A Lantern in the Fog
The squiggles, asterisks and lines that light up my notebook, and illuminate my sense-making process
“Look at this,” said Kelly*, showing me a photo on her iPhone. “I bought these emoji leggings so he can look at my bum to learn the language!” Kelly was telling me an extraordinary story about how her family adopted emoji as a primary ‘language’ for communicating with her partner, who had never fully learned to read and write. Her leggings were a new revision tool.
I scribbled her story into my notebook, and marked it with a big, bold asterisk. Her emoji story marked the beginnings of an insight — that pre-literate people and their families can delay solving the issue head-on because they become so fluent in their innovative workarounds instead.
Stepping into the shoes of the illiterate
Our conversation was part of one of the most inspiring projects I’ve worked on. Our client Pearson’s brief was to raise awareness of illiteracy among global policy influencers at the World Economic Forum at Davos, through an ‘empathy experience’, as part of their Project Literacy campaign.
In other words, we wanted politicians to step into the shoes of someone who can’t read and write, and evoke an emotional response that compelled them to take action.
It was a particularly unusual research challenge in that, unlike the majority of our briefs, not one member of the team could call on first-hand experience.
We wanted to create an authentic experience, so we sought out stories and first-hand reflections from adult literacy teachers, a social worker at a majority-illiterate refugee detention centre in Australia, and five non-readers in the UK. Kelly’s partner was one of those non-readers, and the reason I’d ended up staring at a photo of her emoji-covered bottoms.
Notes from the field
The big, bold asterisk is part of a family of symbols that live in my notebook. When I’m out in the field documenting research conversations, the pages take on colourful lines, shapes and squiggles, layered on top of the words. It looks a little bizarre — but does a good job of illustrating what’s going on in my mind.
As a design researcher, I’m always on the look-out for connections. I capture my gut-feelings of interesting observations, insights and themes as diagrams and annotations alongside my notes.
Our design process at IDEO consists of distinct phases. Research happens up-front, followed by a period of sense-making that we call ‘synthesis’. The aim is to summarise the research coherently. I lead teams as we share stories illustrating the key things we’ve learned, craft insights from our observations, and spot the patterns that lead to design opportunities. We’re distilling across a mass of evidence, so the process is fundamentally chaotic and ambiguous. Keeping our eyes peeled for themes and opportunities during research itself can prevent us feeling overwhelmed later. It’s like making yourself a little lantern before you hit the fog.
It’s like making yourself a little lantern before you hit the fog.
The seeds of sense
There isn’t a ‘right’ way to use a notebook for design research. But I find the way I document information helps. It provides the seeds of seeds of synthesis and a framework to capture gut instincts, and ‘join the dots’. The pages look a little like this:
So, what’s going on here? It’s quite simple:
- In the left column, I write what someone is saying — like ‘I bought these emoji leggings!…it’s become our family’s secret code!’.
- In the right column, I write what it is making me think — something along the lines of ‘new shared language makes learning to read feel less urgent.’
- Shapes and motifs indicate recurring themes in the conversation: vertical lines for a pithy quote, and highlighted chunks for the really, really juicy bits. Some I’ll make a note of during the conversation, and others afterwards during a download session with a fellow team member.
These annotations help me bring together related pieces of learning into insights and often end up scrawled on Post-Its to form the basis of the opportunity areas we flesh out during synthesis.
Okay, so what does that look like in practice?
We identified a handful of people able to share a range of perspectives on literacy to gain wider and more authentic understanding of the topic. Using our conversations with Salima* and Alfie* as examples, I’ll explain our hypotheses, what we asked, what we learned, and how we made sense of it as a team.
Hunch, highlight, insight
One early hypothesis was that literacy defines our understanding of the world around us. So we sought out someone with an expert perspective, whose job it is to explore intangible ideas with people less literate than themselves.
Salima* teaches philosophy to small groups of teenage students with specific learning needs. She told us about some of her students who are pre-literate and why they find complex concepts hard to grasp at first: literacy provides a structure to compare ideas; understanding is not implicit when our pace of reading is slow; writing and reading develops our inner voice; illiterate people tend to live in the present; specific learning needs require a lot of 1–1 attention.
In my notes, the circles highlighted her reflections on challenging pedagogies, squares for students’ emotions, triangles for tools and devices that aid learning, and lines for particularly interesting excerpts or pithy quotes.
These observations helped inform our understanding of what pre-literate people experience from a theoretical and emotional point of view and presented immediate inspiration for scenarios we could re-create, like the frustration felt when reading too slowly to absorb what’s written.
We were curious to understand how the ways in which illiterate people ‘get by’ and express themselves day-to-day compare to people with other fundamental communication hurdles, like deafness.
Alfie* is a performance/drag artist and musician who was born to deaf parents but cannot sign. He talked to us about his frustrations and workarounds for communicating with his parents, and his own channels for expression in his adult life: homogenous relationships reinforce our mindset; fluency/inarticulacy in a ‘first language’ inevitably cements or divides groups of people; if divided we rely on mediators to translate between our ‘worlds’; being deaf doesn’t reduce the need for stimulus and outlets for emotion; limited vocabulary reinforces a ‘black and white’ perspective of the world.
In my notes, asterisks indicate recurring themes in the conversation, the lines, again, signal intriguing observations and great quotes, and the crayoned bullet points begin to form our key takeaways. These helped us explore social and emotional dynamics — how it feels when the desire to communicate, express and share experiences is prevented by the absence of common language.
After all our interviews, we distilled takeaways onto Post-its, and plotted people’s anecdotes along a chronological ‘lifeline’ to spot common experiences and nuances that bring their stories to life.
From that, we crafted a set of insightful design and storytelling principles, which formed the foundations for design to start: prototypes of the Project Literacy exhibit, and our briefing documents for digital storytelling studio Secret Location, which shot the final films.
Ethnography can uncover the most wonderful stories — and the tiny details are the bits I really savour, but they can easily get lost in the transition from field notes through to design opportunities. Just as Kelly described her family’s emoji dictionary as their “secret code!”, the annotation language I’ve described here is my own secret code, helping me decipher what’s important from what’s just interesting, and stay true to what we hear and learn from people.
- * Not their real names. Many thanks to ‘Kelly’, ‘Alfie’ and ‘Salima’ for allowing me to include their stories in this post.
