Category Archives: Grad School

drinking deeply at the pools of ethnography

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The very first course I ever attended as a graduate student was this bastardized hybrid of a course taught by two professors, one from the humanities as self-proclaimed ethnographer of cyberspace (remember when we used to say that? yah, not so much anymore), and the other a professor from the natural sciences, training in Chemistry and much of his work at the time about the study of complex networks. The first was David Hakken, the second Santiago Schnell.    Both characters, generally memorable people.  The class was held in a large lecture hall in the fine arts building: capacity 250.  Our class size however was around 70, which consisted of every single first year student of human-computer interaction design (it was a required course) as well as a every other first year graduate student that year in the school of Informatics, this was including PhD students.  The idea was noble, expose the students to two very different points of view of what counted as science, data, proof, and rigor.  It was almost all “sage on a stage” and in a room like that how could it be anything other than that?

I took quite a few cultural anthrop0logy courses as an undergrad, hoping for a year or two to make it a double major… but I never deeply engaged with the ideas beyond how they gave me increased explanatory power to talk about certain concepts.  In essence they gave me clear ways of talking about certain phenomena.  Really it was during this time that I began to start to really understand and engage with the idea of ethnography, and in many ways I took it as the basis for understanding humans on their own terms.

As I’ve come of age as  PhD researcher, crossing the 1.5 year mark not too long ago I see quite clearly I’ve taken ethnography in, and made it my friend, my constant companion.  At first ours was a friendship of chance.  I arrived in a culture quite different from my own, not just in terms of corporate culture and the fact that Philips is a huge place, billions in revenues, but in a different country.  I quite naturally wanted to understand so many of those differences, to wrap my arms around the idea of innovation which is almost limitless by some definitions.  What began as just a process of making sense of my environment became instead the foundation of my methodology for my PhD work.  As I came close to hitting the one year mark I had to seriously reflect on my progress and I began to code some of the ethnographic data I’d collected in order to give it more rigor.  Patterns started to emerge, though some of those findings weren’t very welcome.

In January I attended the Participatory Innovation Conference in Denmark.  The last keynote was Dori (Elizabeth) Tunstall.  She was simply amazing, by far the most captivating of the keynote speakers. It reminded me a bit of what some of us affectionately called the Hakken dance.  It’s part of what happens when the person on stage gets so excited about what they are talking about that they can’t help but move around up there.  Dori gave several good reference and I needed to have them.

More recently I’ve had to really seriously sit down and write out my methodology for the remainder of my PhD study, and so I’ve done that and realized how much I’m relying on ethnography.  So of course it makes sense to go back and read what I already had and add some new things to my library.  So I’m reading several books now like Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography, and Ethnography: Principles in Practice.  Also since January I’ve connected to the anthrodesign mailing list. I have NO idea why I wasn’t on that list for years.  It’s a fantastic resource and it’s SO good to connect to others who are doing similar work.

So I’m drinking deeply and it’s delicious.

Innovation Methods

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I have begun my PhD journey into the world of innovation methods.  I have been thinking about what I think innovation is.  My first working definition is the creation of a new experience.  I should first qualify that I am using the word experience as a port-manteau kind of catch-all term that envelopes everything from products or artifacts, to systems, or services to something that can only be described as an experience such as cirque de soleil or Disneyland (for one take on types of innovation see doblin’s ten types).  When I say new I mean some facet of it is new, it may only be the packaging, or branding, or it may be a feature, or it may be the way it is marketed or a combination of some of these or other things I haven’t mentioned but are equally applicable.

Methods are activities, processes, or tools used while innovating. I haven’t worked on a good working definition for methods, and am open to suggestions of course.

One of the first challenges of my project is that innovation happens all over an organization, and Philips is certainly no exception to this.  There are people in traditional R&D functions (like where I am in Philips Research) and people in various business units (or sectors as we like to call them at Philips) as well as people in strategy, marketing, marketing intelligence, and design.  Just getting a handle on what all these various departments are doing is a massive undertaking, so I’ve begun interviews all over Philips to start understanding what is happening and to digest this information.  At the same time I am trying to make sure that my present work adds some value to my department before I am ready to start producing some kind of intervention into a process with a new process or training or whatever it is I will choose to do.

Of course the other thing that is constantly on my mind is that this is not just about Philips, but rather any organization, so I am working on reaching out to other organizations to see how they are doing this and how it works for them.  I certainly will need help to do this, so anyone reading this, if you work in an organization and would be willing to talk to me about innovation methods, please contact me.

The last thing of course is targeting my findings for publication in various places.  Of course various design-oriented venues come pretty high on my list, I’ve considered some communications venues (as communication between parts of an organization are so important in innovation), and I’m still actively looking for other high quality venues for either journal articles or or conference presentations (and certainly for the next 2 years or so doctoral consotiums or other similar venues where the feedback and interaction is high would make a lot of sense).  Again I welcome any all all suggestions for these.

Being a preferred candidate

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Here’s the position I just got notice that I’m the preferred candidate for: (complete details on the entire project here)

Description: In recent years, the paradigm for industrial research and innovation has shifted from a ‘technology push’ model towards a ‘user centred’ model so that industrial research and innovation is now more than ever focusing on application development that addresses end-user needs. Although techniques such as Contextual Design also aim towards a contextualized understanding of user needs, they do not meet the current needs of the industry, i.e., limited focus on a specific class of products, and limited understanding of user needs. What is needed is a better understanding of the contextual settings in which innovation occurs. By positioning user insights between problem states and desired states, consumer insights are formulated and further exploited for creating innovations by means of techniques such as a value propositions. This project will develop methods to enhance the market relevance of existing user centred creative processes, as these apply to industrial research by steering user centred innovation practices with marketing data. The proposed method will be refined through its application in creative problem-solving practices within Philips Research.

Outcomes: Methodology development, towards an integrated approach for a user insight driven creative process, will focus on: (i) ethnographic methods for collecting rich contextual data from which user insights can be derived; (ii) techniques for translating user insights into consumer insights that can be validated in terms of their market relevance; (iii) methods for deploying consumer insights into the creative phase of formulating innovative propositions.

In more simple terms it is this: today companies realize that technology alone cannot be the driver in creating and innovating on products or services, we need a user-centered perspective.  What makes this project fairly unique is that they want to fuse user-centered design methods to create a concept, and then use marketing research and business ideas to validate that concept.

In the simplest terms we want to let all the qualitative goodness of design driven research and add in quantitative marketing data and business values.

So what does it mean that I’m the preferred candidate?

It means that the project head and local committee have given me the thumbs up, and that the head of the overall proect committee have to say yes as well, but it would be fairly unlikely that they wouldn’t have the same decision as the people who are heading the project, interviewed me, and will be working with me directly.  We are VERY excited about the prospect of it, and as long as the final offer comes back close to the numbers  they gave me initally with some decent benefits (which is likely given the difference of health coverage in the EU) then we will undoubtedly say yes.

They initially wanted an April 1 start date, but of course I’m planning on attending CHI in Boston so it will have to be after that. We are thinking of having me go directly after CHI and getting things all set up and then Vanessa and the boys following after the school year ends and Vanessa has her performance with Indy Opera in late May.

Some thoughts on the research

Of course it’s interesting that design and user research is positioned between problem states and solutions.  Of course that is a huge step forward from letting design and user research just be a final step, but as per some of the conversations over at NextD that I’ve been participating in, it seems that design is moving and changing and moving even farther upstream towards the problem framing stage.  My thought however is that even when design moves farther upstream and it’s not as if we should then let technology or engineering be the driver from there on out.

The two things I am very excited about are these: adding in some vast amounts of marketing data, and the fact that I’ll be workign directly at Phillips research.  I won’t be simply coming up with some theoretical business process, but starting with what is currently going on at the User Reseach group at Phillips and then moving forward, putting the methods and theories directly into practice.

Open Letter to Annual Conference Organizers

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Dear Conference Organizers:

First of all, thank you for all your hard work and dedication. I know you don’t have to volunteer and put on a conference for all your peers and those aspiring to be your peers. I also know that your taking time to do so will distract from your regular work, whether it be research, teaching, or what have you, so again thanks. I am not writing this to just say thank you though, I have a few complaints.

Website URL:

It is actually much easier to find the conference if there is one website for the organizing organization that puts on the conference that then links and or hosts the conference pages for each year. I have often seen that a department, faculty, school, or univeristy will organize a conference and then not too long afterwards the site gets taken down, or I will find the 1998 conference site for the conference I am looking for. I like the historical aspect of seeing old websites, I really do, but unless it point to current resources as well it’s fairly useless in the longrun. What I propose is this, coolconference.org as the main website and then do 2007.coolconference.org or coolconference.org/2007. This is a good idea if the conference does not spring out of a strong organizing group, but if you have one where the website is active I would say do this: groupsite.org/conferencename/2008, and you could make groupsite.org/conference default to the current year but have all the other years accessible.

Website Design:

Please, oh please, grab as volunteer who knows website design and have them use a nice CSS template. So many are free and many more are $50-100. It’s so worth it. CSS makes it awfully easy to make webpages look consistent, and it’s easy for anyone to create new pages with new content in something like dreamweaver or contribute. Even better, choose a template that works with WordPress and do the whole thing in wordpress, it works amazingly well.

Expect further additions, but for now that is all I have to say. Thank you very much.

Sincereley,

Aaron Houssian

Goodbye 2007–reflections on the self.

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Last night I attended my last class of 2007.  I was very happy about it. Now is the time in my life where I get to do a lot of reflection anyway, I’m writing my statements for PhD programs and I get to take the largely seamless analog whole of my life and interpret it into something discreet and digital and coherent.  At least my professional life and research interests.

It’s not the easiest thing to do.  I mean I need to show how I’m unique, how my interests fit into the departments I’m applying to, into the program, how I will contribute, how I will be enriched.  This is a classic example of the constructedness of identity.  The question remains however, am I just showing different facets of myself, or is there no unity to the self?

Is there one true self, who you REALLY are?  I would say no.  Do  you have a soul? I would say yes.  How can these ideas coexist?

Happily they sit together, drinking tea.

There is no one true self, there is no way that you WILL be, that you OUGHT to be in the sense that if you don’t become that person you have betrayed your true nature.  While I do think it is possible that you may not have lived up to some kind of potential that exists in each of us, there is no preset amount of “greatness” that you could have accomplised.  Instead you have a soul, a part of the universe that is uniquely you, but what that soul is to become is up to you.  It is constructed by you and co-constructed by your environment, your peers etc.

The fragmentary nature of who we are is OK.  You will be someone different with different groups of people.  You are not being two faced in the same way as when you say something to one person and then do something else because you lied about it.

How does design fit into this kind of view?
Design should recognize that we are who choose to be.  Our constructedness and multi-faceted nature need not be made inorganic or undesirable.  Design should realize that we like to try out different roles, and then possibly take them off again.  Designs that support the exploration of self, what it means to live, to be, to become can be very powerful and affective.  I think games can do this extremely well since we can embody different characters and people as we play.  It is part of what makes it so great to play.  Games aside though I would like to see additional designed interactive artifacts that support this view of identity.  Ultimately I hope we have a way to manage all the data that represents us and doesn’t necessarily try to make it coherent for us, but rather it can let the data self-organize, or we can choose to let it be or make it more recognizable.