We Are All Coal Miners: Anthropology about Miners, Packers, Bankers

Today, we are all coal miners.

You turn on the stove. It lights up. You turn on the heat. The house gets warm. You turn on the lights. You can see where you misplaced your wallet. You go down in the mines, or you ride out to the offshore rig in the rig-tender, and you risk your life. Turn on the stove, turn on the heat, turn on the lights; you are involved.

If you aren't clear on the long term global climatological impact of the irresponsible overuse of fossil fuels (and you should be, by now), at least it should be clear that the hydrocarbon industry takes an immediate toll on human lives. But is it the industry? Is it irresponsible mine or oil rig managers? Wasteful consumers? Lame regulation? Crappy technology? Is it "culture"?

Sure it is; all of these things. But even old-school anthropologists should know that studying what's happened in the past and what is happening now are windows to see possible scenarios of what might be. Too few in my discipline take this view, but this is changing.

I've read a damn big pile of monographs and articles by anthropologists, good ones, insightful ones, that end with something like, "until structural contradictions are resolved," or "as long as powerful forces disregard the long-term consequences of (fill in the blank)", without exploring just how this is to be done. I won't point fingers; I'm guilty, too. Its not just a political question. Its an empirical one. What the hell can all this study, all this theory, do for anybody if it can't suggest where, exactly, the levers might be to re-direct our attention from unseen hands and hidden mechanics of power, and move them to influence real people whose views and actions must become, shall we say, more enlightened?

So this is a call for more ethnographic work focused on specific industries, studies set in clearly demarcated temporal and political contexts, studies that can point to where things are broken, and how human suffering may be reduced. There is an anthropological literature on mining, and Godoy summarized it twenty years ago. Historians like Colin Davis at the University of Alabama at Birmingham do this with mining history. Anthropologists like Donald D. Stull and Michael Broadway (and team) at Kansas University (and elsewhere) do this with poultry and beef-factory workers. And Gillian Tett, whose Ph.D. in Anthropology afforded her the methodological and theoretical tools to study of bankers, has done it for the recent fiscal collapse.

If I hear another potential client (or student) ask, "But what are some products that anthropologists have helped to design?" I think I'll answer by referencing not only anthropologists but careful scholars from any discipline, and journalists and pundits too, who provide detailed and clear descriptions of the reasons for corporate failure and government inaction. Reasons that can be unpacked, explored, discussed, and acted upon. We need more of this. And we need it now.

To say that in China, workplace safety generally and mine safety in particular is a problem, is putting it mildly. Thousands of miners are killed there every year in the service of the economic growth the country needs to keep factories running and to lower the already high levels of disorder and conflict between everyday folk and the government. And government there is responding with inspections and new regulations. (The nature of the response to disorder in China may look different, but too often when China takes dramatic action like removing a party-poss from a horribly troubled province, as they've done recently, it is lost in the maelstrom of red-carpet movie journalism and the momentary politics of the day). Will China's actions be enough? Probably not. Beijing doesn't have all the regulatory reach, nor the technical resources—yet. But it is a step in the right direction.

Will the US revamp the regulatory framework that keeps miners and rig workers safe? Will they do enough? Probably not. And no one will until mine and rig safety, indeed, workplace safety generally, are part of a broader empirical exploration that goes beyond bromides from left and right about "the market." Generalizations don't hold water when workers are killed and injured and when families and whole communities are devastated by an unwillingness to confront the specifics behind the broader structural drivers that push managers and operators to consider short-term gain ahead of global responsibilities. Not that doing that is easy. It ain't. But the conversation better ramp up pretty damn soon.

We're all miners, today.

Photo credit: from Michael Coyne's blog at Black Star.

Flowers for Google-China

As usual, things are more complicated than our USA news reporters would have us believe. True enough, Google has not done enough to make itself relevant in China. But for many Chinese people, particularly graduate students and people in Tech, Google has offered things that others either don't do or don't do well. Like their translation service, for example.

Yesterday, flowers were laid on the Google sign at Google's Beijing offices. Here in Hai Dian, a neighborhood through which all of us part-time Beijingren have visited many times on trips to Universities or to shop for electronics in the big IT shopping centers, Google is being memorialized. Gao Ming, a very well known Mainland video blogger, documented some of the reactions on his youku video-page.

Flowers. A cup. Chocolates. Looks just like traditional offerings to departed or departing ancestors.

The video is of course in Mandarin, but click here and you can see how people reacted. You'll hear references to Baidu "Oh, I use Baidu and I use Google. . ." and of particular interest is the range of written comments made to Gao Ming's post. There are fifteen pages of them and growing.

The comments range from reminders that Hong Kong is still China (or, wrote one commentator, "has Hong Kong not returned [to China]?" to a suggestion that China is headed back to the Qing dynasty, that China is once again falling behind, that Google will be missed, and several that essentially say "don't let the screen door hit you in the butt on your way out."

One of my favorites noted that it is impossible to get a sandwich without going into a KFC or into a McDonalds, and that with so much "red meat" to be had for foreign companies in the Chinese market, we should not be surprised to find battles over the rules that govern commerce on Chinese turf. In all, a healthy and lively discourse, arguably more civil than the stuff that has appeared on US blogs about our own recent struggles over health-care policy turf.

So Google's leaving by not leaving does not prevent the Great Firewall from censoring search results. It does send a signal that Google is not willing to self-censor. But it should also be a reminder that Chinese people are actively engaged in discussions about the nature of foreign company presence in China, that Google is appreciated by many, and that doing business in China means confronting difficult questions about local and national policy in an environment of growing local pride.

And before we cast stones at the PRC, its wise to remember that we have our own, very serious problems with Internet access, Internet security, and Internet privacy. Good luck, Google! No more delicious hot-pot around the corner from the HaiDian headquarters for the search-engine engineers. But Hong Kong food isn't so bad, either.

Google in China: A Bad Fit, Hubris, or What?

Lower-income Chinese people—perhaps one should say "lower-income students and their families"—care deeply about access to the Internet. (The photo is our research assistant, Ms. Hu, at the computer in a small Internet cafe in small-town Henan Province in February). But it seems Google is not a core part of the desire to be connected, to learn, and participate in the Internet. Google has not met its potential in China, and now, after an encounter with some security "problems" (to put it mildly) they are making noises about packing up and moving out.

The recent flap about Google's presence in China is, indeed, more than a flap. Google claims that their servers were violated, along with some others. The idea that some official entity got to mucking about not only with Google but with some US corporate property in cyberspace seems not to be part of the Chinese discussion, but news about Google's unhappiness with Chinese censorship certainly is.. To be sure, the security issue is an important one, and censorship is, too. But another issue is the difference bewteen Internet use in China and in the US (and elsewhere).

Google is not, presently, a good fit for China. By now, most folks who are interested in Internet in China are aware of the power of MSN and QQ. Not everyone sees this as a basic difference in communication practice. It might be easy to pin the difference on "cultural difference," but this begs the question of where that difference comes from. Tricia Wang lays out the issues in a lengthy and important post on her blog. Her comments neatly summarize the experience of our research teams (and my personal experience living from time to time in Beijing and here and there) over the past ten or so years. Tyler Rooker at his 中关村 blog has some pithy remaks about Google's hubris that are worth a read, too). Chinese sites like Baidu (for search) and TuDou (for video) are simply more relevant in China.

The differences among Google and other web tools in China extends to mobile phone use, too. It is is related to the pragmatic constraints of access, charges for phone and Internet use, and the services Google offers. Here are some of the issues (covered well by Tricia; I add a bit to her list, here):

• Google doesn't provide access to the rich media content that other sites do.
• The name "Google" is not well understood people aren't sure how to spell it.
• Google has not tapped into the sense of national pride as other domestic IT products have done. Consider the line of peripherals and monitors made by the "aigo" company. Aigo sounds just like "aiguo," which means love of country or patriotism (爱国).
  
• Google is not a player in instant messaging. QQ, the biggest player in instant messaging in China (and, probably, in the world) is much more than an instant messaging system. Its a game platform, it is always integrated in Chinese mobile phones, and it has brand exensions into cute, cuddly products in QQ stores. It has lent its name to a small automobile, the QQ car, which is, by the way, very 可爱的, very "cute" (sounds like QQ). Nothing wrong with a little alliterative fun in IT.
• Google is not really a player in the mobile space in China, where asynchronous communication is cheaper and preferred. Mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous regardless of income. Few people talk much on their mobile phones. People get their business done quickly on the phone, unless they are rich. Ordinary people text plenty, but minutes are expensive. Text and QQ are not. Where is Google?
  
• The competition is working in another space in which Google is inactive: buying and selling little low-cost goodies related to games, identity, and just plain fun. QQ has developed Q coin, a virtual currency that is so successful that the Chinese government is stepping in to regulate folks who trade in it. (QQ says Qcoin is a commodity, not a currenc, btw).
  
• Google makes sense for richer, post-graduate people; there is enormous interest in the Internet as an educational resource but for lower-income people but Google is off the map. A decent desktop is certainly not off the map, even for folks of humble means (like the household in the photograph). IT matters to families who care about their children's future; Google is not seen as a partner in that regard. Why not?

Google has plenty of creative dreamers, but it seems they don't look into the deeper nexus of constraints and incentives that shape and direct practices in different national contexts. I'm sure there are plenty of people at Google who "get it," but it has been my experience that too few in the IT community have a clear understanding of the broadly cultural (and structural) differences in IT practices. A few years ago I met a high-level executive of a very large IT firm who was completely unaware of QQ, of how MSN and QQ are the preferred way of communicating on the Internet in China. How many in Silicon Valley are similarly uninformed?

Tricia Wang is quite correct. It would be a pity if Google were to give up on China, and it would help neither China nor Google nor the future of the conversation about Internet freedom and privacy if they were to give up the ship in the Middle Kingdom.

Finding the "Right People" for Exploratory Research

Recently, a number of design researchers have posted to the anthrodesign yahoo group with questions and comments about using recruiters. While we use recruiters when time is short or when the research topics are very well understood, exploratory ethnography usually does not use an outside recruiting agency.

Likewise, a tight screener is usually not the right tool to kick off exploratory field research. Here's why: finding the right people to talk to—that is, setting up the sampling parameters—is a complex task best accomplished while in the field, and it should be tweaked on the fly and not set in stone before the research.

This causes clients some consternation, so it might be helpful to review why and how ethnographers do their particular brand of field-based sampling. Ethnographic sampling is critical for exploratory research. It is especially important where cultural differences require significant bridging, as between a global consumer product company and Chinese consumers, like these folks outside my favorite Beijing hutong courtyard hotel, for example.

Finding people to talk to and be with is always part of the research process and thinking and working hard at discovering who to talk to is critical. But to be clear, using an outside recruiter takes important learnings out of the field research process and risks not going to the right places and not finding the right people. Just finding people is only one side of the research coin. There is another side.

The other side is finding the right contexts in which to interview and observe. Do recruiters identify contexts for us? Without knowing the range of contexts in which people do (or don't do) the things we are interested in, ethnographic research is epistemologically vapid and frankly uninterpretable. Meaning comes from context, not from words, after all. We have to sample contexts and people.

Sampling in exploratory work means being clear about the unit of analysis (Is it the person? The group? What kind of group?). And it means being clear about the Big N, the universe of units that comprise the domain from which we select a sample, the small n. In exploratory work (Mike Agar calls exploratory work the learning modality as opposed to the testing modality), we often don't know enough to decide just what the heck the unit of analysis should be; nor can we be sure about the boundaries of the sampled universe, the Big N. Both have to be understood in testing research; exploratory research is about bounding the universe and determining the appropriate unit of analysis, which by definition you don't quite know until you go into the field. Hence, my discomfort with recruiters within the exploratory mode.

Dominique Desjeux at U. Paris IV has a lot to say about this. He says that we get into discussions like this one precisely because our footing on what he calls the échelle d'observation, the scale of observation, determines what we can know and how we can know it. He says it in French—zut alors— but its pretty clear: ethnographers are standing on the small group échelle, market researchers are often properly interested in the individual échelle, as are most psychologists.

We all know that even the tightest pre-field screener can trip us up. A client may know with certainty that the right person buys only organic vegetables at Trader Moe's and listens only to Prairie Barn Companion on non-commercial radio. We screen for that, and make a home visit only to find Lady GaGa blaring from an MP3 player and a big bag of crispy-fried-fake-cheese-product-snax on the kitchen counter. Are we in the wrong house? Is this the wrong person? We don't know, yet. You get the idea. For exploratory work, your sample has to flex with the discovered contexts on the ground if you don't know the Big N and if you aren't yet clear on the unit of analysis. When you ARE clear, tighten up your screeners and get on the phone with your trusted recruter.

Don't take my word for it. Read Michael Maltz, the former editor of a quantitative journal of criminology, whose article on the declining significance of significance makes a strong case for working in both the inductive-learning mode and in the deductive-means-based-testing mode. He doesn't reject parametric sampling. He wants to expand the research tool kit. Its a great read, and worth the download:

It is my contention that we have been laboring, we business and design ethnographers, under a biz-research paradigm grown of the American MBA and an individual-psychometric toolkit. The biz paradigm too often seeks "efficiency" at the expense of well grounded exploratory work that might challenge received notions of the right person. This paradigm rarely worries about sampling contexts. The biz-psych paradigm has its place but it doesn't offer useful tools for exploratory field-based work.

So, we have to understand where we are coming from. Testing mode? Exploratory mode? On which échelle do we stand? I hope we fieldworkers are always challenging just who the right people (and contexts) are, thus challenging the testing-mode sampling parameters whose lucky failure so often leads to exploratory fieldwork. The wrong people, the outliers, the early adopters, the queers, the club kids, the differently-abled, the workers in the back of the fast-food shop and the folks who eat fake-cheese-product-snax often teach us a lot more than the putative right people, anyway. At least for me, but I'm usually stuck in the messy, hard-to-explain ethnographic exploratory modality. (Not that I don't dust off SPSS from time to time, its just not usually my échelle!)

The nature of ethnographic sampling challenges ethnographers like me to be clear about what we are doing, and thus to do a better job explaining what échelle we are trained to work from!

Zut alors!

Google in China: Ethnographic Perspectives

Lower-income Chinese people—perhaps one should say "lower-income students and their families"—care deeply about access to the Internet. (The photo is from a lower-income home of a student and her parents in a small town in the Southeast of China). But it seems Google is not a core part of the desire to be connected, to learn, and participate in the Internet. Google has not met its potential in China, and now, after an encounter with some security "problems" (to put it mildly) they are making noises about packing up and moving out.

The recent flap about Google's presence in China is, indeed, more than a flap. Google claims that their servers were violated, along with some others. The idea that some official entity got to mucking about not only with Google but with some US corporate property in cyberspace seems not to be part of the Chinese discussion, but news about Google's unhappiness with Chinese censorship certainly is. To be sure, the security issue is an important one, and censorship is, too. But another issue is the difference bewteen Internet use in China and in the US (and elsewhere).

Google is not, presently, a good fit for China. By now, most folks who are interested in Internet in China are aware of the power of MSN and QQ. Not everyone sees this as a basic difference in communication practice. It might be easy to pin the difference on "cultural difference," but this begs the question of where that difference comes from. Tricia Wang lays out the issues in a lengthy and important post on her blog. Her comments neatly summarize the experience of our research teams (and my personal experience living from time to time in Beijing and here and there) over the past ten or so years. Tyler Rooker at his 中关村 blog has some pithy remaks about Google's hubris that are worth a read, too). Chinese sites like Baidu (for search) and TuDou (for video) are simply more relevant in China.

The differences among Google and other web tools in China extends to mobile phone use, too. It is is related to the pragmatic constraints of access, charges for phone and Internet use, and the services Google offers. Here are some of the issues (covered well by Tricia; I add a bit to her list, here):

• Google doesn't provide access to the rich media content that other sites do.
• The name "Google" is not well understood people aren't sure how to spell it.
• Google has not tapped into the sense of national pride as other domestic IT products have done. Consider the line of peripherals and monitors made by the "aigo" company. Aigo sounds just like "aiguo," which means love of country or patriotism (爱国).
  
• Google is not a player in instant messaging. QQ, the biggest player in instant messaging in China (and, probably, in the world) is much more than an instant messaging system. Its a game platform, it is always integrated in Chinese mobile phones, and it has brand exensions into cute, cuddly products in QQ stores. It has lent its name to a small automobile, the QQ car, which is, by the way, very 可爱的, very "cute" (sounds like QQ). Nothing wrong with a little alliterative fun in IT.
• Google is not really a player in the mobile space in China, where asynchronous communication is cheaper and preferred. Mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous regardless of income. Few people talk much on their mobile phones. People get their business done quickly on the phone, unless they are rich. Ordinary people text plenty, but minutes are expensive. Text and QQ are not. Where is Google?
  
• The competition is working in another space in which Google is inactive: buying and selling little low-cost goodies related to games, identity, and just plain fun. QQ has developed Qcoin, a virtual currency that is so successful that the Chinese government is stepping in to regulate folks who trade in it. (QQ says Qcoin is a commodity, not a currency, btw).
  
• Google makes sense for richer, post-graduate people; there is enormous interest in the Internet as an educational resource but for lower-income people but Google is off the map. A decent desktop is certainly not off the map, even for folks of humble means (like the household in the photograph). IT matters to families who care about their children's future; Google is not seen as a partner in that regard. Why not?

Google has plenty of creative dreamers, but it seems they don't look into the deeper nexus of constraints and incentives that shape and direct practices in different national contexts. I'm sure there are plenty of people at Google who "get it," but it has been my experience that too few in the IT community have a clear understanding of the broadly cultural (and structural) differences in IT practices. A few years ago I met a high-level executive of a very large IT firm who was completely unaware of QQ, of how MSN and QQ are the preferred way of communicating on the Internet in China. How many in Silicon Valley are similarly uninformed?

Tricia Wang is quite correct. It would be a pity if Google were to give up on China, and it would help neither China nor Google nor the future of the conversation about Internet freedom and privacy if they were to give up the ship in the Middle Kingdom.

Is Immersion Ethnography?

Is immersion ethnography? The answer: "sort of." Does it matter? That depends, too.

Our pal and colleague, Hy Mirampolsky, has written quite a good book that introduces ethnography to marketers. He calls his book Ethnography for Marketers: A Guide to Consumer Immersion (Sage Publications, 2006). For Hy, immersion means ethnography. P&G, which uses ethnographic methods (as do most major globla players in the FMCG sector), gets their researchers to interact directly with their consumers, and it has helped. Nigel Hollis, at the mega-research shop, Milward Brown, offered this candid and thoughtful assessment from a market researcher's perspective:

An article in Strategy Magazine on the turnaround led by P&G CEO A.G. Lafley reports that as part of the “internal revolution” at P&G, research methodologies were re-examined along with operational structure and processes. Much of P&G’s traditional research, in which the marketer plays the role of objective witness, has been replaced with programs which bring marketers directly in touch with consumers and their everyday lives. Jim Stengel, global marketing officer at P&G, calls these programs “consumer immersion experiences.” In the name of consumer immersion, P&G marketers are spending time working in shops in Mexico and conducting in-home observations of U.S. pet owners.

He suggests that some think this approach threatens "traditional" research approaches, and he debunks that idea quite well. Furthermore, some of the folks at P&G, he says, don't like talking about consumers. They would rather talk about (and talk with) people. You count things consumers do, you conduct surveys about them, you observe them. But you don't interact with consumers. You interact with people. Immersion is people focused. That's great.

This discussion seems puzzling for cultural anthropologists, for whom people-centered research, participant observation, and being present in people's lives across a variety of contexts has always been at the core of their research methods, for more than 100 years already. An anthropologist would wonder what the fuss was all about. Then they'd wonder why anthropologists haven't gotten their methodological messages across to the business world as well as they might have.

Some folks—perhaps most—in the marketing world conduct immersion by starting with an agency. The agency does the recruiting. The agency finds the people to hang out with. They make the appointment and pay the respondent. The client shows up,hangs out for a day, interacts, and learns. But starting and stopping there limits the learning that could be had. It may limit the marketer's ability to generalize or to understand the wider context in which people live. And it is not the kind of thing that ethnographers (usually) do.

The limitations start with recruiting. No anthropologist would ever separate the recruiting process from the field research process, unless they are really under the gun for a rapid-assessment kind of field trip.

Anthropologists want the first-hand experience (and often, frustration) that comes from meeting new respondents in person, on the phone, or on the Internet. They visit the respondent's neighborhood, workplace, or school first. They make sure that people see them, ask them what they are doing, hanging around. They look for opportunities explain their research interest, and to find out what people think about it. Often, design ethnographers and applied anthropologists engage their respondents quite directly in the research process, as collaborators (see Stull and Schensule, 1987, Collaborative Research and Social Change, or any of the many articles on collaborative design).

The other limitation to watch out for is timing. Is the immersion on a weekday? During a long weekend? Does the pre-recruited sample allow the serendipitous participation in special times, when grandmother comes to visit, during a birthday or an anniversary? After all, special times bring things to the surface that are otherwise hidden. Screenwriters know this; just watch The Wedding Planner or Father of the Bride. So-called normal daily life is a great start but there should be a space for some interviewing during special, ritual times and some space for unexpected discoveries and unexpected meetings, comings, and goings, too.

Ethnographers hang out and interact in real contexts, but they seek natural contexts for ethnographic interviews, as well, just as Jo Yung is doing at a Chinese Starbucks, above.

The immersion that Hy talks about, and the immersion that design ethnographers and anthropologists conduct, do indeed follow from the same idea that drove P&G to (re)discover immersion as a way to understand consumers: get as close as you can to someone else's reality, stay experience-near, and don't rely only on data like surveys that are, as they say, experience-distant.

Being systematic about immersion in this way is what anthropologists do, and there is a hefty body of literature to guide researchers to a better understanding of the lives of people that we ordinarily don't get close to. Use immersion as a start. But follow up, take some time, and explore the possibilities of doing some of your own recruiting. The usual concerns of any researcher—questions about sampling people and contexts, the trustworthiness of the findings, and all the rest, matter a great deal. Just dropping in on a pre-selected respondent for a day is a great start but the research will matter more if the fieldworkers have a bit more time, can assess on their own their sampling needs as those emerge from the field encounter, and if the fieldworker includes some focused interviewing in the mix.

McCafé: a chink in the QSR armor?

Oh yes, McD is pulling out all the stops for McCafé. (Pre-launch photo on right from Detroit, I think).

And QSR observers (more accurately, one consultant/columnist at QSR magazine) are seeing an opportunity in this for other players, citing "new product launches" that steer away from the "core" business as opportunities for competition to make a big play and boost their own comps.

That's true. But it doesn't explain why the opportunity is there. Understanding why the opportunity is there suggests that not all deviations from the "core" will fail nor will all deviations produce an opportunity for competition to boost their own same-store year-over-year (comp) sales.

McCafe, by the way, has been around for years. We just have not seen it in the USA. According to my friends in Argentina (from whence all the South American and, I think, a few Caribbean stores are managed and quite independently of the mother ship, in many ways and contrary to popular opinion) the concept of a McCafé as an in-store add-on originated in Latin America. Free-standing McCafé's have been in China for years (and probably elsewhere but I don't care about and rarely travel to continental Europe--I'm a Swede and a Chinese dude, these days, and don't know nuthin about birthin' no McCafe's on the continent).

In South America, McCafe is a small, clean, pastry-filled delight, and at flagship stores, its more nifty than the most upscale pastry place you can imagine. But with better lighting, more upscale design, and more high-rollers with their McBooks (no, MacBooks) hanging about and sipping on decent quality coffee.

Franchisees in the USA don't know how to do this, don't have room, and aren't committed to it, despite how the McD Main Shop might like to beat them over the head with the Big Red Book of Franchisee Good Behavior and Legal Leverage.

Now, I'm only talking about McCafé in Southern California, Dallas, and San Francisco (where there are damn few Mickie Dees to begin with). So maybe I'm wrong. But I'm right about one thing: an innovation is not always a chink in the armour. But in this case, McCafé may be a big bloody hole. If I were managing a bunch of Starbucks, I'd be tickled pink. McDonalds is training a generation of junior high kids to like coffee, and they'll be ready for Starbucks when they get a real summer job next year. But, oops, meanwhile McD is getting some dough from those teens that other's aren't getting. So who is winning, now? I wonder.

Maybe somebody should hire an anthropologist to dive into this. (Oh, yes, you know what the trademarks are in this post, so give me a break.) And to hammer the initial point home: the chinks in the QSR armor of the competition only exist when local store execution doesn't deliver the promise, or when the promise doesn't matter to the people who go there. Will new/returning customers who formerly (or putatively) abjure Mickee Dees come back to find an unfamiliar coffee and, perhaps, spills on the floor and staff who are not 100% sold on the new product when they were already feeling odd about going back in there in the first place?

One last thing: anybody see a similarity between McD and MacOS? I sure do. More on that later. Maybe.

The Value of Cribbage: Low Vision and Food Packaging

A couple years ago, The Boeing Company hired us to explore how disabled people experienced airline travel in China, India, Chile, and the USA. (follow the link for video).

The results helped Boeing, and may help airlines (we are talking with them!) but we learned so much about disability that we kept thinking, "How can we leverage that learning for better products for people with disabilities, beyond the air-travel space?" But we were too busy with day-to-day business from our regular clients to work on that question.

Just now, business is slow enough to allow our team to re-visit the issue. Thanks to a cribbage game, I learned just how problematic packaging can be.

I was spending more time with my low-vision friend, Fred, an elderly neighbor with whom I play cribbage when I’m not flitting around doing fieldwork. (I should say, "a quick-witted neighbor who regularly cleans my clock at cribbage, and who I have to ply with a couple glasses of wine just to stay even, let alone beat at this old card game!)

Fred was complaining about food packaging. He couldn’t read the cooking instructions with his expensive CCTV magnifier. Sometimes he couldn’t even find them. That caught my attention because we had been talking, at work, about all the stuff we learned on the Boeing project, and how someone—maybe the someone is our company—should apply some of that to consumer products.

So, at a lunch a few weeks later, my friend Carmen (Carmen the fabulous, by the way) of the Braille Institute sat down with me at lunch (we had met during the Boeing work). I told her about my friend, and asked what she thought about it. Carmen told me the same frustrating story: I think she ended up not cooking at all one night because she couldn't find the cooking instructions on the package!





The package shown here (with a hat-tip to Trader Joe's for their yummy French Toast) has instructions on the spine, and you can't read things on the spine with most CCTV readers--the kind of readers that many low-vision folks have in their homes.

Now, here is a case for universal design if there ever was one. Making packaging better for low-vision consumers makes it better for everyone. New technology like the Kurzweil-NFB reader can help, but to use that tool, you have to know where the text is. And the text likely has to be pretty good contrast (and not printed against a photo or some package-design thing) to work.

But how to get packaged-good manufacturers on board? More regulation would make them bristle (probably) but maybe some collaboration would help them understand that 18,000,000 new 65-year-olds are created every year (or will soon be, according to most demographic experts). Plenty of them—myself, Fred, and Carmen included—will have at least some problems with vision.

Designing answers will take work, collaboration, and shared learning. Lets find out who is up to the task. I'm going to keep playing cribbage with Fred (and, probably, I'll loose more often than I'll win) and I'll bet he will have more stories about how some products just don't work for him, despite the tech he has around the house to make his consumer products usable.