Design research? A mesmerising lens on human beings.
As I look back in hindsight to a research project that initiated me to design research, I still feel gutted about the breadth and freshness of the perspectives and understanding it can bring about.
Back in 2015, I joined a multidisciplinary team based in London, to carry out a speculative research project in collaboration by the Goldsmiths’ Interaction Research Studio and co-funded by Innovate UK, the UK’s Innovation Agency. With a small composite team and within design agency STBY… I got hands on an Innovative Approach to Visual UX Research. The auto-cam was conceived as a smart device able to capture relevant moments in a user journey according to changes in biometric data, such as heart rate and sweat, measured on the person wearing it. The idea was to put forward a new method to collect data for researchers, which could supplement traditional techniques like qualitative interviews.
Researching on people, with people: ‘biometric’ visual research beyond usual UX research.
In setting the scope for the Auto-Cam project, we thought about why we wanted to do this project in the first place. What’s interesting about it for us, both for STBY as a whole and for us as design researchers?
Today ‘user experience’ is no longer thought of as referring only to screen-based objects. It encompasses all stages of interactions with a product-service, the user’s expectations prior to use and the feelings that derive from the interaction itself. UX designers need to take into account needs, expectations, behaviours and opinions. Tracking clicks of users and observing and researching in a lab-like setting, is certainly not enough to get the whole picture. Field research and qualitative interviews are a better fit, but so often carrying out extensive research upfront is way too costly.
In thinking about a new visual research device we got inspired by cultural probes: a technique which gives users themselves the faculty to capture significant moment in their everyday life, taking pictures or collecting meaningful objects that can illustrate a particular situation, habit or ritual.
All in all the Auto-Cam would have made the process of collecting probes,‘automatic’, by replacing users’ deliberate “capturing” with a a process entirely relying on objective bio data.
Needless to say, we tested the prototype on ourselves, collecting a fair amount of shots during our everyday commutes, which eventually ended up in our workbook*.Also we did user testing with a sample of candidates and further discussed usage experiences in contextual interviews at the participants’ workplace or house.
Documenting our work
While working on the Auto-Cam, we’ve thought a lot about how to make and benefit from a design workbook in our design process. Our design workbook contains four main sections: a ‘territory map’, proposals, methods, and experiments, aiming to give a comprehensive summary and overview of our initial phases of the project. Most importantly, the workbook helped to define potential directions to take the project in going forward.
As a tool, design workbooks help collect and make sense of observations, research, and ideas in the form of ‘design proposals.’ Design workbooks as a design ideation method have long been advocated by Bill Gaver, Professor of Design and head of the Interaction Research Studio at Goldsmiths, University of London. Working with both Bill and Andy Boucher of the Interaction Research Studio, we were able to see first-hand examples of how they’ve used design workbooks in prior projects. Gaver provides a nice definition of workbooks in his article Making Spaces: How Design Workbooks Work, writing “workbooks are collections of design proposals and other materials drawn together during projects to investigate options for design” (Gaver, 2011).
Creating a design workbook for the Auto-Cam project involved collecting and organising our design proposals without limiting ourselves with too many constraints at that point (feasibility, time limitations, etc.). We also incorporated some of our desk research, pulling insights and ideas from articles, images, and books we’ve come across so far. Other sections of the workbook focus on research methods as opposed to proposals (such as facial and gesture tracking), and experiments (what we’ve already tried out with existing wearable cameras including the Go-Pro, smartphones, and the Autographer).
At the core of this approach lies the belief that ideas in the design process arise over time, and that a design team serves as a dynamic incubator of ideas — where hunches and thoughts can be shared and nurtured. There’s value in bringing them all together into a design workbook to see how they relate to one another, and where our interests lie and overlap.
Prototyping issues and lessons learned
Getting the first iteration of a prototype to work seamlessly just the way you want it to out in the field, in the real world, is much trickier than it seems.With such a very short timeframe for this project, we wanted to deploy an Auto-Cam prototype as soon as possible to begin to test it out. We fasted prototyped, then, and ….a seemingly endless debugging phase began!However bumpy the deployment turned out to be, it definitely made us aware of the importance of striking a balance between quality and quantity, compromising between technical functionality and the amount of participants, and therefore data, we are able to collect and reflect on.
