Design for Social Interaction
Do you ever feel like designers are too focused on designing for individual interactions, rather than the social experiences that are such an important part of our lives? After reading an article published in Science News last spring called “Our brains sculpt each other. So why do we study them in isolation?,” EPAM’s VP of Design Jonathan Lupo felt this was a worthy question to ask our studio. In response, members of the SF design team shared interesting perspectives about doing a better job of researching people in social contexts, and designing experiences fueled by this greater knowledge.
You can experience the entire discussion as if you were there via our 360 roundtable discussion (optimized for Oculus Go). In this article I highlight some of the key discussion points and takeaways.
Our Discussion
Introduction
Jonathan: The article that we all read for the discussion today was based on research done by Thalia Wheatly, a social neuroscientist and faculty member at Dartmouth college. She studies what happens to the brain when people interact with each other; a very different model from the past “brain in a jar” form of study. A key idea in Thalia’s research is that deprived of social interaction, our brains stop working well. Mind to mind interaction creates more than the sum of its parts.
A great example of the power of social interaction is the story of Phineaus Gage, a foreman on a railroad construction site back in 1848 (see his story). In an unfortunate accident, an iron rod shot upward, through his lower, upper jaw and cheek, into his brain, destroying most of the frontal lobe of his brain. After the accident, people said that he stopped being recognizable as his former self. Years later, he got a job as a stage coach driver in Chile and began interacting with people on a daily basis. This structure helped him to build back his identity and gave him back his social skills. It’s a powerful example of how important socialization is for our health and sanity.
Social Design Research
Jonathan: I want to start today’s discussion by asking: what role do you think social neuroscience can play in our design research?
Alex: It’s an interesting question because it gets me thinking about how we tend to avoid group research sessions. For example, we often see focus groups as biased and prefer to conduct individual research sessions instead. Maybe we should be re-thinking our approach.
Jonathan: Right, how many jobs that we study and observe are done in isolation?
A lot of the interaction and engagement with brands and their customers is done socially or collaboratively, so studying this in isolation doesn’t feel true to the natural behavior that we are trying to observe.
Kaitlin: I think it makes sense to observe groups, but I don’t think it makes sense to interview people as a group. People are so intertwined, that you run the risk of getting the opinions of other people, even through an individual’s feedback. It’s good to interview people individually as a way to give them a clear voice and respect them.
An individual’s experience is never just their own. By speaking to them we are also learning about the collective.
Jonathan: That’s a really cool idea. It’s like the individual that you study already has the embedded social interaction that we need to observe. They are a vessel that expresses it, and that we can capture in our research.
Theo: I thought it was interesting in the article how it talked about the idea of the “super mind.” Maybe for our research, there should be a balance. Where we interview individuals, but then also the larger group as the super organism.
Kaitlin: I think that’s a great point. That’s why I think we often start projects with a kickoff workshop. That’s how we get the collective mindset. It sparks ideas for the rest of the project.
Theo: Yes, but the people we involve in workshops are usually different from the people we would interview. It would be valuable to have all of those different inputs: workshops, individual interviews, and group interviews.
Jen: I agree. If you talk to someone one-on-one, and then combine that with a group research method, you might be able to kind of read between the lines and validate certain patterns and hypotheses that you might have. It will help you come up with new information. I think the more data points you have, the more you’ll be able to get out of that.
Designing for Social Experiences
Jonathan: Let’s move on to the next discussion topic. How does our understanding of the importance of these social interactions influence what we actually design? Not just the research to inform it, but the actual products and services we are designing?
Alex: I was thinking earlier that group research is most valuable if we are designing experiences that are actually meant to be shared. So often we are designing for individual experiences. We now have new medium such as AR, where people are looking at the same thing and interacting with each other more often. There seems to be a much greater need for group research when designing for these types of experiences.
Theo: I would be interested in how “individual experiences” are defined. If you’re on social media, your response to something you see is in the context of everyone else who sees the same things. I doubt that anyone would say that’s an individual experience.
Kaitlin: That’s true. There are experiences that we might see as individual, but there is actually a social context that we should be aware of. Right now I’m on a project in which we’re learning about screens that doctors are using while they are in the room with the patient. It makes you wonder— how should that experience be different if the patient is in the room?
Jonathan: Our screens right now are kind of built for one. Our laptops are designed to sit on a single person’s lap.
We have to think of screen-based and non-screen based experiences in the future and how they become rooms and environments, inclusive of more than one person.
Kaitlin: I think the whole IoT space is really interesting. If you think of Alexa, that is very much a shared experience in a family. Or if you think of the movie Blade Runner and the virtual, holographic female companion, it starts to get interesting. In the future, information can just be floating around in a shared world. That’s where I get really excited about augmented reality.
Jonathan: Yeah, maybe we have to study behavior between humans and intelligent digital assistants.
Measuring Success of Social Experiences
Jonathan: Let’s move on to our final discussion topic. Currently there are many ways to capture data about individuals, but how do we capture data about groups? How would we measure the success of a group experience, such as a virtual meeting?
Theo: It seems in those types of group experiences, there are common goals and also individual goals. It would be interesting to understand the ratio of those being met.
Kaitlin: The entire concept of applying metrics to social experiences is very interesting. It ties back to the beginning when we were learning about Phineus. No one knew at the time that social interaction could help restore his personality. He defied expectations because there was something that we weren’t able to quantify until that point.
In a similar way, we are currently focused on measuring the individual, but there is also this collective mind that is separate, and that we don’t yet know how to measure.
Jonathan: Thalia Wheatley might propose that there are no individual ideas. We all have the collective group in our heads. You’re the lens for that embedded group.
Mikhail: Currently when we design traditional interfaces, we have KPIs of how many steps key functions should take. I think that paradigm can also be applied here for social interactions. For example, how many steps should it take to explain my ideas to my colleagues?
Alex: Yes, I think we can learn the most about shared experience from observational group studies, where we can collect information like that. Right now we tend to prioritize conducting interviews, but maybe for shared experiences we can get much richer information from observing how people interact with the experience we designed.
Jonathan: But isn’t that too late in the process?
Kaitlin: I think that’s why it’s helpful to do observational research early in the process. There is a huge power to those studies that we don’t always take advantage of. It’s a “show me, don’t tell me” mindset. In urban design, a lot of decisions are made by observing how people move through the space and what their desire paths are. I think that can be applied to designing shared interactive experiences.
Jen: Agreed, but I do think we often gain some of that observational knowledge from workshops with our clients. There’s a lot that we can glean from the interpersonal dynamic that’s going on in the organization. We can see any political struggles that may exist. We’re in that observation mode all of the time, even when we’re not with our research hat on.
Theo: Outside of workshop settings, it would be interesting to think about how we can observe groups without it being too noticeable.
Jen: Yeah, there’s definitely that threat of people behaving differently if they know they’re being watched. It’s important to find ways around that.
Jonathan: Thank you all for this great discussion. I’d love to hear what Thalia Wheatley has to say.
Concluding Thoughts
With new findings from social neuroscience research, and the increasing capabilities of immersive technologies, there are endless possibilities to better understand people in group settings and design for social experiences.
Our SF studio had a great discussion of how we can use existing methods such as individual interviews, workshops, and observational studies, in new ways to better understand people’s needs in social contexts. We also shared our perspectives of how we can better consider social interaction in our designs, and identify goals against which to measure success. We are thankful to Thalia Weakly for her research contributions, and look forward to embedding more social design consideration into our daily practice.
