Putting my sea legs to the test
I’ve been onboard an offshore support vessel twice so far in my PhD work and now I am eager to test out my sea legs once more. The two previous visits were shorter trips of two and three days and gave me an initial understanding of the bridge environment, its users and their tasks. Now I am planning my third and most important field study. But why am I so eager to go out to sea again?
“I don’t want to be an armchair designer”
In anthropology you have the expression armchair anthropologist, which is a scholar that sits in his office, reads other peoples work and comes up with theories and ideas without going out in the field himself. In the same way I think there may be armchair designers, who sit in their offices and design without actually speaking to the users or visiting the context their designs will be situated in.
Ed Hutchins is an anthropologists/psychiatrist that has inspired many designers to go “into the wild”. Hutchins spent a considerable time onboard a navy ship.¹ Through his time at sea he learned how cognition is distributed between individuals in a team and the tools they use, and how different contexts demand different designs of the tools. Hutchins’ work shows how important it is to do field studies in order to understand the users’ situation.
The act of collecting
I guess many of us remember doing field trips at school. We went out in the forrest during science class and collected samples of plants and flowers which later became part of our herbarium. Through this collection of specimen we learned about which plants are related, how to recognise a plant when we’re out in nature, how to tell different plants apart etc.
According to Wikipedia fieldwork is the collection of information outside of a laboratory or workplace setting. Fieldwork is carried out differently in different professions, but common for all is a focus on data gathering.
Field studies in design
Once we start collecting, the more you have, the more it gets valuable and that will stop us from responding to the present and taking on new ideas what the artists are doing now.
David Elliott, art curator and writer²
Doing field studies in design is not new. Already in the 1940s Henry Dreyfuss and his colleagues went out in the field and collected data to inform and inspire their designs. In my favourite Designing for People Dreyfuss gives an example of a design project with the aim of improving “the habitability” of a Navy ship. The first step in this project, he says, was “to send two members of our staff on a voyage on one of the “tin cans.”³ In the 1970s and 80s the participatory design movement emerged in Scandinavia with the aim of involving workers in work place designs.⁴ Participatory design emphasizes the importance of designers and users to share practice and socialize. Around the same time Xerox and other research labs in the US carried out user studies inspired by ethnography.⁵ In recent years field studies and design ethnography have become more common also in commercial design projects.⁶
I have been thinking a lot about what kind for role field studies should play in my PhD design project. I think it is valuable to keep the childhood image of the field trip in mind when preparing a field study and think of it as going out collecting something and later trying to make sense of your collection. But what is it I should be collecting in my upcoming field study?
Gathering insight and inspiration
The overall aim for my PhD work and this field study is to try to understand how we can design the information environment on the bridge in ways that make the users’ sensemaking easier. To ease my planning I have divided the aim into three purposes:
- Get an understanding of how the users make sense of their situation.
- Map out what information elements the users need to make sense of the situation.
- Get design inspiration and “fuel the creative process”.
To fulfil these purposes I need to use a mix of methods. Using design ethnography, I will focus on the broad patterns of everyday life on the bridge. The ethnographic approach helps me to look at the people I design for as not only users who want to accomplish a task, but also as social beings and people with personal wishes. Similar to a traditional anthropologist, I will keep my eyes open to details and consider every observation as valuable.
However, in order to be able to develop believable designs I also need to carry out structured mappings of the users’ tasks and information needs. To prepare for this I look to the human factors literature and particularly task analysis methods.
Last it is important to take the advantage of getting design inspiration while out in the field. Gaver et al. who introduced cultural probes as a technique in design, stress the fact that probes should be used as inspiration, not information.⁷ In a similar way, I believe it is important to be “openly subjective” while doing a field study in a design project and look for inspirational data, and not merely seeking an objective truth about the users and situations you design for.
So why do I need to go out to sea again?
The bridge environment is complex and it is difficult to grasp everything in just a couple of days. Being a true participant observer will not be possible for me due to the complexity of the tasks on the bridge and the requirements for competence in order to operate the equipment. But longer times spent with the crew will sure give me a greater understanding of what goes on. A longer stay is advantageous because it takes time to get to know the operations, systems and equipment. A longer stay also increases the likelihood of observing a broader range of scenarios and different situations.
My experience from previous fieldwork is that it also takes time to get to know the people and for them to get to know me. Trust built through social interactions is important both for me as a visitor to dare ask all the questions I have, and for the users to feel confident in being honest in answering my questions and sharing their thoughts.
When I come back from this trip I expect to have a deeper understanding of the situation on the bridge that I can share with my colleagues. This understanding I hope will be prove valuable in our future design work.
This post was originally published on the PhD research blog speiling.net on September 13, 2012.
References
¹ Hutchins E. Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; 1995.
³ Dreyfuss H. Designing for people. New York: Allworth Press; 2003. (First published in 1955)
⁴ Ehn P. Scandinavian design: on participation and skills. In: Schuler D, Namioka A, editors. Participatory design: principles and practices. Lawrence Erlbaum Ltc.; 1993. p. 41–78.
⁵ Plowman T. Ethnography and Critical Design Practice. In: Laurel B, editor. Design Research. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; 2003. p. 30–8.
⁶ Salvador T, Bell G, Anderson K. Design Ethnography. Design Management Journal. 1999;10(4):35–41.
⁷ Gaver B, Dunne T, Pacenti E. Design: Cultural probes. interactions. 1999;6(1):21–9.
Originally published at http://www.speiling.net on September 13, 2012.
