Tag Archives: narrative

From Personas to Stories: Creating Better Tools for Design and Marketing

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Design ethnography takes the position than human behavior and the ways in which people construct meaning of their lives are contextually mitigated, highly variable and culturally specific. on the central premise of ethnography is that it assumes that we must first discover what people actually do and why they do it before we can assign to their actions and behaviors to design changes or innovation. The ultimate goal is to uncover pertinent insights about a population’s experience and translate their actions, goals, worldview and perspectives as they directly relate to a brand, object or activity, and the role that these pieces play with regards to interactions with their environment. Often, the information results in a large-scale, broad document, but it also often results in the development of personas.

The idea is that personas bring customer research to life and make it actionable, ensuring the right decisions are made by a design or marketing team based on the right information. The approach to persona development typically draws from both quantitative and qualitative tools and methodologies, but because of the very personal nature of ethnography, the methodology often leads the charge. The use of ethnographic research helps the creation of a number of archetype (fictions, in the most positive sense) that can be used to develop products that deliver positive user experiences. They personalize the information and allow designers and marketers to think about creating around specific individuals.

But there are problems with personas. Don’t get me wrong, I believe personas can be useful and help design teams. But I also believe they can reduce the human condition to a series of attributes and lose the spirit of what personas are designed to do. First, in terms of scientific logic, because personas are fictional, they have no clear relationship to real customers and therefore cannot be considered scientific. So much for the science.

For practical implementation, personas often distance a team from engagement with real users and their needs by reducing them to a series of parts. The personas, then, do the opposite of what they are intended to, forcing design teams down a path that gives the illusion of user-centricity while actually reflecting the interpretations or the individual designers. Creating hypothetical users with real names, stories and personalities may seem unserious and whimsical to some teams within an organization and be, consequently, dismissed as so much fluff. But by far, the biggest problem, at least to my way of seeing things, is that while we want to use personas to humanize potential customers and users, we in fact reduce them to objects and a laundry list of actions, personality quirks and minimalist descriptions.

I’m not advocating the dismissal of personas, but I am suggesting that perhaps there are alternatives. One place to start is to admit we are writing fiction when we construct these tools and expand upon that notion. We should be adding to the mix humanistic narratives. Customer novellas, so to speak. It requires more time and effort, both on the part of the person/people creating them as well as those using them, but it also gives greater depth and insight into the needs, beliefs and practices of the people for whom we design and to whom we market. Rather than relying exclusively on a dry report or a poster with a list of attributes.  In this model, the idea is to create a short story in which actors (the eventual personas) engage with each other, a wider range of people, and a range of contexts. Doing so allows us to see interactions and situations that lead to greater insights. It allows us to look at symbolic and functional relationships and tease out elements that get at the heart of the fictional characters we create.

Why is that important? Because it does precisely what personas are meant to do but typically fail at – provide depth and characterization, establish a sense of personal connection between designers and users and provide breakthrough insight and inspiration. Anyone who has read history vs. historical novels is familiar with the idea. It is easy to reduce Julius Caesar to a series of exploits and personality traits, but in doing so we lose the feel for who the man was. A historical novel, in contrast, adds flavor by injecting conversation, feelings, motivations and interactions. We walk away with a feeling for who he was and what affect he had on others, good and bad.

Imagine developing a persona for Frodo from The Lord of the Rings. We could say the following and attribute it to all Hobbits: Frodo is enamored by adventure but frightened by it. He loves mushrooms, has no wife, is extremely loyal to his friends and will work at any task he is given until it is done, regardless of the difficulty or potential for personal harm. He disdains shoes and has a love of waist coats.

There’s nothing wrong with this description, but for anyone who had read the trilogy or even seen the movies, the shortcomings are obvious. We miss the bulk of Frodo’s personality. In exploring the novel, we come to develop a rich understanding of Frodo, a deep understanding of his motivations and personality and his relationship with other members of the party, including the Ring.

For the literalists out there, I am not suggesting we create anything as vast as a novel, particularly one as expansive as The Lord of the Rings, but I am suggesting that we move beyond attributes and create stories that more fully develop the people behind the personas. Several pages of engaging writing is sufficient. Not only does it provide deeper insights, but it engages the reader more fully, inspiring them to go beyond the “data” and explore a wider array of design, brand and marketing options. Again, it isn’t meant to replace personas (or the research report), but to add to it. It requires more effort and time on the part of the person creating it as well as the person consuming it, something people are often disinclined to do, but the end result is better design, greater innovation and a more complete vision of what could be.

Stories, Invention and the Bottom Line

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The power of a good story, or even a rather mundane one, is truly phenomenal.  In it are wrapped up the hopes, dreams, symbols, and significances that shed light on who we are as individuals and as members of a culture.  But the real power comes not from the explicit statements that emerge during, say, interviews, but from the subtext and patterns of meaning people assign to objects, relationships, and thoughts as they are created by participants through narrative. Not everything can be expressed as matter-of-fact discourse, especially things one cannot really put one’s finger on, or things that do not exist yet. Some of them are central to human experience, such as falling in love or admiring the full moon rising over the sea. If we want to explore this kind of experience, we need means and methods that are suited to communicate it.

I kept thinking about this problem, and one day I decided to see what happens if I explicitly ask research participants to write stories, pieces of fiction, about a topic related to my client’s needs.  Specifically, they were asked to write a story from the perspective of someone shopping for beer.  Much to my surprise, I ended up a wide range of ideas being expressed and a degree of complex language that was poetic, mundane, funny, sad and utterly fascinating.

I have used this method of gathering insights ever since, when I want to learn about things that are beside the topic but nonetheless worth exploring. It is by no means a replacement to fieldwork, but it is another tool that can be used to tease out how people construct their world in ways they may not normally be able to express. These things concern the creative aspects of the cultural context of how meaning is constructed.

Why are stories important for interaction and knowledge? Traditional cultures are storytelling cultures in the literal sense: people tell each other stories. We have often set this fact aside in the post-modern, linear, data driven world of business, but it is still fundamental to who we are.  People do not buy products based on specs alone, they buy based on deeper issues that connect products and places to their humanity. At certain occasions the stories gain a special role, such as at a child’s bedtime or while sitting around the kitchen table (the primal campfire). Stories make it possible for us to share our world, not lists of product attributes. We actively participate in the creation of culture by listening to stories and telling them—and we learn about culture through stories. It is in the context of understanding stories that we uncover triggers and meanings that simply don’t emerge fro surveys and interviews. They supply us with metaphors and meanings that are hidden from view when people are in the participant mode. Stories give them license to explore ideas and create symbols that tap the deepest recesses of a product’s or brand’s subtler meanings.

Stories are aimed at exploring the subjective, but not the individual. They are the collective myth. The point with composing a story is to find a collective level in the invention. It is a kind of inter-subjective reality. Creative solutions and innovative ideas arrive when imagination is actively used by participants, not just the people working for the company in need of answers.

Art, Video and Client Acceptance

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When we conduct qualitative research it is inevitable that we have clients who choose to dismiss what we have to say.  More accurately, there are people within the organization that have, for a host of reasons, made the decision, consciously and subconsciously, to find any excuse possible to reject the finding.  The question is what to do about it.  That means reflecting on what the objections to the work are and the underlying case being used to dismiss the findings. Unfortunately, I think a large part of it stems from the fact that we, unlike a computer program used to crunch data, are the instruments of investigation, analysis and reporting.  The researcher frequently takes on the role of omnipotent, unseen author and expert – and that can be disconcerting to the person on the receiving end of the research. The text, sound clip, or video narrative is filtered through the researcher’s eyes; eyes that are, if trained properly in the tenets of the anthropological discipline, self-reflexive and committed to the honest and ethical treatment of the information gathered.  And in this lie the subtle politics of power and the subject/researcher relationship.

Our words alone, for right or wrong, frequently lack credibility in the minds of business executives and designers who are intent on validating their work or personal views.  What we have to say can be ignored in the light of “common sense” experience held by the business and design teams.  Conversely, while the statements of participants have credibility, their thoughts are often seen as disjointed, irrelevant, or dismissible as singular anecdotal moments.  By constructing stories, both parties (researcher and participant) gain credibility and influence.  The narrator/editor gains the status of author and guide, moving from being perceived as irrelevant to the business situation to a position of authority.  The participant is given greater significance in that he or she is understood as representational of a wider range of meaning, cultural patterns, and behavior.  The participant or participants used in a final work convey a coherent message that can, when the “story” is told well by the author/editor, be implemented by members of the audience.  Video in particular serves to provide specific direction while enticing the audience to tread into deeper waters, thus sparking greater innovation.

In conducting fieldwork, we as anthropologists are asked to share the concrete experiences of the participants’ environment, shared behavior, language, social relations, etc.  In sharing that rich and complex world, new ideas and deeper understanding emerge on the part of the client.  We as the experts see, hear, write, and film what are the most important aspects of the field experience and distill them into something that can be used by the various members of the business, development, and design teams.  And because video is such a potentially influential tool, showing the drama of daily life, the dramatic and artistic side of the story can create waves in the business community that the traditional, omnipotent style of presentation cannot.  Presentation styles, choices of material and stories, lighting, viewing angles, organization, etc. all work to structure the portrayal of a culture or population in ways particular to the ethnographer or team of ethnographers and in ways the client can relate to.  There is an inherent story-like character to all ethnographic accounts of the field.  This is doubly so when research is presented in the video format because of limitations of the lens and the limited timeframe of most cinematic pieces; the convention of film is to present information to an array of senses in a relatively short amount of time.  This does not imply that the videos we create are fictions or that the goal is simply to dazzle the audience.  It simply means that ignoring the story-like nature of the video results in dry, dull work that does little to impact the attitudes, expectations, and development directions of our clients.

The goal is ultimately to shake the client’s foundations of belief, to rattle his or her assumptions, to create a new state a awareness.  It serves to evoke a participatory feeling in the viewers and bring them into the moment of experience, compelling them to consider new ways of classifying and thinking about their world, as well as their processes. There is an artistic element to good research and its presentation. Without the art of ethnography, though it may sound counterintuitive, the findings are easier to dismiss. The story is central to the success of any ethnographic project.

Poetry as a Research Tool

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The power of a good story, or even a rather mundane one, is truly phenomenal.  In it are wrapped up the hopes, dreams, symbols, and significances that shed light on who we are as individuals and as members of a culture.  But the real power comes not from the explicit statements that emerge during, say, interviews, but from the subtext and patterns of meaning people assign to objects, relationships, and thoughts as they are created by participants through narrative.

Some time ago I was struggling with a particularly vexing problem.  We were dealing with a topic that tends to garner yawns from participants, namely how people do their taxes.  Now, while this may be a topic of hot debate on the campaign trail and amongst Tea Party activists these days, it is not a topic that people get particularly excited about when interviewed. The fieldwork yielded good information, but it was difficult to tease out and even harder to craft into something easily digested by the client. I kept thinking about how to put more meat to the topic and decided to see what happens if I asked participants to write poems about the topic, giving each a week to complete the poem.  Yes, most looked at me like I was mad or laughed. But the outcomes were extraordinary.

What participants put together involved a great deal of thought. As people read them to me (and I read them to myself), it became clear that there was a great deal more wrapped up in how people think about and do there taxes than they initially thought.  The act of condensing and assigning meaning meant structuring their thoughts around metaphors and symbols that would speak to some deeper truth.  Not everything can be expressed as matter-of-fact discourse, especially things that are on the surface so terribly mundane.  Process and step can be conveyed easily, but the underlying meanings and association are much harder to get at.

I then wrote the requisite report about the field observations, direct quotes, etc.  But I also wrote about poetic definitions of taxes, quoting extensively the poems themselves and showing the imagery that participants frequently drew, painted or pasted on the page. The insights gleaned from this exercise and the response it produced in the client were far more than I expected at the outset of the project. I have been using poetry as a means of gathering insights ever since.

Why? Because these things concern the creative aspects of the cultural context of belief, symbol and organization. Complex concepts can be tedious for people to recount, but that doesn’t mean they don’t contain elements of deeper, underlying truths.  Poetry, and art in general, gives people the “right” to render emotion on the page, setting aside conventions of rationality.  Poetry, like painting and story telling, is ancient and speaks to the deepest contrivances of the human condition.  People may say they don’t like poetry, but they know what to do with it nonetheless, when given the opportunity.

Traditional cultures are quite literally story telling cultures.  People tell each other stories and share experiences through myth, folklore or even a tale about the day’s events. The act of telling as story is a ritual in many cases – it sets the stage and tells the listener that what is about to come is important. Telling and listening to stories allows us to create culture, which is the crux of how we construct our world, including things as seemingly mundane as taxes.  Poetry is simple a more condensed, raw, distilled version of the stories we tell.

In my research I often use fictional narrative as a means to explore deeper meanings of things, but poetry has become another avenue that results in more visceral responses. When we use poetry construction as a research tool, we ask participants for a creative construction of the topic – not a laundry list of attributes or feelings, but a storyline and expression of what the topic means to them. We also ask them to work on it over the course of a week, rather than simply churning out something quickly.  This method consciously goes beyond interviewing or realist storytelling. Its purpose is to play with ideas and discover the cultural context through a creative outlet. It is aimed at encouraging the respondents to play with, explore and invent invent imagery about a given topic.  The participants construct the plot as they wish, including whatever language or artistic embellishments they think will flesh out the poem.  For the participant and the researcher alike, the goal is to enter the domain of the shared cultural and social imagination.

After the poems are completed, they are typed based on themes and sub-grouped by plot and symbolic representations.  Participants are then invited (during a subsequent visit) to view other poems and the analytical grouping into which they have been placed. The result is a co-constructed sense of meaning out of which insights arise, even for the least exciting of subjects.

Clearly the technique is not for everyone, but for those willing to experiment and those tasked with uncovering deep meaning about a product or brand, the results of poetic creation are stunning.

Thoughts on the Nature of Narrative

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The stories we tell are what most often gain buy-in from our clients.  We convey moments and those moments illustrate the bigger themes and analytical complexities of of our fieldwork. For people not in love with anthropological text, narrative brings ideas to life and helps produce action.  But is narrative just another $10 word or does it mean something more? While descriptive observations such as these work well to qualify and explain narrative in a poetic manner, definitional approaches tend to provide conflicting views of the nature of narrative, since scholars will single out different features as constitutive of the nature of narrative. The following dilemmas illustrate some of the more contentious points.

First, does narrative vary according to culture and historical period, or do the fundamental conditions of narrativity constitute cognitive universals? That narrative was slow to emerge as a theoretical concept, and typically enjoys recognition largely within academic culture, seems to speak in favor of a relativistic approach, but the culture-specific feature could be the awareness of the concept, rather than the properties that define it.  The relativistic approach raises the problem of comparability: if narrative takes radically different forms in every culture, where is the common denominator that justifies the labeling of these forms as narrative? If one opts for the culture-universal approach, the obvious differences between the narratives of different periods and cultures are a matter of thematic filling in and of variations on a common basic structure.

Second, does narrative presuppose a verbal act of narration by a narrator, or can a story be told without the mediation of a narratorial consciousness? What is at stake in this question is whether dramatic media or media that does not use language alone as their primary mode of representation are capable of narration. Take film, for example, where language may take a back seat to cinematography.  The story is conveyed through a non-verbal set of symbols and language may indeed be secondary. My position is that film narration does not necessarily require  a narratorial figure.  Some scholars have attempted to reconcile the narrator-based definition with the possibility of non-verbal narration by analyzing drama and movie as presupposing the utterance of a narratorial figure, even when the film or the play does not make use of voice-over narration.

Both of these issues hold significance in large part because they impact how we construct and distribute a narrative piece to our client audience(s).  Additionally, these issues impact how a final report or video is understood.  Is the intended message conveyed?  Is there a necessary conflict between what in differing contexts might be labeled “science” and “drama”?  If the piece is understood as science or art, what value do the audiences place on both of these concepts?  The overarching issue at hand is less about determining what constitutes ownership of the narrative voice than it is about whether or not we, the anthropologists in the field, are able to successfully convey meaning that results in some degree of change or understanding.

How to Tell a Good Story

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We often get bogged down in the numbers when we talk to our clients.  They’re business folks and therefore we need to talk to ROI, segmentation schemes, bottom-line financials, etc. And yes, that information is necessary, but it shouldn’t necessarily be the focus of every conversation, particularly when we’re presenting findings and insights.  It’s like assuming every movie we see or every novel we read should be a bulleted list of events.  No, the story matters much more than we think.  Even though they might be resistant to the notion, business folks are still human and they respond to the story being told more than they would admit to others or to themselves.  Story telling is imperative to the success of any work you do.  Great stories succeed because they are able to capture the imagination of important audiences. They draw people in.

1. Understand That Attention Spans Are Short

People have little time. As a result, attention spans are getting shorter by the day. Do everything you can to keep your story from plodding along at the same pace and pitch. Mix the serious with funny, dialogue with thought, high energy with no movement, etc.  Telling the story is as much about the performance as it is about details.  Without the performative aspects, there are only facts and facts by themselves don’t make the case.

2. Believe In the Story You Are Telling

If the story doesn’t mean anything to you personally, don’t tell it. It won’t come across as genuine and your audience will know it. A great story is true. Not necessarily because it’s factual, but because it’s consistent and authentic. Clients, like consumers, are too good at sniffing out inconsistencies for you to get away with a story that’s just slapped on.

3. Be Targeted

Great stories are rarely aimed at everyone. When they are, they rarely stick with anyone.  Be aware that there are some people in the audience who won’t get it no matter what you have to say.  Those who do, however, will become advocates. Average people have too many different points of view, to many opinions and too many competing agendas to come at a problem with a completely clear mind. If you need to water down your story to appeal to everyone, it will appeal to no one.

4. See the Story in Scenes

It’s hard to memorize a story word for word. One of the biggest problems people run into when presenting is that it sounds contrived and forced.  That will kill the message quicker than anything.  Break your story into blocks of time. Think in themes and use visual material to jog your memory about the theme you want to address rather than reciting something you’ve committed to memory.

Great stories are trusted and trust is probably the single most important part of getting anyone to act on insights. No research succeeds in telling a story unless he has earned the credibility to tell that story.  And that is largely accomplished in how the story is told, not just in the pedigree they bring to the table.

Selling Aspirations or Realities

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We often see that words, phrases and concepts are repeated when describing an event.  But I have to wonder, is it more powerful for marketing to ask “what happened…” or “when you went/used/etc. what were you hoping for…”?  No doubt it is some balance between the two, but at which points in the shopping, consuming and disposal processes do you stress the aspirational over the practical?  At what point do you reverse them?  It all depends on the nature of the narrative as told by both the brand and the people who buy it.  And it depends on breaking away from a binary view of the world.

Narratives are representational forms that provide valuable data about the practices, perspectives, and beliefs people have about a brand.  In other words, these are the stories people tell, but narrative analysis digs deeper, uncovering symbolic triggers and psycho-social stumbling block. What we want isn’t always what we need (or even what we really, truly want).  Understanding the narrative being told and the one we wish to create means thinking about more than a message.  It means thinking about marketing as a story and that is never an either/or proposition.

Why Poetry Matters to Business People

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Poetry doesn’t matter to most people.  American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Art for art’s sake, but on a microscopic level.  But while it may not seem to have relevance to businesses people, politicians, designers, etc., the fact is that we can learn volumes from poetry.

In the early 1940s, Abraham Maslow constructed a hierarchy of basic needs.  It is the famous description of what human beings require from a bio-psychological standpoint and a concept we learn starting in high school.  Regardless of the epistemological debates about the scheme, it still serves to illustrate a point. Above all else, Maslow contended that we need to be safe. When you’re out of danger you can think about food and water, and when you have those things you can think about shelter, and once you have that you can turn to your psychological and emotional needs. When you’re safe, fed, out of the weather and loved you can turn your attention to a more complex human need to create.

When you have a pressing need to get warm while trapped in a blizzard you probably aren’t thinking about a poem or a story you might read, write or recite. But it also seems clear that there’s a certain middle class perspective inherent in Dr. Maslow’s scheme. For most of the world, the kind of stable conditions he believed were necessary for human beings to be free to invest their energies in creative work simply do not exist. Safety can be overridden by culture or the practical realities of meeting Maslow’s need system aren’t present. But we are social beings that are defined by our collective interactions and ability to communicate.  Language defines us as much as biology. What this suggests is that art, including poetry, goes on, no matter what, as long as people are breathing and speaking. Arguably, you may need poetry more when it is impossible to meet other basic needs, when you are uncertain of what the next day will bring but are sure that your companions are present now to give comfort.

“Giving form to the moment in which he found himself”—is that a description of a human need as fundamental as the other ones on Dr. Maslow’s list? One of the functions of language is to give voice to subjectivity so that it can be shared, to bring us out of the isolation of silence and onto common ground. The truth is that language often fails to do this well. When a business person says, “we need to leverage this opportunity,” we get very little information about just what that means: what do we mean by “leverage,” what does it have to do with the person your selling something to, why does creating a new design or technological innovation matter? We take it on faith that it’s true because we are here to make things and sell them. We trust that the statement points to something real. To speak is an incomparable act of faith.

The project of poetry, in a way, is to raise language to such a level that it can convey the precise nature of subjective experience. It is distilled thought, the refinement or language into artistic meaning. Such enchanted language could magically dissolve the barrier of skin and bone and separateness between us and render perception so evocatively that we don’t just know what it means, we feel what it means.  That is why most entrepreneurs begin a business, that is what defines a brand, not a list of attributes.

It is about individual voices learning to speak on our own terms in such a way that we create deep meaning. The other side is that we need to be able to listen. People who read imagine the lives of others, they come to internalize something more cosmic than themselves, their business, their things. Literature makes other people more real to us by creating a narrative into which we can place ourselves. It invites us to notice differences but, even more so, points toward commonality. Poetry can’t help but suggest that the subjectivity of others is real and valuable.

Poetry’s work is to make people real to us through the agency of the voice. When people are real to you, you don’t simply make things and try to sell them for the sake of the bottom line. We create, market, innovate and design with human purpose. Hence the rise in “craft” products. In the age of the collective of mass culture and mass marketing, there’s hope in that.

 

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The Stories WE Tell

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When research folks talk to clients about their findings they, we,  frequently take on the role of omnipotent, unseen author and expert. The text, sound clip, or video narrative is filtered through his or her eyes; eyes that are, if trained properly in the tenets of the anthropological discipline, self-reflexive and committed to the honest and ethical treatment of the information gathered.  And in this lie the subtle politics of power and the subject/researcher relationship.  Our words alone, for right or wrong, frequently lack credibility in the minds of business executives and designers who are intent on validating their work or personal views.  What we have to say can be ignored in the light of “common sense” experience held by the business and design teams.  Conversely, while the statements of participants have credibility, their thoughts are often seen as disjointed, irrelevant, or dismissible as singular anecdotal moments.  By constructing stories, both parties (researcher and participant) gain credibility and influence.  The narrator/editor gains the status of author and guide, moving from being perceived as irrelevant to the business situation to a position of authority.  The participant is given greater significance in that he or she is understood as representational of a wider range of meaning, cultural patterns, and behavior.  The participant or participants used in a final work convey a coherent message that can, when the “story” is told well by the author/editor, be implemented by members of the audience.  Video in particular serves to provide specific direction while enticing the audience to tread into deeper waters, thus sparking greater innovation.

In conducting fieldwork, we as anthropologists are asked to share the concrete experiences of the participants’ environment, shared behavior, language, social relations, etc.  In sharing that rich and complex world, new ideas and deeper understanding emerge on the part of the client.  We as the experts see, hear, write, and film what are the most important aspects of the field experience and distill them into something that can be used by the various members of the business, development, and design teams.  And because video is such a potentially influential tool, showing the drama of daily life, the dramatic and artistic side of the story can create waves in the business community that the traditional, omnipotent style of presentation cannot.  Presentation styles, choices of material and stories, lighting, viewing angles, organization, etc. all work to structure the portrayal of a culture or population in ways particular to the ethnographer or team of ethnographers and in ways the client can relate to.  There is an inherent story-like character to all ethnographic accounts of the field.  This is doubly so when research is presented in the video format because of limitations of the lens and the limited timeframe of most cinematic pieces; the convention of film is to present information to an array of senses in a relatively short amount of time.  This does not imply that the videos we create are fictions or that the goal is simply to dazzle the audience.  It simply means that ignoring the story-like nature of the video results in dry, dull work that does little to impact the attitudes, expectations, and development directions of our clients.

As with the impressionist tale (see VanMaanen  1988), the story is recounted including all the “odds and ends that are associated with remembered events.”  The audience is drawn into the story created both by the author/editor and participant(s).  They hear, feel, see what the researcher experienced – the audience is meant to relive the experience, insofar as that is possible, rather than interpret it.  The problems, issues, and meanings have largely been worked through in the background by the ethnographer and the story being told is meant to draw in the audience and build a collaborative solution to design and business issues.  The emotional impact of seeing and hearing such lush descriptions and events sparks interest, forcing the audience to more openly engage with the researcher, the research, and other members of the development team.

Ultimately, this means that the researcher applies conventions of art as readily as he or she does those of science. Tension must build, foreshadowing must occur, contextual details must be condensed without losing their power, and the story must have a logical flow as with a written piece.  Details and subtleties are set aside or given greater attention in regards to how they impact the audience’s ability to engage with and grasp a topic.  The overarching issues are how well the story hangs together, how easy is it to extract information (or inspire the viewer to read the larger report), and how believable the material is.  The issues by which the final material is judged are derived from cinematic and literary worlds as much as they are from the anthropological discipline.

The power of the emotionally influential, dramatic story in the beginning of the design process can mean the difference between seeing innovation and the dismissal of the research.  The story serves as a launching pad for teams attempting to turn qualitative data into something concrete that can in turn be productized or turned into a viable business model.  Bore them and there is almost no chance of affecting change.  Selective packaging of field data to exemplify generalized constructs is a standard practice, even though the precise empirical situations in which the field data are developed are perhaps far less coherent or obvious than the concepts they serve to illustrate.

Of course, it is certainly possible that less than ideal development and design occur due to mistakes of interpretation, both on the part of the researcher and the audience.  However, businesses are frequently concerned less with perfection than they are with getting a product to market.  If done well, it is unlikely that the story told will result in disastrous business models or product designs.  In the end, the fieldworker must decide whether the risk outweighs the possibility of having the entire piece of research dismissed because he or she failed to engage the audience.  The final decisions as to which stories to tell and how to tell them falls to the ethnographer’s ability to understand the audiences for whom the video will played.

Gavin