Monthly Archives: September 2011

Why Recruit In The Field?

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We often turn to recruiters go find our participants.  A screener is built, a company hired and two weeks later we show up on someone’s doorstep with camera in hand. Of course this is a practical reality of timeframes and budgets, but it means losing opportunities to expand and improve the research we do.  Recruiting in the field is and should always be an element of how we execute our work.  Be willing and able to recognize potential participants while you are actually doing the work. Take advantage of the setting and use it to recruit. We often overlook the situations we find ourselves in, missing opportunities to gather a wider range of experiences and perspectives. The plane, the party, the person in the shoe store, they are all opportunities to strike up a conversation and find participants. But why do it? There are a several reasons.

First, context shapes behavior and conversation. The nature of the interaction we initiate in one setting will produce a different kind of interaction than we may experience in another venue. That means that once the participant is recruited and the setting changes, we may uncover potential differences between what they say or do in one context to another. Contradictions are where some of the most powerful insights usually occur. Which leads to the second point.

Recruiting in the field it begins the data collection process and helps to develop and theory behind what you’re seeing earlier in the research. It is an opportunity to start formulating questions and ideas based on first-hand interaction rather than waiting until you meet a participant for the first time. Who are the people we want to talk with? What are the social and cultural circles that will shape the event.  It isn’t enough to define a demographic sample, you need to think in terms of cultural, social, professional and environmental systems.  We tend to reduce people to their parts rather than thinking about them in a broader context.

Third, recruiting in the field often leads to a greater rapport. Rather than being a stranger who shows up at your doorstep one afternoon, the participant already has a sense of relationship, provided you’ve taken the time to strike up a solid conversation. Participants recruited in this way have a different set of expectations and take on a role that breaks free of the researcher/participant paradigm because this sort of recruitment changes the power dynamic, moving the nature of the interaction from a transaction to one of genuine sharing.

Metaphor and Design Ideation

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Psychologists have been big believers in using metaphors in therapy. Beginning with Freud and Jung, they were interested in dreams because they believed dreams could serve as metaphors for issues that people were trying to work out in their waking lives. And over time psychotherapists, from the fathers of the movement to today, have often  believed that if they could introduce the right metaphor at the right time in therapy, they had a chance of helping someone see their problems more clearly, and perhaps enable them to engage in positive change.

Metaphors are powerful tools outside of therapy, of course.  From semiotics to language acquisition to design, metaphors define much of how we come to interpret the world and envision new ideas and things. Often there is nothing that can make a concept more persuasive or tangible than the use of an image that sticks in someone’s mind. An image may be memorable based on its concreteness or whimsicality or universality or perhaps its graphic nature; what makes a metaphorical image persuasive is its aptness to the situation one is attempting to understand.  It doesn’t mean anything, however, unless you can somehow analogize the illustration to some real situation. In other words, saying “it’s a metaphor” doesn’t mean anything unless you can answer the question, “what is it a metaphor for?”

I try to bring metaphors into presentations or ideation sessions whenever I can.  People may not be able to appreciate or understand how to build on an observation or insight unless they can visualize an analogous situation. Rather than focusing on solving problems or addressing “needs” right away, providing rich metaphors often assists people in viewing the insights in which their personal feelings are so entangled more objectively or more truthfully.  It allows people to step outside their daily roles and think creatively. The challenge is to design metaphors that are both memorable and apt to each party’s situation.  But that is also the opportunity for creativity on the mediator’s part, and for me, part of the fun of doing this kind of work.

Create a shared view of the present and the future. 
One element is to design a meeting tool to help quickly capture images and adjectives that people have in mind when asking what people are doing today, both inside the organization and the customers engaged with the brand, versus what they will do tomorrow. For example, you might pose questions such as: Imagine the research finding as a color, what would it be today? How does this compare to how people what it will be six months from now? It sounds silly, to be sure, but it gets people thinking about the situation in terms other than fulfilling immediate needs or focusing too quickly on details that may not be relevant to the bigger picture. It also gives people license to exercise their minds and start thinking in genuinely new and innovative ways.

Moving in the same direction. 
Pick one that’s appropriate for the design or strategy team and its journey, such as shopping for groceries for a party or preparing for a trip. Consider locations and cultures of team members as you choose the best metaphor. Find relevant photos or other images to post during the conversation to evoke the same sense of place for everyone. Get team members talking about what each must do to prepare for this adventure together, what help they need from others, the inherent risks and how to mitigate, etc. Capture responses as part of the meeting output, either online off to the side. “Translate” these responses into real- life implications for your team.

Painting pictures from the first-person perspective.
Encourage team members to use highly descriptive language. For example, you might ask: “Imagine you are a typical customer (or user) making a shopping list. How are you feeling as you walk through the steps? Why?” By painting a vivid picture, with each team member imagining s/he is the focal point, you’ll cull out more vivid and authentic responses far more quickly than if you asked: “Describe the typical customer experience.”  In other words, it forces the participants to think in the role of the person for whom they are designing, not in the professional role with all its baggage.

Choose images carefully. 
When you’re working with team members who have different  professional languages and concerns, using visual communications is more efficient and effective than using words alone. Tread carefully, however. Make sure that the use of a particular image, whether literal or proverbial, is appropriate and understandable for all team members.

Cheering the Death Penalty

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I, like so many people, sat through the Republican debates the other night, listening to the same old lines that pour forth from contenders during any election cycle, regardless of the party. The dogma is rehashed, centrists and extremists are more clearly defined and the theater unfolds in fairly predictable ways.  But there was a moment that struck me as I listened to the otherwise predictable responses – and that was the audience’s reaction to Rick Perry celebrating the number of people the state of Texas has executed under his tenure. Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted of murdering his three daughters and executed despite evidence showing that he was likely innocent of the crimes, was something (not someone) to be celebrated.  Or was Cameron Todd Willingham even a factor in the collective response?

Texas has held some 234 executions on Perry’s watch, more than the next two states combined have executed since the death penalty was restored 35 years ago (three people who were juveniles at the time of their crime were executed between 2000, when Perry took office, and 2005, when the Supreme Court banned the execution of juveniles).  But the numbers or the morality of the death penalty were not the thing that hit me – that debate has largely been decided in the minds of most voters and it is to be expected that anyone running for the Republican nomination, for better or for worse, is going to support the death penalty. It is simply a platform issue and one that won’t change anytime soon.

No, the fact that Mr. Perry said he stood by his record was no surprise.  The eruption of applause that ensued was.  It was the first real explosive response of the crowd for the night, which struck me as disheartening, because it speaks volumes about the driving force behind the current ultra-conservative perspective and worldview.  Job creation, US military involvement abroad, the debate over healthcare, none of these produced anything more than the standard mediocre applause.  It was the fact that a candidate was proudly proclaiming that his state, and his governorship, was adept at killing that set the crowd on fire.  And therein lies the problem, because this is not about dealing with crime and handing down justice.  This is about hatred of and bloodlust for the “Other.”  It is about fear on a grand scale and the breakdown of civil discourse.  The people executed and those on death row in Texas are more than convicts, they are symbols to the far right.  The cheering of Mr. Perry’s comments is about fear.

On one level it is about fear of change and fear of those unlike us. A Texas inmate named Duane Edward Buck, who is set to be executed Sept. 15, has petitioned Perry for clemency from his death sentence. Though Buck’s guilt is not in question, the way the prosecution secured his death sentence is. To prove Buck’s “future dangerousness” and secure the death sentence, prosecutors used the testimony of a psychologist who claimed that Buck was more dangerous because he is black.  Is this to say that every supporter of the far right agenda is racist?  By no means.  But it does represent the underlying current of fear that explicitly or implicitly excludes gays, Hispanics, non-evangelical Christians, non-Christians, liberals, etc.  It is representative of the belief that if you are in disagreement with the Tea Party’s fundamentalist wing you are something to be avoided and feared. You are suspect because you aren’t like them.

On another level the cheers are meant to send a message of intimidation to people both inside and outside the party.  It is a vocalization that says if you aren’t with us, we will crush you.  If you aren’t like us, we will hate you.  If you confront us or call us into question, we will destroy you.  It isn’t about the death penalty, Perry or the nature of the criminal justice system.  It is a grand, explosive “fuck you” to anyone and everyone that supports anything other than the extremist views of a philosophical minority population of the US.

Mr. Perry is a religious predator who is willing to do anything to get elected President. Just the fact that a man so blatantly and defiantly amoral would be considered qualified for the highest office in the land speaks volumes about the disintegration of the Republic as a result of the destructive efforts of Fundamentalist.  It should be of little wonder that his remarks on the Texas legal system and its propensity for executing people garner such a strong response.  Because it isn’t about justice, it is about fear and control.  What seems of interest isn’t the statement they cheer, but the subtext the statement represents.

Myths, the Hero and Design

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In a world of stripped of rites of passage, where we no longer move through the cycle of separation, initiation and return, where the daily expression of the journey of discovery is almost null, shopping becomes a surrogate for the search for meaning. It is by no means the only expression of it, of course, but it is a defining element of who we are, whether we are engaged in it or reaction to and rejecting it.  Consumption and the act of shopping have become a postmodern replacement for the lessons learned through folktales and through myths.  A hero in myth ventures forth from the world of common day into a world of supernatural wonder: the hero comes back from the journey with the power to bestow boons upon others.  Shopping is the hunt, the religious experience, the co-created ritual story telling in a postmodern world.  But we crave something less superficial than simple consumption, we crave engagement.  It isn’t always about simply getting things – that’s a simple matter of a few clicks.  It is increasingly used as an expression of self and the quest for cultural, shared meaning that is growing harder to find.  Social media and reality TV have changed us to a voyeuristic population, but these are windows into the mundane or the freakish, not windows into the collective dreams we once shared around the camp fire.

Strange as it may sound, myths matter to design, marketing and brand development.  They align our world at speak to the collective dream.  A dream is the personalized myth; myth is the dream depersonalized. And it is at that level that a brand can manifest itself as a character in the storyline of a person’s life.

The characters we identify with in myths, folktales, etc. are the primordial self, the bold statement of the relationship between the person, society and the cosmos.  The principle work of the person wrapped up in the universal storyline of the human condition writ large is to retreat from the world of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties of being really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what Jung called the “archetypal image.” Steve Jobs and the Apple story represent the archetypal hero; from the birth of the company in a garage, to the struggle against the monolithic beast, to exile and the valiant return. And upon his return he is transformed into the magician, the sage with the experience and vision to transform his world and the lives of all the people he touches.  We build shrines to heroes because they are more than the local boy done good; they spread a message, an image, a lesson that goes beyond the local to the universal.  They speak to the absolute conditions of the human condition. And that means that like their brands, the spaces in which we sell our goods are bound, or should be, by archetypal models as well.

If we speak to archetypes when constructing a retail space, we do more than produce a nice experience. We create an expression of the deeper elements of what it means to be human in a world where dangers are ambiguous and the thrill of discovery is subservient to the soccer practice and the gas bill. But shopping is a practice that has ritual structure and involves the creation of value and meaning that underscores the need to purify, change and be reborn.

By transforming the retail space into an archetypal motif, shoppers come to see it as a focal point in their lives.  At the macro-level, these sensibilities shape cultural expectations about how every environment we interact with should be properly organized. Settings can and do take on a “personality” depending on how they relate to cultural archetypes we posses about a given spatial frame. The visible layout of the space needs to reflect cognitive and cultural frames that allow people to construct and revisit stories, the goal being to produce visceral responses that can’t be ignored or denied. Products need to be designed and displayed in such a way as to make them visually reverential.

The retail environment becomes the fire around which we gather to take part in the spoils of the hunt. Black Friday becomes the story of cattle raid of Ulster.  The quinceanera is Cinderella. Buying a home is the descent into the underworld and the trial of the guardians at the gate. Esoteric as it sounds, this sort of thing has ramifications for how you design, be it an object, a space or a message.  It means thinking of the store front or the online portal as a liminal space where people learn something transformational is about to take place.  It means providing customers with a stage upon which to act out a role rather than simply buy a product, which has implications for lighting design, space between shelves, fixture height, even the glass in the windows. It has implications for how we define loyalty programs and how we interact with our customers – how do you continue the story a week after they leave the store?  How do you create and sustain communities? How do you create the sensation of the story telling around the hearth when people are distributed over vast areas?  All of this means far more than deciding whether or not to use an end-cap to sell your batteries, your beer, your socks, etc.

Touch It, Design It, Build It

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No one operates with just one sense.   This is fairly obvious at the sensory level where the visual, kinesthetic, auditory, tactile, etc. elements of our world come together to produce bio-cognitive responses.  Something soft, round and red will produce a different reaction than one that is hard, square and blue.  Increasingly there is a recognition in all types of consumer research, from product design to packaging, that there’s are emotional and/or experiential connection that people have with products.  These go well beyond bio-cognitive responses and speak to the symbolic underpinnings of what it is people believe about a product or brand.

Tactile design is, unfortunately, an often overlooked element of design from the semiotic perspective. The value people attach to products or brands has as much to do with how something feels as it does with how it looks or the function it serves. That means that how a package feels in the hands of a consumer can imprint a long-term psychological association not only with the object, but also with the company that makes it.  This means taking a two-pronged approach. One the one hand, you have to explore how context shapes how people understand different materials.  What feels “right” in one setting may not feel as good in another.  Second, you have to understand reactions and associations when materials are experienced in isolation – blind testing where the only sensory input is touch. When relying exclusively on the tactile, the consumer is forced to set aside their sight-based sensory dominance and focus completely on the sensation of touch.

Ergo Chef knives are a great example of this.  Not only they ergonomically ideal tools, the materials used in the handles mimic skin insofar as being soft, but not so like skin that they produce a negative association. Researchers found that if the material was too human-like, if felt “creepy” because it reminded people of host of negative symbolic relationships – associations were made with cannibalism and slasher movies, both of which in turn speak to host of other negative symbolic associations.  Based on fieldwork and testing for symbolic associations with a range tactile experiences, Ergo Chef developed a material that felt comforting, secure and innovative.  In other words, they didn’t just ask if a material felt good, they explored how different materials felt both in isolation and in context, and what symbolic associations could be assigned to the material.

You wouldn’t design a product or package based only on what you hear or see alone.  What seems right in a lab may mean nothing if it loses it’s meaning in a different context.  Looking at the symbolic underpinnings of materials and shapes allows you and a design team to isolate the senses in certain activities and uncover a range of meanings. We gain powerful insights into what people think and feel about the things we build.  That leads to a truly holistic approach to integrating design, marketing and brand.

Anthropology Has Always Been a Visual Practice

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The other day I was talking with a friend about ethnography as a writing genre, not just a methodology.  Not surprisingly, the conversation focused on the textual nature of ethnography specifically and anthropology in general.  What struck me as we talked was the focus on the written word, as though that were the principle mode of representation.  And being someone who writes, it is, from a personal standpoint, largely on the mark.  But then the discussion turned to video and photography, both of which I use frequently, as do most of the anthropologists I work with in the private sector.  I would even go so far as to say that the collaboration we practice with other disciplines, such as designers, artists, etc. extend the practice of anthropology further, turning most of our work into something decidedly non-textual.

The notion that anthropologists are more textually-oriented than visual is far from true.  Anyone who has spent the early part of their training trying to figure out the subtleties of kinship diagrams, mastering the art of reading archaeological site maps, and illustrating the landscape in which they did fieldwork knows that the visual side of anthropology is as strong as the written word. Anthropology has always been visual.

We tend to think of visual anthropology as that part of cultural anthropology concerned, in large part with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and new media. But visual anthropology also encompasses study of visual representation, including areas such as performance, museums, art, and the production and reception of mass media. Visual representations from all cultures, such as sand paintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings and photographs are included in the focus of visual anthropology. And while it may be a stretch, I would go so far as to say that it increasingly includes the products of our research – package design, marketing campaigns, product design, etc.  While these are not necessarily direct representations of a people or context, they are representations of insights in material or visual form.

So why does it matter?  It matters because we often find ourselves perpetuating the myth, at least in the business-focused community, that ethnographic work finds culmination exclusively in the written word, with video and photography being a side project meant to illustrate a difficult concept or to add flavor to a report.  Consequently, many of the people who hire us hold the same belief.  The more visual work we do, the more useful we are.

It’s not easy being green

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As we get the last blast of idiotic summer heat through the middle of the country, I can’t help but think about what it means to be green in the context of utilities.  Several months back I did a project on climate (one of many over the years) in the home – at the time it was the dead of winter, but what we saw then holds true in the heat.  People have a difficult time articulating why it is important to save energy from a moral and ethical position, but they all reference it. There is a cultural understanding that preventing waste is simply something people “should do.”

Being green is often a secondary issue and can be extremely vague for most people.  Yes, there are the true believers, but the perfect recycler is often the same person driving the Yukon.  It’s about justification and rationalization.  The family is wiling to make changes to their life style, but not if it reduces a sense of physical comfort in the home.  They recycle diligently and take measure to reduce electricity use, which they learn about from the local utility website, Dr. Phil and the recommendations their children bring home from school.  However, the idea of raising the temperature in the home more than a degree or two is out of the question.  Sacrifice or actionable awareness is relevant only to a point. And there is probably a connection between immediacy and short-term gain (instant gratification) vs. long-term benefits/suffering. Turning off a light is painless and gives you a sense of accomplishment. Dialing up the heat all summer is just asking too much for too long.

Color, Context, Culture and Design

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“What is color?” Seems like a fairly obvious question, but it’s not as simple as it appears. In a world filled with company identities, brochures, signs, and web sites, it is remarkable how few businesses ask themselves, “Why do we use this color and what does it mean around the globe?” Clients often have specific colors in mind for any given project. These choices are often based on their answer to the “favorite color” question (or it’s driven by brand standards that make little sense). However, when choosing a color, the more better question is, “What message does this color communicate?”

Color is the by-product of the spectrum of light, as it is reflected or absorbed, as received by the human eye and processed by the brain. It is a cognitive reaction to stimuli.  Competing with the basic biology of the human brain is the cultural understanding of color, which goes well beyond national preferences or association (e.g. white being associated with death in Japan). It helps articulate how the world is understood in its entirety.

First, the mechanics. The world is filled with light. As every school child learns, if you experiment with passing light through a prism, a spectrum will be produced in the form of a rainbow. The prism separates the light into the wavelengths of light the human eye is capable of seeing. Hence, color. These colors are present in all light that is around you. When this color filled light strikes an object, most of the spectrum is absorbed by the object. However, a fraction of the light will bounce off the object, like a sound wave echoing off a canyon wall. This reflected wavelength of light enters your eyes and your brain interprets and labels it a certain color.

The sensations of color are not just physical phenomena, but they are also shaped by our perception — by the mechanics of vision and the way our brains process information. What we see of an object depends upon the object, but also the lighting and, more importantly, our perception.

The appealing sensation of complimentary colors (like red and green) does not originate physically from the actions of light on our eyes, but perceptually from the actions of our internal visual information system.  How we interpret the actions of light on a surface is what determines whether a color looks “good” for any particular use, not the actual color itself. We are predisposed to feeling certain emotional responses to certain colors, and these feeling can be mapped out mathematically, not unlike the scales in music that are universally appealing. And this is where choosing a color scheme, be if for advertising collateral, a logo or a store layout gets tricky because perception is part biology and part culture.

Color has cultural meaning that goes well beyond something as simple as green being a universal associated with cultivation, plants and fertility.  Color underscores how we interpret the world and can shift depending on context. For example, the colors of the dress and body painting of different nations is another aspect of the anthropology of color. Although the aesthetics of color theory seems universal, what is pleasing in color may vary from one culture to another. For example, the rules for color display in the West Suk of Kenya use a system of very specific sequences of color that are considered beautiful, conforming to a concept, known as “pachigh.”

Among the Suk there is a conventional concept of beauty of color as applied to beads. While all colors or pigments are pretty, so long as they’re not too faded, colored beads arranged in a pattern are beautiful. But there are preferences which exclude various arrangements. Some colors are preferred, such as blue, but any color may be strung out in a solid line and be contrasted with any other solid colored string and called pretty. But, when differently colored beads are put together on the same string, an alternation of blue and white or of red and white is acceptable, while alternate red and yellow, red and blue, or yellow and white is not considered pretty, no matter what pattern they form. The reason is because the latter groupings have a reduced contrast between the colors, and have become like the drab colors of goats and sheep, considered to be boring. White and yellow, for example, provide little tone contrast whereas blue and white are considered pretty. This is pachigh.

Choosing a color to communicate a message requires research and knowledge of the message as well as the audience. But equally as important is an understanding into the effects of color on the human psyche. This insight will add depth and meaning to any message, and any business concerned with their image would do well to toss aside their favorite and instead choose the right color for the right job.