‘By the People’ DE presents at DUX

I’m off to Chicago in November to present our paper ‘Engaging With Stakeholders: Mobile Diaries for social design’ at the Conference on Designing for User Experience. The paper describes our work on mobile diaries and design research methods over the last 18 months. The act of doing these kinds of collaborative design activities with our clients and their stakeholders produces rich results. As well as generating data that inspires our future design work the research facilitates a co-design process in itself. This can lead to the generation of content by participants, as well as a reflection on, and change in existing practice. Kinda of a Participatory Design meets User Generated Content.

For those that are interested I’ll post the paper shortly, but here’s little more general theorizing on what has emerged from our recent experimental design research program that I think is interesting for designers and researchers.

We are using mobile and online tools/devices in design research for the development of sites that encourage social change, (e.g. that support campaign action or community sharing). We are by no means alone in the use of these methods though our long time social bent is pretty unique and this communal commitment to a social goal between us and our clients (and their stakeholders) does creates certain opportunities for collaboration.

But back to the method: (In short, the method consists of giving participants mobile phones and cheap video cameras for them to record aspects of their lives over a fortnight. Participants send images and audio representing their daily activities, thoughts and experiences via MMS’s to a password protected blog where they can login and see their posts, comment and also respond to posts from the researchers over the project period). In addition to the benefits of this kind of self-reporting which I cover in the paper, what we are finding is that the experiential relationship between the method that we are using (i.e. the use of technologies that encourage participation) and the purpose of the research (i.e to design technologies for participation) is significant.
It is not just that these new “digital” methods enable remote, self-directed in situ data collection using everyday tools. While those aspects are critical it is also significant that while participants are using mobile and online technology to generate research ‘data’ they are also generating potential content and design material for the sites we are designing.

A hypothetical example would be - we do research into a home gardening site, and during the generative research into this topic with participants, they generate lovely rich, textual and audio visual material about gardening. So you already have your ’seed’ user generated data. While this is great, and fun and exciting and very rewarding research - seeing the participants’ data as potential content is at odds with the conventional role of research outputting data for analysis, and the notion of participants as anonymous subjects.

While (from my perspective anyway) these are interesting outcomes of our research into design methodologies in themselves - I am also interested in what it indicates about the potential for social software (in a pretty broad sense) to trigger a rethinking of methodologies and/or approaches in the design process. And, subsequently, the role of design research and generative activities in themselves for this type of design.

[much of this was originally posted to the Yahoo Anthrodesign Group List]