Adam Little @ CIID

User research at the Copenhagen airport

Some more user research for our service design/library project, but this time at the airport. One of the topics we are exploring right now is foreigners in Copenhagen and how the library might be able to assist them. What better place to find foreigners than the airport? Actually most the people we approached were either Danish or were on their way to neighboring Sweden. No matter, the Danish people gave us an opportunity to ask questions about other topics and for those going to Sweden we just had to re-frame the questions some.

Reviewing material back in the studio

We decided to video tape these conversations and to my surprise only one person objected to our request to do so. Approaching strangers, especially in such a busy place, has been extremely challenging, but I am finding the conversations are becoming easier as the concepts for this project begin to develop. And as Simona told us earlier in the day, we are not looking for “truth” because we are not ethnographers. What we are doing is design research which means we are only seeking inspiration.

Card sorting in the library's grassy room

Yesterday was one of the most challenging days this year. We didn’t have to code anything, we didn’t have to solder anything, but we had to speak with people! We are currently in the user research phase of our service design class where we are designing for libraries. Earlier in the year we had a week long course on user research during which we found ourselves in elderly homes trying to speak to people suffering from dementia. But strangely enough, talking to average people in the library and on the street seemed more challenging.

The challenge probably results from the fact that our project is so wide open right now.  Since we are still exploring, it is difficult to know what to ask people. This means our questions are not focused and we find ourselves having casual conversations. It is not always easy to keep those conversations going when you are approaching strangers.

Because our group was somewhat weary of this, we prepared two different activities to help spark more interesting conversations. Once we got the hang of this, our day became much easier.

A young girl's sketch of how she perceives the library

The first activity asked people to make quick sketches of how they perceive the library. The results were nice and provided a conversation starter, but we still felt like we were not learning anything new.

More card sorting

The second activity was much better because it helped guide a longer conversation about different topics, a lot of which went beyond the library. We gave the participants three place mats (book store, library, internet) and a bunch of small cards with keywords on them. We asked the each person to place keywords on the place mat it best described. We were less interested in the final layout of keywords than we were about asking them about their choices along the way. We also included blank cards and allowed them to write their own keywords.

Compiling the results back at school

These conversations were much more rich and much more natural. It might also be worth mentioning that it was Sid, Eilidh and I conducting these activities. This seemed to be the perfect amount of people (one lead, one photographer, and one note taker). Back at school we organized our notes and photos for each person we spoke with. Hopefully after another session or two of this kind of research, which we plan on doing outside of the library, we will be able to identify specific problem areas that will make for an interesting service design project.

My bookmarks from the past week:

• Anthropologists help tech giants figure out the softer side - Feb. 25, 2009
  Genevieve Bell must be Jay's boss. Fortune Mag. on ethnography at tech firms.
• The Valley and the Sky | Sascha Pohflepp
  Acid? Drop City? Whole Earth Catalog? The future of design??

I am happy to share that Eilidh, Sid and I have been invited to exhibit Meet the Food You Eat at the Innovation Lab’s NEXT exhibtion, April 2 - 5 in the city of Århus.

A dozen of the most daunting international  minds on business, technology and invention will take the conference stage. And 100 of the most perspectivating, forward facing  and unexpected uses of new technology is drawn from research labs, startups, and R&D facilities from around the globe, to be showcased, tried, discussed and probably fixed a few times during the four day exhibition.

I am glad they chose to include that line about fixing things ;) Anyway, we will be joined by a few classmates exhibiting their own projects, Bunny Bot, CALEN3DAR and Compound Eye.

This video was created for the 2 week course “Social Computing & Sustainability”. As the first of two Industry Projects we will have this year, it was a collaboration between the Interaction Design Pilot Year and Intel. Jacob, Yves and I produced this video as a mock “user research study” as a way to communicate Green House CPH, our concept for a government initiative to decrease energy consumption in Copenhagen.

I hope the video explains it all, otherwise keep reading for some more information and photos.

Read More »

My bookmarks from the past week:

• Utilities Turn Their Customers Green, With Envy - NYTimes.com
  Is ‘keeping up with the neighbors’ incentive to reduce energy consumption? How about head-on competition?
• COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009
  Coming soon to a city near me
• COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009
  Coming soon to a city near me
• From the InternetS of Things to a Web of Things
  Dominique Guinard’s slideshow from the LIFT 09 Workshop
• Internet of Things: Roadmap for the Future
  Vlad Trifa’s slideshow from the LIFT 09 Workshop
• Wired for Progress: Building a National Clean-Energy Smart Grid
  Everything you need to know about the “smart grid” right here
• Hyper Island: Hello IDEO!
  Two Hyper Island grads talk about their experience working at Ideo London
• Manifesto of Open Disruption and Participation by Eric Paulos
  “Ubiquitous technology is with us and is indeed allowing us to communicate, buy, sell, connect, and do miraculous things. However, it is time for this technology to empower us to go beyond finding friends, chatting with colleagues, locating hip bars, and buying music.”
• The Demon-Haunted World - Matt Jones Presentation at Webstock Conference
  “Since the 60s we’ve imagined the combination of computers and our environment would create both utopias and dystopias. Since the 80’s we’ve seen academics, artists and corporate R&D labs prototype these futures from the top-down. Now, hackers are building sensors, bots and software into everything around them bottom-up, fast, cheap and out-of-control. They’re creating environments that react, adapt and respond to us - and perhaps more importantly - each other: The Demon-Haunted World. Matt’s session will be a whistlestop tour of those days of future past and pointers to some practical futures we can start building right now, together.”