Fighting for Control — A Realization Moment on How to Properly Utilize Design & Research Tools
In the student design community, we have been constantly having conversations on tools. Project management, research, design, development… A handful of tools exist for each of these categories, with their own perks and purposes. We are exposed to way too many tools that are supposed to help us work more efficiently and effectively. We love them, we study them, and apply them whenever we can.
However, it is dangerous for us to be trapped in a mindset of using the tools for the sake of using them. Especially for us design students — who have learned methods mostly in a classroom setting, with assignments guiding us to apply these methods — we need to understand what is the goal of using these methods. Through this blog post, we want to reflect and share a recent realization moment we experienced during explorative research phase:
When using tools, we need to take a step back and think about our goals. We should be using tools in a way that best serves our own purpose, instead of mindlessly following prescribed rules.
The story started when the team was creating a stakeholder map. We were trying to achieve a deeper understanding on our problem space — the healthcare system around surgeries and chronic diseases — which is known for its complexity in stakeholders and the value flows among them. At first, we wrote down all the stakeholders we could think of on individual post-it notes, and arranged them on a whiteboard. However, we quickly realized that there is an important factor that wasn’t captured in our diagram — time. In health care, stakeholders are constantly changing in different stages throughout time, hence we found ourselves creating duplicated post-it notes and drawing messy lines among them. How can we most effectively and clearly map out the relationship of all stakeholders on one plane?
As a bunch of creative problem solvers, we as a team proposed a “3D Stakeholder Map”, in order to conceptualize time as a third axis. The team sketched out a cone shaped diagram, with slices of planes indicating the different stages of the health care process. In order to make the time axis more clear and easy to understand, we quickly shifted the visual presentation to be a bullseye, where the different layers represented different stages. After agreeing on the low-fidelity diagram on the whiteboard, we digitized the bullseye, added color and clear type to increase the readability of the diagram.
Although we were proud of our innovative creation of the stakeholder map, we didn’t realize what we did there until a failed attempt of executing a research method later on. The second story is a failed-fast story -
After conducting over 8 hours of interviews with patients and stakeholders, we were trying to organize all the notes we had using a method that was introduced in a user-centered research method course: creating interpretation notes. Facing the large amount of qualitative data to be processed, the whole team was tired. Pressed by the approaching deadline, we simply followed what we learned in class and quickly processed the notes as a group, so that we could jump into the affinitizing stage. However, we realized that the interpretation notes we created cannot be directly used for affinity — we have been writing down what we thought as the most important insights as our interpretation, resulting in a significant information loss. One important aspect of our project is to truly understand the emotions patients went through when they received medical procedures or health care. These emotions were conveyed sporadically throughout our interviews, and we almost abandoned them.
Realizing our mistake at 9pm on a Friday, the team started to panic, fearing that we might have wasted our time and effort, and done this whole thing wrong! However, we quickly bounced back and discussed what the true goal for interpretation notes in our use case is: to interpret our interviewees’ words and understand their situations, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. We agreed that even though we might have done some work that was unnecessary, we still benefited as a group and achieved a deeper common understanding. We realized that we were on autopilot and following the steps prescribed in our research method class, without thinking about what the goals is and how the method can best serve our project. Compared to the time we created our stakeholder map innovatively, we thoroughly understood how and why we should make a stakeholder map, and we took control of the tool instead of being controlled by a rigid set of rules.
Reflecting on these two stories, we want to share this piece of learning from our explorative research phase:
Design should a process of ruminating on the goals instead of the methods. For young designers, design is a journey of fighting for control, because there are way too many rules and conventions to follow, and we need to make sure that no matter what we do, we are achieving our own goals.
Team Panacea is now in control of our methods and tools. By applying this lesson to our future work, we are going to effectively execute research and design processes and steadily march towards our end goal.
