Jules Marshall
Netherlands Design institute
jules@design-inst.nl

"How can we make users the subject - not the object - of innovation?"

This was the key question when more than 50 people from nine EU countries gathered for a one-day forum last November at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. It was the first opportunity for researchers and designers working on the two-year Presence project to share best practices from different approaches to design and user research.

Presence is an i3 initiative to develop scenarios about communications to enhance the community ties of older people. It combines test sites in The Netherlands, Italy and Norway, and design input from Italy’s Domus Academy and the RCA, with support from the Design for Ageing Network (DAN). The Netherlands Design Institute (NDI) is managing the project and its communications.

The forum brought together people telling very different stories, from very imaginative, inspirational data-gathering and highly graphical, intuitive presentations, to much more process- and numbers-oriented hard validation.

With such a wide range of participants, projects and methodologies presented, conclusions could be expected to be thin on the ground. "The consensus was that there was no consensus," DAN co-ordinator and forum chair Roger Coleman summarised.

"One of the great things we learned about multi-disciplinary teams was that friction can be good and consensus is not necessarily needed," said Kay Hofmeester, project manager of Presence.

"Diversity should be enjoyed," Gillian Crampton-Smith, professor at the RCA’s Department of Computer Related Design (CRD), agreed. "Hearing people who have completely different approaches gives you a perspective on your own approach so you understand it better." You need to test your natural proclivities against real stuff, she said. "The fantastic value of a more objective approach is that it enables us to test - and get beyond - our instincts."

There is a strong emphasis on user-centred research in Presence. "It’s less important that a method is scientifically sound, than that it be effective," said Elena Pacenti from the Domus Academy’s design team. It is more important that research generates new ideas and stimulates the creative process. Getting at what people want and need - even if they are not aware of or able to articulate this themselves - is the primary goal.

Design scenarios can proactively anticipate or discover needs people did not realise they had. One novel technique for eliciting a more impressionistic understanding is the ‘cultural probe’, a term coined by Tony Dunne and Bill Gaver from the RCA’s CRD department for packages given to the three communities of older users.

Containing maps, postcards and disposable cameras, the probes gave people tools and prompts: they were asked to return pictures and stories of how they saw themselves situated in their social and physical milieu. The data returned is used to help break down the stereotype of ‘needy old people’ by focusing on the richness and variety of their lives.

"We're looking for gaps that aren't being addressed or met by other techniques or methods," said Dunne. "We're also hoping that new patterns will emerge, and that those patterns create a different sort of landscape of needs and desires, different expectations."

Elena Pacenti praised the value of these ‘inspirational’ packages for "starting a conversation among the local community." Danielle van Diemen, a social sciences researcher who has used the probes in the Amsterdam Bijlmer test site, is convinced such probes will bring valuable knowledge and ideas about how groups feel about living there - most importantly, ethnic minority groups which are traditionally hard for designers to reach.

"Tell us about your last long conversation"
A postcard - part of the 'cultural probe' distributed to participants in the Oslo test site - elicits soft, 'inspirational' data.

From the other end of the objectivity spectrum, however, David Yelding of the UK’s Research Institute for Consumer Affairs said that when producing comparative reports about products, mistakes can be libellous "and there's nothing as coldly sobering as a lawyer’s letter on a Monday morning. I can tell you from experience."

As a result, very close attention is paid by David Yelding's organisation, RICA, to methodology - and accuracy. But Yelding said the forum had stopped him "being puritanical about methodology", and encouraged him to in future "enter into partnership on a kind of roller-coaster ride with designers, bringing an element of creativity in research, to get towards new thinking, new ideas."

User research in design also aims to observe and understand people effectively, challenge stereotypes, test and evaluate, avoid costly mistakes before and improve products after manufacture.

Different approaches suit different situations, and the value of the various methods presented did not rest in the absolute quality of the data produced, but in its usefulness at different points in the design and develop-ment process. The skill is to use the right method in the right situation and to combine methods to suit the purpose at hand.

The aesthetic quality of research tools also matters, with people far more likely to be engaged by a well-designed bag of tricks than by some endless questionnaire. "Involve users as soon as possible," pleaded Tony Dunne, "and please let’s make the experience fun. The words ‘user research’ sound dull before you even start to do it!"

"Research has no value until we communicate it," was another recurring theme of the day. Communication not just with designers, but also with the world of marketers, engineering, business and academia - the people who choose design consultants, use designers and brief people.

It was agreed that using a website to pre-brief the forum participants had been very useful, and opening it to the public will help gather more information on the subject and create a unique resource of design/research methodology - a "centre of gravity of best practice that has been inspirational," as Maypole partner Tim Brown, IDEO’s European director, put it. This has now been done at www.presence.org.

Did the forum represent some "incredible vanguard of advanced behaviour," wondered John Thackara, forum rapporteur and director of the NDI, or was it simply a case of "trying to catch up with what other people had already been doing for quite a long time?"

"I think we're moving from a linear to a parallel process of research and the development of ideas," Tim Brown answered. "We're just learning how to break out of a linear process, where you feel the research has to come before the ideas, and just starting to understand what parallelism is about."

Kay Hofmeester said he too found himself pondering these parallel processes. "Sometimes the sharp discussions going on between different disciplines is the most interesting part."

Francois Jegou, from the French DAN member Design à Long Terme, offered his Forum feedback i cartoon form.

The increased speed of product development locks companies into an ever-increasing tempo. Maybe looking to user-oriented, social research rather than being forever technology-driven might perhaps create for them a little breathing space? Elisabeth Davenport, a literature professor from Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh, noted the difference in tempo between academic study and company research. When teaching systems analysis at business school, she had noted that companies did a very deep analysis and step by step breakdown of a potential user, then attempted to meet the needs of that linear design process.

"Having begun to work with Domus, I realise that what we're all interested in is people adapting to environments. ‘Inspirational’ design chucks new things into the environment and we then perceive how people adapt to that. It's almost as if, walking through a garden, suddenly a new plant appeared where you didn't know there was one before."

Could it be that experience at Presence’s test sites would change the nature of the research process, by bringing the designer in so early? Domus Academy’s Marco Susani thought so - and he’s for it. "The idea of participating, trying to understand more, to be there and participate, appeals." But he added that it was important not to try and "camouflage the existing roles" of designer, researcher and user.

David Yelding added that it was against the conventional wisdom of the cold, dispassionate observer, not to bring anything of yourself as a researcher to the people you are interviewing or dealing with - but concurred that conventional wisdom had evident limits.

A discussion ensued about the effectiveness of peer group research, when users themselves do research or help each other learn. Presence partners Telenor and Human Factors Solutions (HFS) in Norway, for example, help older Net ‘super-users’ teach other library-going oldsters basic IT skills. Inter-generational teaching, where grandchildren and grandparents trade skills, also takes place there. Both are effective and fascinating to observe, said Sidsel Bjørneby of HFS.

Someone quoted Gregory Bateson’s observation that ‘science probes, it does not prove.’ Even the most objective of scientific experiments could not avoid bias, which suggests that scientific probing and the process of iterative design are not that far apart. The gap between scientific method and design method could actually be quite narrow.

"Design is the bias that helps things evolve," concluded Susani. "That is why design is one of the engines of civilisation. You have to use gut feeling and intuition to go beyond user opinions and move them forward."

• The Presence Forum continues on-line at www.presenceweb.org. Visitors are encouraged to comment, react and add original papers on their own research methods for feedback. The site is facilitated (and discussion provoked) by design and science writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams, working with user and research practitioners including DAN and Presence members. Towards the end of the year, the various methodologies, reactions and other inputs discussed will be summarised. Have your say before then...

© 1998,1999,2000 i3net	-- Search i3net --	About the i3net web pages
Revised: 17 April, 1998.		Mail to webmaster@i3net.org