Full Circle Associates

Kris R. Cohen, University of Surrey (UK)
Who we talk about whe we talk about Users
(Usual live blogging disclaimer. A lot of the language used here is unfamiliar with me, so my ability to "catch" is reduced.)

Hello my featureless dark! Let me first thank three people for early encounters of this paper, Rick Robinson, Katrnia Nickol and Nina Wakeford. Thanks for giving a little more time for the presentation of papers.

The general topic is exclusion, the way design reearchers particixpate in certain kinds of exclusion. In a way simple thing to observe. Talk about the way our threoris and methods are implicit in exclusion, what the stakes are in a larger frame; landscapes of possibility. That’s the most important aspect of the argument. Produxts have a far more diverse life than the things we study. Desingers fail to understand.

Migratory
We all know some part of the story how social and cultural researchers arrived at industry, migrating from university. This is a story of migration. Nothing comes through unchanged. Things adapt and are made to adapt. Metaphor presents questions. How have research methods changed, how have they been forced to change, hybridized, what have they had to give up to fit in, what languages and customs adopted and what are their options for livelihood. Use these questions as lenses to view practice of design research. What theory and method can become in their new home. The answer is the bedrock

In a design setting, especially where design research methods are ideas will come to circulate materially. Theory and method become embodied in products and made public. The products we make are a relay of theory out in to the world. Iterating with a set of ideas embodied in those products.

This feels like a unique place for research and has implications. When people, users, interact with products, they are interacting with ideas about how the world might work. All products body forth a kind of social theory to predict or dictate product use. Design research in industry accepted, they are the closest people come to social theory. If true, it means design research are in the business of designing what is possible. Design or user research is central to this work. Because design research conceived as world making, research and the lives we are researching, are landscapes of possibility. Neutral, not positive or negative.

At it’s most sanguine it names possibility and distinctly political. The stakes of design are quite high, higher than maybe indicated.

Who/What
I’ll begin in the boardroom. Preparing for a final year of research, the goal was to develop new methods for Sapients research directions. Present options to board. Favorite proposal was to spend a year in a homeless shelter for women and babies. I knew a little bit about how research themes are connected in design research. Study users of X to understand their use of X. We identify a think we want to study, then identify a user of those things. We study mobile phone users, a certain kind, in order to understand something about the phones. The relationship between the what and the who a busy one and interesting. When nothing much, when the who comes self evidently connected to what, it has been rendered invisible and unthinkable. What are the ways that design research constructs the relationship between who and what. About class , race, gender are smuggled into the research we do.

In order to conduct useful research you have to study people who are considered viable market. Young homeless mothers would be excluded. If they are not users of X, they are the wrong people to study if you want to design improved Axis. Common sense. Schematic – forces that suture a who to a what. The choice becomes almost a given and never defended. The structure dictates our choice. The client specifies it. Teen with parents of income of $ - don[t need to say white, heterosexual.; Assumed.

On Being and Not Being a User
By now a certain application might be obvious. The relationship between who and what should be where our research is geared. Matters, in a design setting, this linking is important because the people we choose to study are models for the people we imagine will use the product. All works of the mind contain within them the image of the intended reader (Sartre). In the product I encounter the product of someone imagined as me. Sometimes like, not. The product we create a landscape that is either encouraging or alienating. The experience of the world as an increasingly designed place, the impacts are far reaching. Implications.

The people we chose to study are users; who buy and use the product under study. The concept of users cannot be dispatched with gentler synonyms. (Drawing heavily on feminist writers on technology).

One of the most significant adaptations theory has made in it’s new environment. The concept of user fuses who and what into a kind of abstraction. Can be used as research methods, advertising and marketing slogans.

Homeless mothers rarely get to be considered users. User and non users are determined by others. Companies don’t design products for homeless people. Common sense does this soft work of exclusion. Research methods do the heavy lifting of exclusion. Design research shapes the world we all inhabit, drawn from a narrow use of people chosen as users. We all have to live with the designed products even if we don’t want to purchase them.

Various , … no connections between demographic categories appear distinct when they aren’t. Mobile phone users are far more diverse than research studies indicate. Much happens that is important and studiously ignored.

The examples are going to be academic. They are here because they are accessible, and we can talk about them. In her book, Flexible Bodies, spent time with ACTUP. “My field work has made visible to me that the categories we found so useful are no longer useful. Martin says her experiences of ActUp allowed her to see the politics of AIDS through their experience. The unexpected quality of Who. We can see AIDS as thematically related to immunity and the immune system. But the choice of an AIDS activist org, more political than biological, run by people with and without AIDS, is not expected to be the primary group to study immunity. Not our market. Marginalized others in the broader culture experience of the immune system.

This is not a matter of choosing something surprising or extreme. Companies study extreme users as a more exotic way of linking up who and what. The marketplace defines them as extreme.

Bruno Latour followed scientists to the forests. Not because they are extreme users but because he understood lab practice was exclusionary. He wanted to know what was excluded which allowed labs to be used as labs. Straight and queer cultures are not monovalent, distinct from each other. Elastic alliances, not just interrelationship, but intimate commerce between them, not innocently distinct. What we know about family, home and work, has relationship to sexuality or any of the other oppositions that stabilize the who’s or what’s of a study. Products that do not proceed with exclusionary practices in the products we create.

Characteristic not just of extrinsic, but intrinsic relationships. The self or individual. Women who draw in come and housing support do not experience their lives through those social services. Many women for the months living in the shelter they never invite friends over. By this strategy they do not appear to their friends as residents of homeless shelter, even though their friends know. Thus mobile phones become more important. Take visitors by phone. They help them to create vital boundaries. The women are never simply users of social services. They choose their frames and they avoid the frame of social service users.

To go learn a bout people’s tactics for not being users.

Landscapes of Possibilities
Perhaps problem is use of ethnography in design research. We can speculate on why.; Rooted in the observation of behavior in context. Watches and asks. Need to identify something to watch. A who and a what. And that drives where you go to do your fieldwork;. This dynamic of watcher watched, hardwired into the practice. This version of ethnography has been eagerly adopted by companies wanting to identify a quantifiable who before spending money on research and design.

We flatten out our possible undersigning of both users and mobile phone. We assume their intelligently though the use of the most visible users.

Certain people are ritually ignored. Studies just replicate what was visible.

Foster design research which operates on a means other than exclusion. Thinking of those who can’t and don’t use a product. These contribute to the landscapes of possibility. The exclusions we make matter a great deal.

Final thought. Perhaps something is wrong with the field’s inspiration. Poorly suited to helping the field develop;.

Formulating and conducting our research around expansive political landscapes.

Suggestive Suggestion: Designing for Publics
Think about what we are doing is designing for publics and thus a recreation of those publics. The ways that products circulate materially and symbolically far beyond their users, modes of sociability. Talk about design as part of public life. Ordinary use of public that is trouble. That ordinary sense that public is opposite of private. So implies public space that is open, available and non-intimate. Linked to public spaces.

Talking about something different. Literature on publics is huge. Two qualities. Each is slightly counterintuitive.

1. Publics are less useful described as things that have the quality of publicness. The shift from a space that can be labeled as public to something that designers create. See it as process. Products as factors of things publicness, transformed Riding on a train in the age when walkman emerged and how that changed the experience of that space. Mobile phones in trains. Product entering a public space and impacts that space. Space of circulation.

2. Public action is always unpredictable. Startling unproductiveness. Productive. Helps us notice how reliant our current practice is on predictability. Prophylaxis against unpredictability. User researchers track unpredictability with the goal of mitigating unpredictability and create product what do predict use. Whose get fused to what to enable predictable production.

Mitigation might be a foolish goal. Unpredictability is the public’s greatest power. All products eventually go public. Design research might be about looking at how publics interact with products. Experience – design that… missed … if we think about products as public, impacting far beyond those who buy it. Pollution is one example. This is also true of the circulation and use of products of themselves, regardless if they produce. Airbags designed for males, impact on women and children.

Landscapes of possibility are things design researchers might employ. More subversive about how we link the who to the what in our research.

Q: Do you have any thoughts about getting our clients for the kinds of research your are suggesting? Pay us to be subversive.

A: There’s a growing consciousness about the responsibility of a company to ensure its processes are ethical;. Possibility; growing trend.

A: Continue the EPIC conference every year.

A: One are in convincing clients is through dealing with issues of accessibility. Broaden their perception of who they think their user is.

A: Base of the Pyramid. Idea that there are 5-6 billion impoverished people. If corporations could design services for those people to make their lives better. Even if profit is small, volume could be major revenue stream.

Q: From perspective of sales. I have designed philanthropic services for banks, and non profit foundations. Design may operate in a field that cuts across the for and non profit sector. Companies are interested in their public image and building social capital that would ultimately improve sales. I’m wondering if the implicit assumption that we operate in the for profit sectors does not fully encompass the complexity in which the post modern corporate operates. The intersection between the social needs of the users in emerging markets, and social and financial capital.

A: Of course there are practices that are not exclusionary, even in for profit companies. Not trying to say that capital is evil or the problem. It’s problematic, but what isn’t. We operate in that space. The point of trying to work at the level of practice about how we link up who and what we study, even if they don’t adhere to market logic.

Categories: EPIC2005