Finding the right stories

"The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell" 

- Malcolm Gladwell

The road towards a masters degree seems to be a series of challenges. Up until now there has been one challenge after the other, and even though I know where it is all going to end, and how I can get there, I never know when the next challenge is going to hit me. For example: after doing a series of semi-structured interviews (and learning that it wasn't at all as bad as I thought it would be) I had to transcribe them and look for the important clues in their stories -- but also in their silence -- that will take my research further and be of relevance to my analysis. There are so many different perspectives and different statements. So, where do I begin? What am I looking for? How do I find them? Did I ask the right set of questions? And which, of all the topics discussed, do I choose to analyse further? 

The beauty of learning

Future Workshop on Facebook

An important part of my thesis is looking at how traditional methods for participation can be utilized in the online space. While this may bring about a series of challenges (Hagen & Robertson 2009), there is value in the knowledge and experiences that we have from using pre-established methods, and for that reason, I believe that the methods will have the ability to work through online spaces. However, as the methods were developed for the use in face-to-face interactions, they may not work the same way in an online space. I have therefore explored the process of translation of the method in the execution of a Future Workshop on Facebook to further celebrate the inexpensive and unifying territories for participation.

Online Future Workshop
In Participatory Design the Future Workshop approach is a technique to enable participants in generating ideas for the future activities at work places, and initiate ideas and visions for impementing those ideas in system design (Greenbaum & Madsen 1993). In my study, I chose to conduct a Future Workshos to enable users of an online Heritage Photo service to contribute in the decision making of developing a mobile application of the service.

To apply this method to Facebook and the online space, several challenges and issues needed to be addressed, such as: who and what type of users I was involving, the fact that they were distributed, and the fact that their differences could lead to difficulties with facilitation.

In addressing one such issue, I prepared banners to create boundaries between the different phases and as introductions for the participants involved. Each phase had a topic for dicsussion as a centering point to facilitate the heterogeneous participants.

Not only would they give a visualized division between the different phases of the workshop and create a framework for the participants to work in, but also introduce and create a common understanding for the heterogeneous people involved.

--
Further explorations on the workshop, the process of translation and how Facebook as a platform for performing Participatory design influenced the method and the outcomes, are important themes of discussion in my thesis, and hopefully a valuable contribution to the Participatory Design community.


References

Greenbaum, J. & Madsen, K.H., 1993. Small Changes: Starting a Participatory Design Process by Giving Participants a Voice. In D. Schuler & A. Namioka, eds. Participatory design: principles and practices. Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, pp. 289-298.

Hagen, P. & Robertson, T., 2009. Dissolving boundaries: social technologies and participation in design. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group: Design: Open 24/7. OZCHI  ’09. New York, NY, USA: ACM, pp. 129–136.

Killing the darlings

I have just spent the whole day on the floor of my studio apartment, because my desk was not large enough for the amount of paper I have scattered around. The paper I am writing together with my supervisor for the Participatory Design Conference in August is due by the end of this week, and for the very first time, I find myself struggling to fit everything I want to convey into the limited number of pages. Normally, I put all my effort into typing out all that might sound anything close to relevant just so that I can have fair amount of pages to hand in.

Now I have come to the point of my writing that I have to delete some of the darling sentences that I have worked on, to make all the content fit in to the louzy four pages. After all the years of trying to get enough in to my papers, I find deleting some of it so much worse! Somehow everything seems to be connected, and if I cross out a small part, a different part gets messed up. However, all of this might be just another case of being blinded by my own stubborness.

I ones read an interesting paper on writing articles by Sørensen (2002) as a part of syllabus for a course on qualitative research methods at uni. Sørensen gives a set of helpful guidelines for the novice writer (moi), and many of them have been helpful in my current situation:

• Keep it simple by having only one point per paper, and by only sticking your neck into one guillotin
• Being a copycat can pay off
• Polish  packaging  and  content.
• Writing and reviewing are two sides of the same coin

The paragraph or section that you’ve spent much time writing and re-writing, and  maybe  invested  most of  your  pride  in,  need  necessarily  not  be  very  communicative.  You  should,  hence,  always  be prepared  to  “kill  your  darlings”  if  these  darlings  are  only  your  own 

(Sørensen 2002:12). 

And he is most certainly right. I have found that deleting some sentences gives one quick sting of anguish for about a millisecond, before I realize that, hey, it all makes so much more sense now!

References:


Sørensen, C. (revised version of 2002): This is Not an Article - just some food for thought on how to write one, Working Paper. Department of Information Systems, The London School of Economics and Political Science. No. 121. 

Master thesis

Motivation I'll be frank - involving users in the design process was totally greek to me two years ago. It was in my first design course of 'experimental design of IT' in the fall of 2010 that I was presented to User Centred Design, Co-Design and Participatory Design.. etc. A whole new world, I tell you! 

Unfamiliar to the idea of including the users in design decisions, I found it even more challenging to actually find these people to involve.. participants were either busy, not available at the same time, or just simply afraid to speak in the group. We have all these great methods that actually work wonders to bridge the gap between designers and users if you have the right set of people for the right project, at the right time and place.. for the right method. Yeh.. 

I found inspiration in my every day distractions of Facebook, Twitter, online newspapers and blogs. No matter where in the world we are, or how busy we are, we are never too busy to share, connect, communicate and be on Social Media. It seems like we have become dependent on sharing our thoughts, ideas, opinions, and even what we had for breakfast. And with today's technology we are almost always 'present'. Also, in terms of design - good ideas come from this historical increase of connectivity (Steven Johnson 2010). Participatory Design can benefit from using Social Media to extend their reach to users, and explore participation and design beyond the physical setting.

Approach Ethnography

I was inspired by the book "How to be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum" by Keri Smith (2008), and used some of the methods she presents for documenting my daily discoveries. I found out that research and ethnography does not have to be boring at all. 

Recommended by yours truly for a fun and inspirational exploration 

My portable research museum

I present to you the red book. This journal contains everything from the explorations logs I have written from discoveries through the jungle of Participatory Design literature and Social Media, notes from meetings, to a messy mix of thoughts that have popped into my mind in the middle of my sleepless nights. There is no copy or back-up made of this journal, so I if I lose this I. A.M. S.C.R.E.W.E.D...

Behold the magical kingdom of Participatory Design

This is it! 

My final semester as a master student at the University of Oslo. A lot of work has lead up to these final months of  analyzing, writing up, and checking for spelling mistakes. I have decided that it is time for me to share to the (participatory design) world what I have been keeping myself busy with.

The topic for my thesis something as simple as: 

- the involvement of users in a design process through social media -

Sounds simple right (and perhaps a tad geeky)?

Wrong (and right)! 

In studying how a conventional Participatory Design method can be applied in Social Media I have learned to collect data and document the processes.. gained knowledge about peoples participation and the effects of moving a design setting from the physical work place to a digital setting. As I will describe in this blog I encountered numerous challenges that lead to interesting (and exciting) findings.

I hereby declare the "It's PD stuff" blog for open!

Stay tuned!