Week 6: Presenting Exploratory Research

February 16 — February 22, 2020

<02/17 Presentation of Exploratory Research>

There were two major points of feedback on our presentation:

1. This is a very important question and there is a “tsunami of literature on this topic” from Shabana Zuboff, to the Private Eye, to Jaron Lanier to a bunch of others who advocate erasing individual digital footprint. “You are going to try to swim in the flood of this discourse”. The problem with all of these is that none of them are prescriptive of a rational approach to dealing with this issue. “You’ve to decide where do you want to step in: at an institutional scale or an individual level, do you want to go as far as Jaron Lanier recommending to throw away your cell phone or do you want be in the middle.”
2. There is another dimensions to the personal privacy invasion: appropriation of data from public infrastructure and businesses, ransom ware. There is data and information, if you get hands on it, you can influence people to make decisions or destroy their democratic functioning.
3. It would be interesting if the team could came out with guidelines for designers and engineers, or for data platforms to shift the power from data takers to data makers. What would that set of rules, the 10 commandments of Design for Digital Agency be, that Peter is going to teach from now on to witness this shift of power.

<02/19 In class session with Liz Sanders>

Liz Sanders came for one whole studio session to help us get started on thinking about the generative research phase involving participants. She highlighted 3 things through her talk while giving us tips and showing examples from her own work:

1. What is level and context in which you are trying to place this workshop?
2. Clarify what is the goal of the workshop? Are there particular things that you found during exploratory research that you want to learn more about?
3. Who would be your audience for the research and what tools/methods should you employ that map back to your goal?

Hard copies of workbooks shared by Liz Sanders for students to take a look at during the class

Towards the end of the class we had time to work with our groups to come up with ideas, this was helpful to some extent. We didn’t get immediate clarity on the structure or the content of the workshop but it was a good start. Through the 20 minute brainstorm session, we realized two things:

1. Since ours is a heavy topic and something that not everyone can comprehend intuitively, we need to use a works-book to first walk the participants through some of the key concepts before engaging with them in-person.
2. Doing generative research with data takers and data makers might need two separate workshops to first understand their perspectives and pain points separately, to then doing a combined one to bring them together for an activity or a dialogue.

Doing 3 sets of workshops and a work-book sounds a lot, so we put a pin into the idea for now and would be iterating more on it soon.

The rest of this week was pretty slow in terms of team coming together to brainstorm ideas for generative research because of the career fair. We decided to use this time as an opportunity to take some distance from what we had been thinking, reflect on our own process and come back with fresh minds on coming Monday. Check out our next blog post for the further process.