only how people behave, or the perennially-popular-ethno-marketing refrain “what they actually do instead of what they say.” We cling to the position that it is not our job to say what anyone ‘should’ do.

But research and design, especially when woven together, are loaded with hundreds of value-laden choices, and with motives (from our embeddings in business) that are impossible to avoid. When we look at the entire arc of design process, including the research work which informs it, we believe that we need to be clear about what we hope the should will be even while we are depicting the could of design possibility. Understanding the role that our own values play, how they intertwine with the understanding and aims of our subjects, is not a hobble on design work, it enriches it.

I’ve argued in earlier papers that in the developmental side of design research, one has to be comfortable with the idea that research does not provide definite answers to particular questions. And that thinking that the work of ethnographic research should ‘answer’ a question has led to the intellectual shortcut of using ‘unmet needs’ as a catch-all substitute for the much harder interpretive work that great design takes off from. (ref. for “Uncertain Answers” paper). In that work, I argued that instead of identifying needs, research should take as its object (following Clifford Geertz) the ‘thick description’ of how experience is organized for the user. And that the work of design can use that description (aka a “framework”) to understand what could be changed through a new product or interaction or experience – whatever kind of design work was on the other end of the research. I still think that’s true, but incomplete. The idea that the rich, descriptive summary of a “framework” is what design practice needs from research is a good one, but in effect, it has only shoved the issue of choice and direction a bit further off, onto the design itself.

For more years than I would like to admit, I used some version of this argument in almost every introductory talk or workshop presentation I gave. And in the not insubstantial portion of those where my friend and colleague Hugh Dubberly was present, he would patiently raise his hand and ask me some form of the question, “I think you mean what it ‘should’ be, not ‘could’ be, don’t you?” After all this time, I’ve finally realized just how right he is: “Could” vs. “should” is a simpler way of framing potential vs. commitment, chance vs. responsibility. And going back to our opening, when you recognize the power of a tool, values, commitment, and responsibility all become what we should do in the work we do. In this paper, we’re going to look at how we need to rethink the descriptive part of design research in light of values, in order to, put simply, do good.

Design & Research, simplified

Let’s start with a simple proposition: the work of design is getting from a set of conditions which exist at the beginning of the process (now), to a future set of conditions which include ‘now’ to ‘next.’ we are researching then, are the conditions under which those choices will lead to a consumer, user, making a choice themselves.

Here’s a better way to think about the point of design research: understanding frameworks, at a dynamic level, not just a snapshot

Slide Show Notes, story flow:
1. Let’s start with a simple proposition: In other words, taking the present set of ‘what is’ conditions and developing what ‘could be.’
2. There is an idealized, pure innovation view of design that more or less ignores the now in order to shout real loud about ‘next’!
3. Set against that, is an (also idealized) research-driven view embedded in market research which pretty simply extrapolates the now to the next.
4. The truth of good design work is somewhere in between,
5. The rise of human-centered design, design research, and ethnography gave us a more nuanced, more complex, understanding of the ‘now’
6. The main point of those approaches the idea that by understanding the individual, social and cultural influences on why people think the way that they do, why they use what they use, why they need what they need (or think that they do), we’ll be better able to design well.
7. Prior to this, the language of ‘good design’ had been largely confined to aspects of the ‘product’ (even if that product was a logo or typeface). Occasionally, we looked at the process. But with the advent of “user-centeredness” emerged the notion of a “framework” as something that could not only be described, but – especially through the work of interaction design – as something that could be designed.
8. “Experience” as an object of design further established the role of something that was personal to the users, but could also be described and altered through the work of design.
9. Design as imagining the ‘what if’ of a users framework.
10. Design research has lacked an object – a thing to be about. Theory is nice, but that’s not what we’re talking about. And “needs” is neither a useful design construct nor reliably ascertainable.
11. There is a parallel between the work of design and the notion of successive approximation in theory building.
12. Summarized in the abstract-concrete by now to next model
13. A nested set of ideas:
Frames (are how people think)
Models are descriptions of the way that the elements interact
Scenarios are articulations of possible changes to the conditions of the model.
14. Definition of ethnography in the design world: description and interpretation, toward an end, within constraints.
15. The implication that if you can make anything, you need to choose what to make, where to intervene, what to target.
16. Choice, and the ability to affect other folks’ choices, means values play an important role.
17. Two lines from here: the dynamic change story and the values story.
18. The dynamic change story: the difference between designing the object, and designing an object, its behavior, its environments, and where it will end up (the ball and the hole slides). Why it is a model, not a snapshot.
19. Borrow from physics the idea of components to understand dynamics, like force, direction, resistance, spin… control (add or remove)
20. How designing those control the ‘metaphorical’ trajectory
21. The values story — what sustainable, environmental issues, and design for social impact have done to change the landscape – what Knorr-Cetina calls the ‘fictional symbolic’ the set of things we all come to use, to agree to.
22. Lakoff on republicans. IHI ‘preventable deaths’
23. Redraw the original picture of frameworks with values as the ‘forward anchor’ of the design process – not form.
24. The bigger goal of design work is to clearly understand the values (as both initial condition and as endpoint), the ‘signposts’ (from the World Wildlife Fund paper) and the ‘choice architecture’ involved in getting from the current set of forces to a new frame, experience, and stuff.
25. We do this using a profound and empathic understanding of experience, design is like judo, working with forces to redirect them towards something.
26. Solving for both ends: A context in the future. Has four parts
the initial conditions
the endpoint
the signposts
and the frame architecture. Expand and example for each of these terms. What they provide is a new laundry list of what you can understand and what you can change
27. Good Work comes out of trying to do good within various frames of reference: cultural, social, domain, field…. Not an absolute. But you need to understand the levels.
28. The positive notion of subversion from Marcuse
29. What’s the right word for this values-based, systemically-scaled, experience-frame design? Not sure.
30. Examples (pos + neg): Segway, Hybrid Escalade, IHI

But somewhere along the way, the issue has become muddled. Understanding consumers has far too often been reduced to identifying ‘needs’, and market research has become a kind of dreaded hurdle that must be leaped before you go on to the next phase of development. Or in the worst cases, “validating needs” is a screen that has grown so finely meshed that nothing but absolute mediocrity passes through it.

I think that the current balance of power between the ways in which companies think about consumers and products on the one hand, and the tools that they use to do so (current conceptions and models of research) on the other, are in a sort of deadlock. There is a kind of tyranny emerging where consumers’ needs, opinions, and preferences have become a constraining, limiting force in the dialogue between producer and consumer. Paying attention to people is a good thing. Having your customers seem like a limit on your ability to move in the market is not.

I want to talk today about the value of what might be called “answers of uncertainty.” Things you find out that result in someone saying “maybe it’s…” or “it could be that…” or “what might happen if.” An understanding of consumers that results in stories of possibility rather than in the reduction of risk, the elimination of uncertainty, or the ‘validation’ of paths already taken.

To do that, requires a step or two back in order to examine some presumptions and to lay some new groundwork for thinking about what questions to ask, and what answers to expect when you ask them.

Part I. We build, therefore we are: “Social Construction” theory bits and pieces:
This way of thinking has its basis in an area of social thinking loosely termed “social construction” – an approach to thinking about those gaps between the individual and the social, between the psychological and the cultural. It is an area in which you find anthropology, psychology, sociology, and culture theory all grappling with the ways in which their theories and their disciplines talk to one another. I’m going to build a bit of this story from some of the key concepts in this area – or at least my peculiar take on them

1. Not just “needs.” In market research and in much of business, there is a widespread presumption that people are motivated by needs, drives, desires. The easy accessibility of Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” has made for a simplistic psychologizing of the world, and the notion that if we can identify the need, we’ll satisfy the person. I think that there is only one “need” that is of any consequence: the need to make meaning, and through that, to be a particular person, to have an identity. Every day, being yourself is work. That we do this work – and aren’t simply driven by mysterious internal forces – is the essence of the idea of the social construction of reality. (getting dressed)

2. Active construction. This is the most important shift of the constructivist position. The work that we all do is constant and lifelong. We do not reach some full expression of an inner self by the age of 12, or 21 or even 65. Continuity and coherence are important elements of identity, but that does not imply stasis. Think of how difficult it is to maintain the position of a boat in tidal waters, across seasons and storms and the waxing and waning of the moon – that is the work we do to be who we are in the context of the world around us. It is imperative that we imagine people not simply as bodies animated by needs, but as adaptive and self-defining systems, complex and rarely stable.

3. Presuming an audience , or ‘objects’ in the grammatical sense. This is the second really important shift to keep in mind. We, as actors, presume not a passive audience, but other players. Our understanding of, anticipation of reaction and reception are every bit as important as our intention. “All the world’s a stage,”

4. Tools: all of this construction work requires tools. Things to think with, things to express with. Things to use. Props, even. Tools are both opportunity and constraint. Our ability to create a world, express a self, act a part does not and can not come entirely from within ourselves. In the same way that an artist uses material (both of the physical and the conceptual variety) we use words, clothes, technology, stuff to construct and present ourselves to everyone else. Again, the important thing here is that this is a dialogical process: we (as consumers) use the tools that are available, while at the same time we (as producers, designers, builders) make new tools. (Cell phone “where are you?” as an example. )

The “social” in social construction.

5. Roles. Social systems only work because we act within (mostly) their constraints. One of the most central of these constraints is the idea of a role. I’m just as clear on the role of “speaker” right now as I will be when I return to being part of the “audience” in a few minutes. But were I to confuse the two – if I were to just sit here expecting all of you to speak to me—we’d all know that something was wrong. The important aspect of the notion of roles for this discussion though are two key facts: 1) roles are not just for individuals; and 2) roles are defined as they are enacted – in playing it, you elaborate it, change it, bring new character and possibility to it, and those who see you do that have their idea of the role changed forever. And so it goes.

A bit more on the key ideas here:. Roles are played by institutions as well as individuals. Which is where it gets interesting for businesses. Your company, your brand, your products are what social scientists call “interlocutors” – those with whom we have a dialogue, a conversation. And a conversation is not a conversation if it is one sided. In the simplest case, a teenager engages the ‘back to school’ displays at retail as as much a part of the “who am I?” dialogue as her friends, her school, her family. But a company like e-bay makes possible entirely new communities, businesses, ways of finding and doing and being. e-bay didn’t come from “needs.”

Who defines what’s possible to do with something that we use? It is as much the people and the organizations who design it, make it, sell it, and change it as it is the people who use it. And what’s more, consumers expect that kind of evolution and participation. It’s hard work to be a mom, a student, a professional, or a snowboarder. It is impossible for someone to be any of these things without the rules and the tools that the social structure provides. From fashion to language to modes of work to entertainment to meals, use and expectation are constantly informing one another, constantly suggesting to people that there is another way to do something.

The personal computer, the walkman, the automated teller machine and drive-thru breakfast are just a few of the things that were launched into the world proactively, without a base of “needs” to justify them. And yet they have changed everyday life, have profoundly altered the set of expectations we share and the way in which we create the tales we tell about ourselves, to ourselves. The organizations that launch products and services like these have perhaps more impact on social life than those things we think of as social institutions such as schools, governments, or religions.

System-scaled interdependency: Here’s the last bit on this: the necessity of considering things ‘in context’ – an object in a context of use, individuals in the context of an institution, a company in the context of a competitive space, whatever level we might choose to focus on — is a corollary of the social construction position. But this very quickly gets us to one of the principal reasons we need to not only accept, but to embrace uncertainty. Very simple systems are predictable and stable. And systems that have a major element which is unvarying (at least on human scale) are also more stable. Gravity, for instance, is pretty constant. And the earth and the moon have found themselves a pretty stable way of relating to one another.

But let me take a couple of seemingly simple objects that are part of our everyday experience (coffee pot, stapler, book) and ask you a few simple questions: “What is this?” “What is it for” “How is it that you know you know that?” It doesn’t take a great deal of reflection to realize how many socially constructed, dynamic systems are involved in the perception of something as simple as these seem to be. Imagine the effect on the ocean tides if not only there were say, 100 moons around earth, but each of the moons was constantly deciding what its orbit should be and arguing with the other moons about who should be in which orbit! In other words, prediction isn’t made difficult simply because these systems are large and complex (though they are), prediction presumes a kind of stablilty that I think just isn’t there.

II. Part Two – Stability is not an option (which is really good )

Okay. Why not? And why is this a good thing?

1. I think that what I’ve described above might best be characterized, somewhat paradoxically, as a “robust unstable system” By which I mean simply that how it works keeps changing, but that it works does not. And again, I think that the key here is the two-sided nature of the making of meaning. People being (creating, discovering, inventing) themselves, doing the work of being father, student, executive, manager, plumber or vacationer do not create these roles from nothing. We use and act within, as Max Weber famously put it, “webs of significance which we ourselves have spun.”

2. If it weren’t for human nature, this would all settle back down to a nice equilibrium state, and the ‘web’ would be pervasive, stable, and predictable. But that isn’t likely to happen. Not only do the actors in this system have the ability to change the rules, but there are any number of very nice models and theories which show us why human beings will always be inclined to change. These range from the compelling work of Csikszentmihalyi on the dynamics of optimal experience (whose absence we experience as either boredom or anxiety), to the effect on cognitive development of complex tools – a kind of empirical proof of the “shoulders of giants” insight of Newton’s, to social theory that examines how technology and social complexity are affecting the way we experience such fundamental things as time and space.

3. It seems that people have not just a quirky interest in change for the sake of change, but a profound, adaptive use for it. To really show how human and how important the role of difference, change, development, and complexity are is a long and complicated argument to make, which I don’t really have the time or space to do here — but in many ways, it isn’t the most important part of this argument. All I’m trying to do is give you some of the evidence, some of the range of ways in which it seems clear that the ‘consumer’ side of the dialogue I’m talking about is deeply predisposed to look for new ways of doing things.

4. I don’t think that this reduces to a sense of novelty, of simply marking something up as ‘new and improved.’ We’re all too busy for that. The places where change is most valued and valuable are in the places where people are trying to do the work of being who they are. These are 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.

5. This is where the other side of the dialogue comes into play. You can’t just put a new tool into someone’s hand and say, “Here, use this.” You have to tell them what to use it for, or at the very least, say, “Here, use this.” when the context will help to make the possibilities clear.

6. Just because one gets bored when things don’t change, when skills outstrip the challenges of the situation, doesn’t mean that one knows how to change the situation. As individuals, we look for two things: a suggestion of what’s possible, and someone we trust and have confidence in to make that suggestion.

7. And here’s the nice part: I think that brands have increasingly become one of the most important places where people look for those suggestions about what might be, and good brands, great brands, are the ones where people trust that the brand knows the complexities of the situation better than they do. The social theorist I mentioned above (Anthony Giddens) has argued that more and more elements of our daily life are based upon abstract systems which we only touch through some sort of technical intermediary (the airplane and the watch examples).

8. You wouldn’t buy a new car from bob & fred’s car company, would you? Not without a lot of work. But BMW can successfully deploy ‘adaptive technologies’ –such as cruise control that adjusts to the density of traffic around the vehicle that average folks like me have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER how it might work. 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.

9. I’d like you to indulge me in one more little bit of theory. I like it because it is both simple, seemingly obvious, and at the same time, subversive. In the 1960’s, the expatriate Marxist critic Herbert Marcuse wrote a slim volume called “the aesthetic dimension” whose central proposition was that art is always subversive of the dominant order because representation always puts the current system “in play” to a degree, that the social dialectic is always being driven forward by imagination. In other words, by representing anything other than the current reality, the artist flashes a huge neon sign in front of his audience that says “IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!” (McDonald’s Drive-thru breakfast as a case example)

10. People are using the things you make, you sell, to tell stories to one another about who they are. But in that telling, they get other ideas, they discover new things to be, new ways to be who they are.

11. And on the other hand, they are looking for ways to make those stories new, better, more compelling.. And who do they look to for that? In some measure, they look to the organizations that build the things of their world, the makers of the elements from which they construct their world and the meaning of their world. And they are, in this dynamic, willing participants in a dialogue, though never simple, passive recipients of ‘messages.’ And this is why we need to understand them, their frames of reference, their language. If you want to tell them a story about how things could be, about how they could be, you need to know how they see the world.

III. Definitely finding uncertainty

1. So that is the role of research in all of this. I promised that I’d finally get around to it. If you understand your customers in this very active way, and understand as well that you are – witting or no – their partner in the building of the stories of their lives, then the role of research changes.

This is not the research that tells you what to do or tells you what they need. But research that asks & understands the way they are making meaning will open up lots of areas where things are shaky and unknown, and unclear. In other words, it will help to find the places where people are looking for someone they trust to suggest some ways in which they might subvert the current reality. Escape some boredom, control an abstraction, tell a new story.

Cicero

We work in an interesting field, a decidedly fertile one.  A field where social scientists, designers, business people, and ‘liberal arts majors helping mankind’ (as my sister’s business card used to say) come together to understand the experience of the mundane as well as that of the esoteric.  A field where understanding the underlying structures and sources of these experiences is as important as attempting to imagine where they’ll go in the future.  It is compelling and provocative on its own merits, but moreso when we give over the work we do to our partners, our interlocutors, as a basis for their work.

‘Applied Ethnography’, ‘Design Research’, ‘Qualitative Research’ – whatever we choose to call it, has arrived.  The past year has brought official imprimaturs from Business Week and the Harvard Business Review. And it is a sizeable enterprise -recent estimates put it at upwards of 15 percent of the 10bn worldwide market research market.  Fifteen years ago, that percentage was barely measureable.  Ethnographic work is growing both by cannibalizing older forms of qualitative market research and by opening up new applications in product development, technology and strategy.

As a result, there are literally thousands of ethnographic studies conducted every year by corporate research, design, strategy and marketing groups, and the consultancies which serve them.  The work is happening around the globe.  It is taking place in virtually every industry.  There are thousands of practitioners.  That should be a good thing, in terms of the growth and development of the field, the discipline. But only a tiny fraction of the work done in industry each year circulates in the community of ethnographic researchers in industry, and it shows.  Listservs such as Anthrodesign, and popular research bloggers like Steve Portigal find themselves beleaguered with the same basic questions and issues posed by beginning researchers fifteen years ago.

Despite all of the attention and all of the work, the progress of the field is slower, and more markedly individual than one would expect.  There are few conferences and fewer publications.  The annual EPIC conferences are an opportunity for practitioners to build networks and to advance the field in professional conversation.  EPIC’s single annual proceedings cannot conceivably contain (or critically examine) the breadth and depth of what the members of those communities find important to their work.

We propose to change that, fundamentally. Or more precisely, to provide the field with an infrastructure on which to change itself. To provide the opportunity to think differently about the work we do; about how we cultivate this field and increase its fertility.

It’s a fairly simple proposition:  make more of the work that gets done each year available to more of the field; provide a (large-scale) forum that will enable discussion, collaboration and theory building; and develop a set of shared practices and values for connecting the field to its partners, clients, and participants.

There are good models out there.  The open-source software movement and the attendant notion of “permeable boundaries” have revolutionized business models, not just software engineering. Social networking and web 2.0 tools have opened up new scales of collaboration and new ways of seeing and generating value.  And the proactive ethic of the Designers’ Accord has shown the power of leading an industry through the explicit articulation of (in the other sense of the term) values.

If you put all of that together, you get a discipline ecology, with separate but intertwined platforms for data, theory, and practice standards.  Of course, it is not that simple.  So we’re trying to start with the right blend of practicality and ambition, and through that engage the broadest part of the field in an emergent approach.

There are three ‘legs’ to what we are proposing:

a socially-networked, large scale repository of field research;

a collaborative critical and theoretical writing and publication network for the field;

and a community-developed articulation of values to which members of the field (both individually and corporately) subscribe to and develop.

The first piece is a ‘work-in-progress’ site named Pulp.  Pulp is an ‘online salon’ for a new field.  In some ways a multi-author blog, but instead of daily posts,  it is built around “works in progress” by a wide range of folks who are working on ideas, books, and articles on or about the intersection of design, business, social sciences, and culture.  In Pulp, authors will get thoughtful, critical feedback from their peers, along with editorial and communication design support as they develop their arguments and build bodies of work. For the authors, Pulp provides the support of a writing group, along with new tools for pushing that work and exposure to a large field.  For the larger professional community, Pulp provides early access to cutting edge thinking about the theory and practice of this new field.

As a collective, most of the professionals in this field are trying to figure out some aspect or another of how we work, what’s important about it, and where the field might be headed, should be headed.  We are agnostic regarding job titles, backgrounds and specific interests—this isn’t a blog “about” service design, or about design thinking, or ethnographic research or the social implications of new product development.  But any of those might be what someone is working on in one of the pieces up here.  What’s more important is the ‘working on’ aspect of it and the openness to development, input, and feedback that a working group of peers provides.

When I was in graduate school, I was part of a ‘workshop’ that had been started by one of my advisors (Wendy Griswold, now at Northwestern) on the sociology of culture.  There wasn’t a curriculum.  Wendy didn’t lecture.  There were no grades.  And it went throughout the year, year over year, with a slowly changing composition of graduate students from across the university and faculty members from Chicago and various sorts of interesting visitors.  We presented work in progress to one another.  We shared drafts of papers and chapters. We critiqued what we read and we argued (in the best of senses) about what we were working on and how we were thinking about it. And a couple of months later we’d bring back the new version and see what everyone thought.  It was perhaps the single most valuable part of my graduate education.

We’d like Pulp to have that feel, and serve that function, although at a different scale.  The idea of a salon (think Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table) gets at that idea pretty well.  So, Pulp is not any one person’s blog.  And it is not a running commentary in short form on topics of the day.  But in the breadth of contributors, and in the evolution of new ideas, it will be something worth keeping an eye on, a link to, or a feed from.

Larger in scope is The ACME Review, our handle for the system that builds a repository of fieldwork data open to the entire field.  One that, like Wikipedia, gets better the more it gets used.

We know how difficult it is for practitioners to share work that has been fielded with the express intention of addressing a particular client question.

Corporations, consultancies, and individual researchers spend thousands of hours and lots of money re-discovering various wheels every year. Rarely are they able to build, year over year, segment over segment, on prior work.  It is very difficult for a new research program to get a good sense of what has already been done, even at the most basic level.  Because the research is qualitative, it has seemed stubbornly resistant to the kind of scaling and re-use that quant research enjoys.

With a nod to Warner Brothers, ACME Review would use a simple rubric and a set of templates and guidelines to aggregate a database of case studies across industries.  The rubric would guide the translation of single cases into “anonymized” research for the (fictional) ACME Corporation.  Elizabeth Churchill developed the basic idea of this rubric for a conference several years ago, and while it is slightly tongue-in-cheek it works well as a way to deliver content, methodology, and analysis, without disclosure of client IP.  Using the model of a confidential marketplace, a la Angelsoft, we see the possibility of quick growth to industry-standard scale.  Methodology, models, and concrete findings become available and more importantly, organized and searchable.  Access to that database returns value to both researchers and member corporations.

In graduate school I was part of a ‘workshop’ that had been started by one of my advisors (Wendy Griswold, now at Northwestern University) on the ‘Sociology of Culture.’  There wasn’t a curriculum.  Wendy didn’t lecture.  There were no grades. It went across academic quarters, year over year (I was part of it for four of them), with an evolving composition of graduate students and faculty members from across the university.

We presented work in progress. We shared drafts of papers and chapters. We critiqued what we read and we argued (productively) about what we were working on. In the workshop, the papers and the arguments grew and developed (and sometimes died) as their authors brought new versions back for another round. It was perhaps the single most valuable part of my graduate education.

I think that having something like that workshop would be a very good thing to have now, in the professional context, with a different, even more diverse group of colleagues.  So we’ve started to develop one, and this is it.  We want it to have the feel of the workshop that Wendy developed: open, collegial, intense, and rewarding.

We’re developing pulp for the community of folks who think about and practice in the intersection of design, the interpretive social sciences, technology, and business.  The kinds of work that go by the names of ‘interaction design’ or ‘user centered research’ or ‘design strategy’ just to pick a few.  The idea of a salon (think Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table) gets at what we are after pretty well.  pulp is not any one person’s blog.  It is not a running commentary in short form on topics of the day.

What pulp is ‘about’
pulp is being developed by and for folks who are trying to figure out some aspect of how we all work, of what is important about it, and where the field (fields?) we’re engaged with might be headed.  We don’t know where, exactly, that is. We have different backgrounds and specific interests, but pulp isn’t a blog “about” service design, or “about” design thinking or ethnographic research or any of a dozen other topics that somehow, add up to the emerging whole of a field. But any of those might be what one of us is working on in one of the pieces at any given point in time.

It has seemed for some time that this space has been in need of a place for both new folks to find their feet, get introduced to some of the central tenets and core dialogues, and at the same time, allowing the edges of the field to get explored, developed, and extended.   Collectively, as they evolve toward ‘done’ we think that both the articles and the discourse around them will feed the larger dynamic of the work.  Will help to shape the future of this emerging field.  That’s why the ‘working on’ aspect is most important to us.

How it will work (we think).
pulp is organized around the give and take of criticism around a “work-in-progress” (aka a “WIP”)   At the top level of the site are current  works-in-progress by the authors who are part of the pulp community.  Alongside those are the archives of completed (or at least temporarily put aside) work and ‘strands’ of emerging topics.  The site will be available for reading and searching by anyone who registers, but only the community of authors and critical readers will be able to post articles or add comments and criticism.  We are explicitly trying to structure pulp so that we don’t get “LOL! Thx for posting!!” types of posts from users like “anxiousweasel82.”

pulp is here primarily to support the dialogue between writer (or writers) and their critical community.  We have “@pulp.com” email addresses if you need them (sometimes, you just need to write something outside of work).  Part of what we want to do for each author, each article, is to build a following in advance of publication.  To engage the ‘wisdom of crowds’ when it makes sense, and to make a much wider audience more aware of your work.

The four main categories are:

Works in Progress (“WIPs” )  Book outlines, article drafts, conference presentations.  Theory, review, speculation, argument.  All good.  Promotional pieces, simple case studies, self-aggrandizing stunts and ad hominem arguments not good.  Pitched overboard immediately.

Strands, which are more like a conventional discussion thread, though built around an author’s specific questions;

Archives for completed articles,or unpublished papers put up by the authors; and

Authors are a community of contributors  from more than a few disciplines, with many types of affiliation and  levels of seniority, involved in the work of this field.  That’s kind of the point.   We do distinguish between folks who are working on stuff, and engaged with other author’s works, from folks who just want to read or scan (though we want them to do that).  So, ‘authors’ will be by application or invitation, and require contributing at least one work in progress.

We have some pretty strongly held views on the importance of citation & acknowledgement, and how critical those are to building a community of practice.  So check out the “House Rules” on the About page. pulp will not be for cases (that’s The ACME Review’s job), but for theory, method, review, integration, synthesis, and exploration.

become a pulp author

Where pulp WIPs go
We are committed to increasing the circulation and citation of the work we are all doing to further the discourse and thinking in the field. We hope that the work here will provide practitioners, students, colleagues more things to read, more things to think with.  In other words, what’s up here, we expect and hope that people will use, but give credit where it is due.  We promise to do the same.