I’ve learned from working with the experts in human inquiry methods at the Institute of Design a lot about learning about patterns of daily human life. As we know, there’s very little asking of questions necessary in most interviews on the researcher’s part.
Lately I’ve been looking into more participatory approaches into design, which somehow I have an appreciation and affinity for– mostly because of the philosophy of putting design into the hands of the ultimate end user. I realize though, that it’s much harder to accomplish in reality. I’m still trying to find out why that is, but I suspect that it has a lot to do with putting words into people’s mouths. A collage tool in which you take a subset of the images in the world and ask people to organize in a particular way is severely limiting– an image itself is a specific combination of a particular lens on a particular subject. There are infinite combinations (and compositions) of photos in the world… and somehow allowing the user to organically create their own is probably better, but time consuming and requires more effort from the participant.
I came across this day in brands today and thought it’s probably a good way of understanding what people already use, love, and spend money on.
Out of curiosity, has anyone used this technique to help inform the design of new offerings?
I’d specifically love a way for people to note down the brands and services they use on the web… for learning, self help, personal development, or consumer electronic devices.
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