Visual Dialogues with Farmers

Our field is full of tools and techniques for planning and executing contextual research projects, but the truth is sometimes you just have to make it all up as you go. I ran into this during a project while interviewing local farmers in Savannah. I wanted to understand how their business models changed throughout the year, whether their biggest challenges occurred during the peak of off-season, and how seasonal transitions were managed.

So, I decided to make a one-page worksheet out a full calendar year, and invited my interviewees to join me in decorating the page with notes, timelines.

Here are a few interviewees’ worksheets:

Looking back, I’m still delighted by the conversations that took place on these worksheets. By visualizing their thoughts, my interviewees each told a great story. Sometimes they would get lost in a long pause, thinking back to last year, that long deathly grind of a summer, or that early spring cold snap that hurt market turnouts for an entire month. These conversations brought a richness to the research that I might have missed, had I not created a place for them to take shape.

Composite illustration of multiple worksheets:

This post was originally published at VoltaCollaborative.com