Week 06: Designing Generative Research Tools
After we planned our generative research goals and methods, we started to design the tools. The first thing we focused on was what is the goal of this research. Thus, We tried to make the questions concrete that we want to explore.
Goals
Workers
- What specific problems exist between workers and management?
- What is workers’ mental model of management? And of unions?
- How do workers think about consumers?
- What do workers wish consumers knew about them?
- What do workers wish consumers knew about their job?
- What are the workers’ needs (& challenges?)?
- What is the one way workers think they could use help? And one way they would help people?
- What do they think community looks like?
- How sensitive is the management of worker challenges?
Consumers
- What do consumers feel their responsibility is towards businesses/role?
- What are the challenges that workers face?
- What is the consumers mental model of the service structure? And of unions?
- In an ideal world, what would the relationship between the workers and the consumer?
- In an ideal world, what could be the relationship between consumers and a company?
Manager
- How sensitive is the management of worker challenges?
Research Activity Planning
After setting the questions, we did a quick brainstorming session for finding the best tools or methods to find the answer to the questions using generative research methods. We came up with many ideas.
Persona Building Activity
Ask workers to think about their, customers’ and managers’ motivations and challenges. This activity might include personality or interests, use a character of management to create a story to learn about their mental models.
Puppets/Role Play
Encourage them to act out worker and management conversations; give them a scenario. Some of them act as consumers and some act as workers; they empathize with themselves.
LEAP Collage
Let workers think about how to bring improvement into their working conditions; what is possible, possible but difficult, possible in the far future
Relation Mapping
Let them mapping the people that they are related to and write all the roles of people that they know. This might let them realize that service workers or managers are not the faraway people but one of their close friends or families.
Exploring Self Perception Structured Collage
How consumers view themselves in relation to businesses? Different roles and their levels in a group/hierarchy. Maybe also get workers to explore self-perception? How do they see their role?
Collage Conceptual Modelling
How do workers express concern? In the future ideal world, what would that look like?
Walk through a Day
Let them explain about their best day/difficult day/what does a good customer look like.
Community Reflection
Let them think about their own community and what they can do for the communities and what the communities can do for them.
Research Plan Development
After getting some feedback from the professors and other cohorts, we decided to focus on Persona Building Activity and Community Reflection, since other activities might not be appropriate for some people — for example, introvert people could feel uncomfortable to participate in puppets/role play methods.
ACTIVITY 1A: Building Personas
Our first activity is called Building Personas. We have three types of roles: an employee, consumers, and management. Think of these as broad groups of people, not any one specific person. What are these people’s motivations and challenges? Please use the images provided, and you can also write in your own words. You have 15 minutes.
[Ask them to talk through the images and words]
Activity 1b: Making Persona Connections
Next, use the green marker to connect the shared interests of two or all three groups. Use the red marker to connect distinct conflicts of two or all groups. Here’s an example: Managers motivation to make money conflicts with an employers challenge of work-life balance. You have 8 minutes for this activity.
[Ask them to talk through the connections.]
Activity 2: Community Reflection
INTRO: This next activity is called Community Reflection. First, when you think of community, what do you think of? Write down what you consider to be your community. Next, write down what do you offer to your community What does the community do for you?
Pilot Test on Chen
To understand whether our research method works well or not, we asked for a pilot test to Chen, a 2nd-year MDes student. She gave us a lot of great insights and feedback.
Also, she said that instead of perspective-taking, her impressions and stereotypes of these people were easier for her to create. Trying to imagine herself in their place was tough since she had less knowledge of their lives. This supported our objective of trying to surface the mental-models of these people of the others in the triad. For Activity 2, she suggested that dividing what they have done and what they wish to do might be more helpful to find out the information that we want.
After revising the tools, we went out to find service-workers to talk to.
CMU Food Custodial workers
We could find two custodial workers and they actively participated in our research. It was quite surprising that they are understanding the other groups’ perspective well — customers and management. Generally, we could find our research works quite well. While talking with them, we could also learn that they still have communication problems with their management, which was one of the important findings from our previous interview research. Also, through the research, we could realize that they think management only takes care of their customers, not the employees.
