The PacEth Blog

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

2010-02-12T16:00:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-06T16:57:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-25T09:37:00.001-08:00

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?

Is Immersion Ethnography?

2010-01-20T16:49:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-08-27T08:00:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-12T14:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Gansu Micro-Business Meets the Mall: Boiled not Fried

2009-08-02T22:50:00.001-07:00

These Gansu guys (who would probably identify as Huizu [回族], Chinese from the West of China who practice Islam) provided us with dinner in a big city in Southwest China's Sichuan Province. I had my hopes up for those yummy wide noodles that are stir-fried with lamb or beef and big chunky vegetables, and maybe a skewer or two of spicy lamb. I kept asking about this dish and that dish, pointing out likely looking delicacies on the menu on the wall.

"Sorry, don't have that."
"How about this one here?"
"Nope, not that either."

These folks were so friendly and the smells from the kitchen were so yummy that I gave up and asked "Okay bring what you have," and Jo (who actually speaks and understands Mandarin, while I only fake it), pointed out to me that they are only allowed to serve boiled foods.

Plenty delicious, but the wall to the right (and out of view here) had such lovely goodies on display that I was a little bit dismayed. Its the same menu that most Huizu restaurants have, anywhere in China. But the offering here was sort of limited. Howcome?

Local government was re-habbing the neighborhood, and won't let this restaurateur have a license for anything but boiled food. No wok, no grilling. Water pollution, we were told; inadequate sewer hook-ups. Next door is a Sportswear mall, brand new, not quite finished. The top floor will have a food court. You can bet that they will have all kinds of food, not just boiled noodles and boiled Jiaoze (佼字）.

Discrimination against minority people is illegal, in China--unconstitutional in fact. But all the world over, discrimination against micro-entrepreneurs seems the order of the day. Too often, the banks and the big developers win, and the small operator makes do. In this case, selling (delicious) boiled noodles and jiaoze, which were more fun to eat, cheaper, and probably fresher than most of the stuff sold in most of the food courts, anyhow.

What color is my drink?

2009-07-09T15:17:00.000-07:00

I'm not a big fan of energy drinks. They're loaded with caffeine, and caffeine makes me high. Too high to be alert as these drinks are supposed to make me. However, once in a while I do need to down a can or two in the hope that I'll get something done before crashing.

Caffeinated drinks are a rare item in my fridge, and I've been brand-aware of only one: Red Bull. Its liquid is greenish yellow. Or at least this is the color that I know. And I only came to know its color because of a cocktail I sometimes get: Vodka and Red Bull. But lately a friend of mine gave me a box of Jolt, something I'd never heard of before. As usual, I just drank it right out of the can and the thought of what its color might be has never crossed my mind.

Then one day I poured a can of Jolt out on ice and was greatly surprised that it's blue. BLUE. How would I have know? It made me wonder how we, the consumers, come to know all about the products we use everyday. In the same manner, you would never know the color of ketchup because Heinz has decided to pack it in opaque reddish bottles. Wait, if you hadn't experienced ketchup before, how would you know the bottle's color is that of the sauce?

I've learned a new phrase today from a computer science friend: Cognitive blind-spots. I think these are things we might overlook because they fall through the holes of our cognition. There are a lot of packaging forms out there that obscure the product inside. The packages serve as a vessel to deliver the product to our senses (not to us, but to our cognition) OR block the product from some certain sense. Think about the yucky bitter medicine you take, masked by sweet sugary coating.

I'm just pondering about the possibility of not knowing the look of things I put in my mouth. In case of medicine, it's by choice, but in case of Jolt, I'd rather know it upfront than have alien tongue.

Action Steps in Printer Use: Design Flaws for Visually (Un)impaired

2009-06-19T13:48:00.000-07:00

After lunch with Carmen Aplegren, the intrepid publicist at the Braille Institute of America (and owner of Gal Pal Val, the amazing guide-hund), I realized we have a ton of stuff from our research about how design doesn't take into account the visual needs of users like me, or like Carmen, who sees a bit less of the world through her eyes (but more in other ways) than I do. So here's an example of crappy design. (And yes, we love our printer-maker clients and they are working on this. . . ). More examples to come, from other sorts of tech-tools.

Our Mulit-function printer (not the one pictured at right, which I borrowed from the Internet, but one rather like it), works quite well. Really well, in fact, and we use it plugged into our wireless router so all three of us can print with it, wire-free. But for scanning, you have to do some cable-rearranging.

You see, our printer is wrapped in a shiny black plastic case just like the one here. This means that icons or instructions embossed into it are rendered invisible to anyone over the age of 35. Which includes this writer and a lot of other humans who find office machine design thoughtless at best, or anyone with even the most minor visual impairment (which includes anyone peeking over to the dark, backside of a printer pushed against a wall, where it always lives: except in some Epson design center, perhaps—sorry printer-maker, its tough love).

To use the scanner, we have to unplug the USB cable from the router, and plugging in a USB cable attached to the nearby desktop computer, which has the scanning drivers loaded into PhotoShop. Sounds simple, right? Just a couple of steps. If only.

I count at least 25. Here’s the actual activity sequence.

1. Remove the existing cable that goes to the wireless modem. The cable promptly drops behind the file cabinet on which the printer rests, next to the wall (the printer sits on this low file cabinet). (Since it dropped, you can't tell the orientation of the business end of the USB cable).

2. Get on knees, grub around for the long end of the cable, pull it out of the crack between file cabinet and wall, and in the process, dislodge the cable from under the bit of wood flooring, the edge of which had covered the cable as it crossed a threshold.

3. Stick the cable back under the wood flooring so no one trips.

4. Get some scotch tape and tape the plug-in end of the USB cable to the file cabinet so it won’t fall down.

5. Find the desktop’s USB cable. That’s easy. Locate the plug-in end.

6. Try to reach behind the printer and plug in the chord.

7. Try again. The first orientation was wrong.

8. It is not going in. So, lean the printer over so you can try to see the USB plug in.

9. The business of leaning the computer over has unplugged the power chord. Power chord drops to the floor.

10. Get down on the floor again, pick up the power chord, and try to find a place to put it where you can reach it when you stand up again. This fails, as the chord is rather short and you don’t have a convenient outlet by this cabinet.

11. Get the scotch tape again. Tape the chord to the file cabinet.

12. Back to standing position (you’ve been on the floor twice now). Lean the printer over. You can’t see any indication on the black plastic to help you know how the cable is to be inserted. Its as little dark back there behind the printer, after all.

13. Move the papers off the top of the cabinet so you can turn the printer into the light, and

14. Move the desk light over closer to the printer. Get down on the floor again.

15. On your knees on the floor, with eye glasses off, a nearsighted person can make out the orientation of the plug-in.

16. Make a mental note of blood pressure, as you really wanted to scan a document for a client who you’ve told you would and could easily scan and send something promptly, and promptly was over with five minutes ago.

17. The phone rings. Compose yourself. Stand up again, dropping the chord behind the file cabinet one more time in the process.

18. Talk on the phone to another client (we are a micro-biz, so there is no one to else around today to answer the phone). Finish the call and hang up.

19. Back on your knees again to get the cable fished out, stay on your knees.

20. Insert the cable. Stand up.

21. Try to turn on the machine.

22. The machine won’t turn on because it is still unplugged.

23. Stifle the urge to throw the whole thing out the window and buy a manual typewriter and a stack of carbon paper with which to replace all your computers and printers.

24. Back on your knees to fish out the power cable which has fallen, again behind the cabinet (scotch tape wasn’t really designed to hold stuff like your power chord).

25. Plug in the printer and find your document and scan it at last.

Now, wasn't that a pain in the butt?

Innovación, Trabajo Científico, y la Sonrisa: Ejemplo Boliviano

2009-06-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

¿Cómo hacerlos útiles los datos de un estudio etnográfico? ¿Como traducir hallazgos para que sean útiles?

[An English version of this post appeared below, here.]

Biólogos y ingenieros y—de vez en cuando—antropólogos se dedican a especificar la realidad, de documentar, de organizar lo complicado de la realidad en fórmulas, en taxonomías, y lo ponemos "en orden." Así es que intentamos de conocer lo que sea diferente, lo que sea lo mismo; es decir que hacemos categorías, compartimentos, listas. Descomponemos la realidad para lograr una nueva visión de lo que encontramos en la naturaleza, en el día en día, en la experiencia humana.

Todo bien. Pero ¿es adecuado el ojo frío del científico para innovar, para diseñar? Mi reciente experiencia en Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, me hace pensar. . .

Estuve tres días dando un taller, con un grupo súper capaz, súper diverso, súper listo y talentoso, explorando la metodología y epistemología de la antropología en cuanto a estudios para el diseño de servicios y productos. Fuimos al calle, sacábamos fotos, charlábamos y discutíamos. Me dieron permiso de usar mi español californio (y de vez en cuando lleno de Espanglishismos). Trabajábamos muy duros, todos.

Ahora bien. Día tres. Tuve el desafío de unir la experiencia del grupo en un resultado final, de empezar con un proceso de diseño frente a las necesidades que encontrabamos en la calle de Santa Cruz, en el mercado, en el parque, en el comercio. ¿Cómo hacerlo? Soy antropólogo; no soy diseñador. Pero gracias a Diós, tengo un collega en Los Angeles, Hai Nguyen, cuya formación de diseñador industrial me sirve como bastón. Le llamé por Skype y me dió sus consejos: seguir adelante con el proceso de dibujar soluciónes, de dejar a lado (por el momento) las especificaciónes y listas de necesidades interminables que resultaron de la charla y del encuentro con la calle. "Dejen las ideas fluir," me dijo. Buen consejo.

Pero cuando empezaron el último día, yo regresé a mi habitus analítico: empecé de darles al grupo listas de instrucciones muy detalladas. Hasta que me interrumpió un joven semiólogo del altiplano, un tipo simpático de esa ciudad tan colonial y minera que se llama Potosí. El estudiante me dio un "momento de enseñanza" (a teachable moment, como dicen los pedagogas).

Levanto la mano y me dijo: "Creo que haya algo para añadir al proceso."

"Hay que incluir la risa, el elemento lúdico. Si no sea divertido ¿qué tenemos, pues?" me preguntó.

Relámpagos. El soñar con el futuro es un proceso humano, y si olvidemos eso en nuestros esfuerzos "científicos" olvidemos por que y para que trabajamos.

Empezaron unas risillas sofocadas. Je je je. Y empezaron los grupos con su taller, trabajando, charlando, con risas y sonrisas.

Los resultados fueron desenfrenados, innovadores, impresionantes. Y me di cuenta de que el análisis es una cosa y la creación es, en cierto sentido, otra. Entre los dos si no entra una carcajada, olvidamos el elemento mas humano del proceso.

Airplanes and butter

2009-06-08T17:56:00.000-07:00

Newsweek issue June 8, 2009, has an article about how many math and physics geeks have turned Wall Street into their playground, become partly responsible for the financial meltdown we're in now, and how some others math geeks are trying to see through the way financial engineering has worked.

What struck me right in the beginning is this analogy:
"Imagine an aeronautics engineer designing a state-of-the-art jumbo jet. In order for it to fly, the engineer has to rely on the same aerodynamics equation devised by physicists 150 years ago, which is based on Newton's second law of motion: force equals mass times acceleration. Problem is, the engineer can't reconcile his elegant design with the equation. The plane has too much mass and not enough force. But rather than tweak the design to fit the equation, imagine if the engineer does the opposite, and tweaks the equation to fit the design. The plane still looks awesome, and on paper, it flies. The engineer gets paid, the plane gets built, and soon thousands just like it are packed full of people and sent out onto runways. They fly for a while, but eventually, because of that fatal tweak, they all end up crashing."
(Revenge of the Nerd)

The article goes on to imply that it is the quant people that think they can forge chaos into equations to foretell financial happenings. Doing so, they have brought false prophecies to Wall Street and its believers essentially have brought it down.

I couldn't help but draw some similarities to our world of market research. In a similar manner, the quants often use formulaic surveys to form correlations that aren't necessarily there in real life. More often than not, I've encountered questions like "rate this" and "do you agree/disagree with that?". Even though the quants have solid methods to churn the answers people give for this kind of questions into some insights, the problem might lie not in this "churning" but all the way in the beginning: the survey questions. OK, here's another analogy: If you, a butter-making pro, are churning like hell and you don't get butter, the problem is not in your techniques, but it's in what you're churning. Can you churn, say, water into butter?

Standing in the ethnography playground, my co-workers and I have always been advocates for a holistic approach in market research. While I have much respect for quantitative methods, as least for the shear coverage of the population that we qualitative people could never dream of, I think research should start with exploring "what's going on," a part of it is testing what/when/where/who to ask and how to ask them. And we do it through careful observation in context of what's happening in the subject matter. It is qualitative exploration that identifies the cream so quantitative survey can churn it into butter.

We go deep for the quants to go broad. Together, we all will get a good picture of what we're after.

The mathematician in the article lamented about how the credit market has run, "They built these things on false assumptions without testing them, and stuffed them full of trillions of dollars. How could anyone have thought that was a good idea?" The entire article is quite captivating and relevant. Give it a good read!

Learning, Creativity, Ideation, and Laughter

2009-05-08T19:59:00.000-07:00

How to structure an ideation session? How do you make ethnographic data useful in a design setting?

Biologists, engineers, and even those fence-riders, those anthropologists, who sit on the line between the humanities and the sciences, like to parse the world into its component parts. We (and I include myself in the fence-sitting crowd) like to take things apart. It helps us see how things work. We sort out what the parts are, we try to understand what is the same and what is different. We taxonomize and typologize. And when things are set in motion, we try to isolate one moment from the next, we try to inspect, document, or (in Spanish) precisar, to make clarity out of the murky water of lived experience.

Which is all well and good. Except when it gets in the way.

I was on day three of a three-day workshop that aimed to link ethnography and design. I'm an anthropologist: I know how to do ethnography and I have a fair idea of how to teach parts of it. I even enjoy doing it. But I'm not a designer, not a card-carring one. I do badly trying to build things (though I can put together things and sometimes make them work). Creating new things is something I wish I could do more easily; I wish I could improvise on the piano better. Seems that creating, dreaming, and thinking about what might be is different from documenting and analyzing what is going on.

So there we were, day three. I had to pull the mini-ethnography practice work together and we had to have the group ideate, create, design, and dream. I had a template (partly borrowed, partly invented, but mostly borrowed) that seemed to make sense. I called Hai (thanks to Skype) and told him I was worried. How much time should I allocate? How should I structure the ideation? Should I pull forward the specifications drawn from the problems and desires that the fieldwork students had encountered in their mini-fieldwork? We kicked some ideas around, and came up with a format: start with ideas. Let them flow. Add the specs and documentation and stuff later.

That seemed fine.

But when it was time to explain the task to the group, I fell back on the analytic, parting and sorting and picking-apart mode of the ethnographer in the early stages of analysis. I was listing all the steps they might follow, specifying where to put this or that insight or fact, how to draw it on the page, and how the groups might organize themselves.

Then one of the students provided me with a teachable moment. A student from Potosí, that most colonial and traditional of Altiplano mining towns, a linguist and semiotician, raised his hand.

"There is something you might want to add to this process," he said.

I was nervous enough, already. What did this guy from the Altiplano have in mind, I wondered?

"It should be fun. There should be smiles and laughter." The student's face shone with Boddhisatva light as he smiled.

Giggles began to bubble up from members of the group. I had been too damn serious. Ideation should be fun, getting new, goofy ideas should be happy stuff, not serious data-crunching. And without that ludic element, the ideas would not be as interesting, nor would there be as many of them.

What followed was a rather riotous hour and a half of sketching and brainstorming an specifying, and—best of all—laughter.

The richness and complexity of the results told me all I needed to know. Relax more. Laugh more. Learning requires that one lower what linguists call the "affective barrier." You can't be uptight and learn much. You have to ease up and laugh to create.

Pulchritude, Sex, and Transforming Consumption (I)

2009-05-08T19:51:00.001-07:00

This sounds like a rather odd blog-title, but remember: I'm in Colombia, the place the created (or inspired) the likes of Gabriel García Marquez or that anthropologist whose writing seems intentionally obfuscatory and intends to be shamanistic poetic all at once, Michael Taussig.

I don't aim to be poetic, metaphysical, or especially artistic in part II of this post. But I want to write a bit about a dinner that I prepared in a very pleasant condo in Bogotá last night where I learned a bit about my lovely hosts, deodorant, gay sex, and the idea of consumption. Creation of pulchritude through consumption, perhaps? (What an ugly word that is, considering that it aims to signal beauty, right?)

The label on this (probably) 12 year old bottle of deodorant cream says "Pulcritud a toda hora con Yodora," beauty all the time with Yodora, which is where part (I) of this post ends (sorry, dear readers, both of you may have wondered where part I was, so now you have it, and so I lean to manage my little blog, eh?).

Transforming "Consumption" (III)

2009-05-08T19:47:00.000-07:00

So all this deodorant-as-lube raises another question, a bigger one about the nature of what marketers, and now many anthropologists, call 'consumption.' Time to get theoretical for a second, and offer a hat-tip to our academic colleagues who generally think and write with greater depth and (sometimes) clarity about things like this.

Are we trapped into thinking that you can't have human sexuality without "consuming" a product? It seems an odd thing to consider having sex as an act of consumption. Very odd indeed but it is the sort of notion that a lot of cultural critics would enjoy playing with. "Ah, the commodification of sex!" And the anthropologists would get ready to present another paper on the commodification of everything.

As David Graeber has pointed out (in an unpublished manuscript about consumption) we tend to assign a lot of things to the consumption category that don't belong there. Things like watching television of playing baseball. Or even having sex. There is a problem in doing this.

One problem is that these things have little to do with consumption and a lot to do with human sociability, human interaction and human delight, fun, production, and other things. Sport, for example (and sporting can mean several things, here).

The Yodora example, if nothing else, is just one more reminder that what we may want to call consumption is not consumption at all, but a re-invention, or maybe just an instrumentality, a tool to do something social: have sex, hang out with friends and feel that you don't smell bad. Or a discursive instrumentality: Yodora as a tool for after-dinner charla in Colombia.

Might it be useful to stop using the term consumption unless things are really used up or destroyed in their use? The idea of conservation of matter argues against using consumption incautiously because stuff that we buy is usually transformed through use and not destroyed at all. The Yodora cream runs out because it goes onto your skin and then is sweated off, or washed off, and it goes somewhere else, where someone or something else may have to deal with it. So following a product through its recycling and re-use, following Desjeux's (2001) product itinerary, is often enlightening for this very reason. We aren't consumers. We are transformers.

A lot of what Daniel Miller (1998) and others, like Appadurai (1986) and Desjeux have done, and we should be glad of this, is to point out how what we uncritically call consumption is rarely what it seems to be. It is almost never about buying into what the product's makers have in mind, and it is very often something rather creative, something conditioned by individual understandings, individual re-writings onto the meaning-board of a manufactured product. What else was Roland Barthes (1988) writing about when when he pointed out that authors don't simply communicate meaning to readers? Readers write their own meanings onto what they read. Simple enough. People make new meanings of the stuff they buy. This is a venerable idea, one that Nancy Munn (1986) writes about: value transformation through exchange, a helpful way way of looking at goods in exchange systems which does not, as far as I know, show up in Miller's work. (Daniel, tell me if I am wrong, here!)

But it seems anthropology is stuck in consumption mode. We are using up an idea that marketers handed to us. Anthropologists too often use words like consumption or commodity when those words really don't fit what people actually do. People don't consume, they transform.

Maybe we should be done with the word consumption when we are talking about economics, exchange, or products. What passes as consumption from the perspective of marketers is not really consumption at all. Consumption is about using up things, or destroying, potlatch-like, the goods that you have accumulated. David Graeber is right: a soccer match on a neighborhood playground in Bolivia is not consumption. Neither is watching television, nor is having sex. We use things that we have purchased to do these things. But does this mean people who buy stuff are co-opted, through their purchase, into in an ideology that descends from some corporate boardroom in some wealthy city? Are these people less human? Is their participation in a single and harmful kind of social system thus insured? Maybe, but if so, just how does this work, exactly?

Certainly a lot of products which people buy aren't worth a shit, many of them are down right harmful in the short and long run. Sometimes people find out about this and stop buying whatever they bought. Sometimes, the harm in buying and using something is not obvious, and sometimes it is obvious enough but people keep buying it anyway, often for rather complex reasons. Some of those reasons may include clever advertising. Other reasons may include our greedy stomachs or our faulty folk-sociology (enhanced by amoral advertising) about health and safety. Think of some fast foods, most Sports Utility Vehicles, and nearly (but not all) hand guns, which are often very bad for people in the long run.

But some things that people make, sell, buy and use are a great deal of fun and don't do too much damage. The point is that each instance (or context) in which a product is bought, taken home, used, re-used, interpreted, argued about, and passed on (to the next user or to the garbage can) can have rather different consequences from another product in another context.

What different sorts of products have in common in the patterned ways in which they are used and re-interpreted has not been much explored, except by archaeologists.These patterns are worth looking at.

I have a hunch that things we eat are are used and shared in rather peculiar ways that may not match the way lawn mowers or carpeting are bought and used. Some things are displayed. Some things are served at a table. Some things, like some kinds of underwear, are hidden. We need a vigorous contemporary archaeology and another look at material culture, here, as much as we need a theory of economic value. We may not need a theory of consumption at all.

So I don't think Daniel Miller has it right by using the term consumption all the time. Perhaps it is time to try replacing the term with transformation.

Our understanding of ourselves and our human relatives elsewhere in the world as we buy and sell and use stuff that we did not make with our own hands is just beginning. Taking an archaeological view, in which money can be seen as a very recent innovation and mass-manufactured and globally marketed goods as something even newer, we can forgive ourselves for not having adequate models for understanding what all is going on when we buy and use stuff. Stuff like Yodora.

It isn't enough to say, as some anti-consumption straw-woman might, "ah, that Yodora. There goes the commodification of human life, again!" But it doesn't make sense to simply say "there is again the creative power of consumption! See how people resist the corporate world by consuming Yodora to have sex!" Too many of us who study 'consumers' tend to do one or the other.

Using Yodora as a discursive tool, as an element in an informal, after-dinner salon, however, doesn't have anything to do with consumption at all, and everything to do with sharing a few laughs and getting to know the comfort levels of host, hostess, and guest with topics and behaviors that only show up among close friends, and after some good food and a little white wine.

The empirical question of what else Yodora is about requires some field data, and, among other things, some pharmacological data about what happens when Yodora use strays from the use indicated on the product's label and, for example, into the intimate lives of gay men in Colombia.

-----
Works Cited
Appadurai, A. 1986 The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (edited volume). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Barthes, Roland. 1988. Image, Music, Text. New York: MacMillan

D. Desjeux, 2001. La méthode des itinéraires comme méthode comparative appliquée à la comparaison intercutlturelle. (http://www.argonautes.fr downloaded 04/2009).

Graeber, David. n.d. Consumption. Unpublished manuscript provided by the author.

Miller, Daniel. 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.

Munn, Nancy. 1986 The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pulchritude, Sex, and Transforming Consumption (II)

2009-05-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

I really like the image at right, of Monica Bursztyn and some Bolivian model, in Simple, an art gallery where I spent three lovely days giving a workshop in ethnography and design.

At last, I do have a more directly relevant image. But this photo is about sex (and lets be honest, a kind of gay sexuality is certainly what that photo is about). What I learned about Yodora deodorant includes something about sex, so this image is relevant enough. Moni and I were in Bolivia before I flew off in TACA for Colombia, where the next image was taken. So its a good introductory image, here. Now, on with the story.

There are several things to say about Yodora, here. I'll pick one: its about what people in the trades (both anthropological and business) call consumer products, and how people use them and what this might say about our notion of "consumption."

I was invited to dinner by a fellow researcher, an economist and business guy who runs a small research shop in Colombia. I ended up cooking. This happens, sometimes when people feel comfortable, informal, and perhaps a bit insecure in their own culinary skills (at least that was one of the more interesting reasons given for the immediate acceptance of my half-kidding offer to cook dinner the afternoon before). So I cooked. Pasta; with a sauce of pleasant Mendoza Savignon Blanc and tomato and garlic and this and that of whatever seemed fresh.

In this Bogotá condominium, I was especially aware that what we were doing was far beyond the reach of most Colombians, most people in China, indeed, most people on the planet. But we did not enjoy the meal any less for this awareness. One tends not to feel too guilty about eating well when a good Savingnon Blanc is involved in more than the pasta sauce. That accounts for some of the levity in the kitchen and at the dining table. The rest I leave to the altitude of Bogotá.

After dinner, the conversation turned to consumer products, especially consumer products as they come to be understood and used by people who are not consumer product makers and who don't live in fancy condominiums. Poor people (I mean money, fiscal capital, nothing else; I don't mean cultural capital because my host put odd consumer product stuff in unexpected places, too, as you'll see) or maybe people at the edges of whatever the mainstream is.

We agreed, my host and hostess and I, that people who make consumer products are usually not very much aware of how these things are used. This is especially the case when consumers are poor people: Campesiños. Jente del campo. 农民 (nóngmín, peasants or farmers). This is because middle class people, managers, and corporate leaders don't often spend time hanging around in poor people's homes. Perhaps a few of them do, and certainly some of the people who make consumer products understand what life in that sort of home used to be like because they come from that sort of home.

(Which, by the way, suggests a rather interesting line of inquiry: how is it that some companies seem to know what is going on with the people who buy their stuff and may even care a great deal about such goings-on, while other's don't seem to give a shit. How many corporate executives come from a lower-class background, and what difference might that make?)

After dinner came coffee, panelitas de arequipa y coco (yummy), and the following exchange.

"Look here," my host said. "There was a time, maybe twenty years ago, when the borders were closed in Colombia and you couldn't import any perfumes at all. I worked with a guy who created imitations of famous American perfumes. That's another story. But this deodorant was used in those days by poor people and other people too."

He pulled his foot into his lap, removed his shoe, and to my delight and the mild revulsion of his lovely wife, off came his shoe and sock, and he rested his foot on the table.

"People would put the stuff on their feet. Other people would use it as a deodorant. See: it smells fresh. There wasn't much else in the market. But farmers used it for their feet. Let me show you."

My host (we shall call him Leonardo) got up from the table, and exclaimed, "Paga muy bien attención porque voy a enseñarle algo importante." Pay attention; I"m going to teach you something important.

He came back with this little tube of toothpaste, and started dabbing it on his feet. "Like this, they used it!" he said.

His wife covered her face with her hands. "Diós. Por favor, Leo. . . " she said (but she was laughing as hard as I was, by this time).

"Okay okay, then wait," Leo said and he got up and found this old jar of Yodora.

"So they'd use this." (The foot was on the table again) and not only for feet. Gay guys, they'd use it on their behinds. You know. When they wanted to screw."

I asked, "What? They did what?"

This conversation was moving in a delightfully silly and unabashedly frank direction. I'm thinking, 'These Colombians are not uptight like Angelinos, or Chileans. . . maybe this is that Latin openness to sexuality or something.' Maybe it was the Savignon Blanc.

"They used it for lubricant. What else?" he said.

By now we were all cracking up. So the questions might be, how is Yodora used now? How is it that products come to be used as they are intended by their manufacturers (as they almost never are). Is there no universally available and inexpensive lubricant, condom safe, that one can buy to use when having sex in rural Colombia? Is there? What? Or is it simply the case that people got along fine without such stuff for years but now that condoms are in the sex-picture, things are different?

Below: the researcher, economist, entrepreneur, and table-manners violator who brought this all to our collective gustatory attention—Juan Felipe R.

A ton of human sexuality questions, not to mention table-manners questions, come to the surface, here.

Table manners aside, it strikes me that there hasn't been much anthropological attention paid to the commercial stuff, the artifacts you have to buy, that go along with sex. That might be an interesting, and even an important, field of inquiry. Too often, people who care about HIV or human sexuality in general don't ask specific enough questions about what people actually do, and I don't know of much research relating human sexual behavior to the products people use when they are having sex. It would be interesting work, right? The book would sell, at least. And that would be a great topic for another post (which really belongs as an extended article for American Ethnography, which likes such racy things.

Ethnography for Systematizing Innovation

2009-04-28T19:39:00.000-07:00

Hai Nguyen really should have facilitated this one, but he was entertaining visiting relatives from far away and couldn't join this gang in Bolivia.

What we managed to do over the course of three days was discuss and practice some of the basic business of ethnography. Having at least two anthropologists, a semiotics expert (semiotician?), a couple business researchers, and several economic development specialists in the room made it easy—and productive. What we did was send out teams to do a bit of ethnographic observation, documentation, and interviewing in places where micro-business was happening: market stalls, street-corner DVD sales, and the like.

Then, for the last four or five hours we spent together, the groups brainstormed product or service ideas within the contexts they had studied. They specified who the innovation was for, they sketched it, they outlined the design specifications or requirements for the idea, and they described what allied or additional products or services might devolve from their ideas. The result was a delightful demonstration of design built upon multi-disciplnary teams and fieldwork.

There are additional opportunities here and if we had more time we might have explored some of them. Collaborative work with the people who let us into their business lives would be one that comes to mind. The DVD sales guy is in contact with us (the design idea that came from learning about his job is above). Maybe something to connect these kids who not only sell DVDs but know and care about cinema can actually happen; and it may happen in some format that takes DVD and tosses it by the roadside--one result of our work is that this DVD merchant is now a VIMEO member. How long until he posts his first video, I wonder?

There is a great deal to say about production and reproduction, about design for and with end-users of products and services. The discussion about the ethics of design in a context of street-sales of products that are not quite legal were discussed at length. (Okay, these DVDs were pirates, but there is more to say about that). One of the interesting things about this group's work was the willingness to explore the implications of their work in a wider social and cultural context.

All of this happened in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, with a group of Bolivians from up high on the Altiplano, and some from down low on the Eastern Plains. The divisions in Bolivia, if they were present in our workshop, contributed to a diversity of perspectives that made the experience and the design work far richer than it might have been if everyone were from the same place. But, after all, this is Santa Cruz. Everyone is from somewhere else, here. . .

Ethnographic Sampling III

2009-04-08T19:34:00.000-07:00

Too often, the client's segmentation scheme reflect normalized abstractions rather than the evolving needs, tastes, and practices of real people.

For our India mobile phone client we proposed a rather different model.

At the end of the day, we wanted more time in the field than the client was willing to support (at least this time). But we think it would have been time well spent.

We suggested that our team identify ethnographic segments, drawn from observed patterns of practice and meaning within a particular strategic domain--in this case, the strategic domain was “basic” phone users (people who are buying inexpensive phones). We use male or female gender as a major sub-segment because of the continued importance of gender in structuring consumption in India and elsewhere.

Our ethnographic research--observation and secondary contextual research supporting user interviews and participant observation--was designed to identify patterns within a gendered basic-user target. Ethnographic segments would be identified on the ground, not pre-selected from a quantitatively derived market segment as is usually the case. (And as the client really seemed to want.) The contexts of use for both men and women within these segments would add a real-life dimension to our presentation to marketers and designers.

Using ethnographic segmentation (it might be more clear to simply call it segmentation by contexts, but what the heck) would help product design and marketing by discovering patterns within segments that are not static but can be dynamic and context-sensitive. Strategic decisions in our proposal would have focused on two or three broad cultural contexts of use, or to might have included include additional fine-grained contexts. We provided our client with this visual model of what we were trying to convey (Figure 1, above).

(Our prior work in India had suggested that day-parts and days of the week might have been important. Thus, within general culturally recognized use contexts, we might have paid attention to day of the week and time of day, something like 'Taking and making a business call during the day on Saturday' or 'Hanging out with phone in hand at a teashop' might have been our fine-grained contexts. These were examples we gave to the client, but only the fieldwork could have determine how useful these--or others we might have discovered--might have been.)

The moral(s) of all this is, or are:

• Design researchers don't sample only individual people. They sample contexts and people, both.
• Design researchers try to determine the range of contexts in which things are happening, in which products are used, or related needs or activities take place. Sample there.

Within these contexts, anthropologically-leaning design researchers find out what the meaningful sorts of people are who are part of the world in which these goings on are happening.

It makes sense, then to think about people after you have determined where you are going to go, which contexts you want to visit, and, in consultation with your client, which contexts will be the most strategic for the organization to understand and design around.

It isn't people alone. Its people and contexts that provide the meaning behind people's actions and desires.

Designers want meaningful scenarios that are rich in the local complexities of daily life, the complexities that people take into consideration when they decide to do this or that, to organize their lives or their thinking in one way or another, or even to buy a new ring-tone for their mobile phone or not.

Ethnographic Sampling II

2009-04-04T19:33:00.000-07:00

Theoretical Sampling

Theoretical sampling often seeks maximum variation rather than a "representative" slice of reality (Miles and Huberman 1994).

In other words, anthropologists (or any ethnographers, really) are interested in the systematic study of the contexts surrounding a particular consumer product or business practice. They want to flesh out the real-life meanings behind product choice, purchase, and use.
What is this meaning business, anyway?

Its more than words. Just ask a surrealist. (Or Foucault.)

Linguists, who are supposed to know something about meaning, are often asked to explain how one knows what a word means. Usually, their answer is that to understand what a word means, one should see how the word is used in ordinary speech (Ogden and Richards 1952). Understanding the context in which a word is used (and the contexts in which it may not be used) is the key to understanding its meaning(s). The same is true of IT products and services like mobile phones in India. Mobile phones are part of multiple contexts--home, work, family, street, train, and so on. And as they move from pre-sale to sale to delivery to use in a variety of contexts, and, finally, to disposal (or resale), what they mean and how they are used changes quite a bit.

To understand the range of meanings mobile phones may have for Indian people, or for any kind of people, you have to see them used in context.

If anthropologists find meaning in the contexts that surround what people do then why would the individual person be the unit of measurement around which to build a sampling design? Clients may ask, "How many people will you observe? What kinds of sampling frame will you design, and what kinds of people will fit into that frame?" Our answer is often "We don't know." That is hardly a satisfactory answer when one is trying to win a research contract.

Other Problems
So there is trouble in the sort of means-based statistical clustering used for determining market segments and, likewise, trouble in many client's expectations around sampling. The first kind of trouble lies in the selection of questions or question categories for the initial segmentation questionnaire. How can you know that the questions the client used were the right questions to ask? How did the client determine which dimensions of taste or practice to include or exclude, and what did they overlook completely?

The next trouble comes in selecting the factors for clustering. Which were the most significant? Usually they use those that are most significant in statistical teams but is a statistical norm--taken as a moment in time--the most strategic element to select from a moving target like the evolving use patterns surrounding mobile phones in India? Does the norm include the tail ends of the curve--the outliers, the users on the edges of the normal pattern? If the pattern is put into motion through time, the users at the edges--early adopters and adaptors--then the users--and contexts that surround--them who are at the edges of the normal curve most certainly should be included in design research.

Next: Toward Ethnographic (contextual) segmentation.

Works Cited Part II
Matthew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman.
1994 Qualitative Data Analysis: An expanded Sourcebook. 2nd Edition. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Ethnographic Sampling I

2009-04-01T19:33:00.000-07:00

What people say and what they end up doing is different. It’s not just important to speak to them but you got to spend a day in the life of the customer and observe them.” For understanding the customer better, Jain suggests new methods such as ethnographic studies and tools like calculating customer lifecycle value. — Dipayan Baishya, THE ECONOMIC TIMES (India), July 2005.

Anthropological research teams are more and more often called upon to produce research results for design teams. Usually, the team has to devise some sort of formal research plan for the client. And often, the client is working from a segmentation scheme derived from traditional, questionnaire-based quantitative research. These schemes are usually based on questions that make sense--strategic sense--to the client. Sometimes they reflect the ways that consumers or end-users actually organize themselves. But more often than not, they miss important kinds of variation.

We were working, recently, for a client like this. Actually, we were almost working for them. (They did not accept our bid.) They had a segmentation scheme that they used for their global mobile-phone marketing and design. They wanted to know more about the Indian market. And they wanted us to build our proposal around their segmentation scheme. While we not win the contract, we used the bidding opportunity to think a bit about why we were not happy with traditional segmentation schemes.

Traditional segmentation schemes are means-based, and like other means-based approaches (see Maltz 1994), they don't do a good job of providing the contextual data that help designers imagine design scenarios. And because they are based on what people say, they may be based on lies that people are telling, as Professor Jain suggests in the quotation above.
A psychologists might draw a sample of individual product users or buyers, and study patterns in individual desires, attitudes, values or behaviors about a product. An anthropologist would discover the range of contexts in which groups of people learn about, acquire, transport, store, exchange, use, and talk about a product. Its a significant different.

And more than that: an anthropologist would want to participate as much as possible in product use, and interview the people using it. That approach calls for a rather different kind of sampling. It calls for theoretical sampling.

Stay tuned!

Works Cited Part I
Maltz, Michael
1994 Deviating from the Mean: The Declining Significance of Significance. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 31(4):434-463.

Actually, You Can't Afford Not To

2009-03-05T12:54:00.000-08:00

With the current new economic OS, you can not afford not to take an anthropological approach. Holistic, systematic, close-to-the-customer or community work is needed yesterday. No more masters of the universe, making plans from cubical land. It's time for some ground-level re-thinking of what brands mean, how products are bought, sold, and used, and how value is created in the present, em, context. (I did not say "marketplace." That word needs a re-thinking, too).

Ken Anderson likes to call the current economic, em, 'situation' The Great Reset. I think that's not bad. But then, someone (maybe it was Dawn Rivers Baker, who thinks and reads a lot about microbusiness) said that in fact, a 'reset' is a switch-off that returns the system back to its old, more stable and operating self. But the conditions that created the present fiscal mud-pit should not be repeated. We need more than a re-set. We need a new OS, a new operating system.

Words like Capitalism and Socialism get thrown around a lot by politicians. They are not used often by entrepreneurs or designers. Anthropologists, these days, are more cautious with those words. We work in China quite a bit, and while there is an emerging (and changing) social contract, it is clearly not a communist one in the strict or even in the loose Marxist sense. Yet the capitalism one sees in China is hardly the unbridled cowboy marketplace (at least, not all the time) that one might imagine it to be.

These Dubaian women will be making adjustments that matter, on the ground. They'll do so faster and in more creative ways than will the political or economic planners (who, if they did not steer us into this muck-pit at least did not do enough to steer us away). They already know what value means, they know how to negotiate with husbands, how to open a business where it was once prohibited for a women to open a business, how to buy, how to sell, how to manage, how to make a family life work. Understanding these folks, not listening to economic hacks, may move us out of the muck-pit.