Slaves of the Feed – This is not the realtime we’ve been looking for
Thomas Petersen, founder and partner of Danish digital creative agency Hello discusses our digital life and ponders possible ways to solve the problem of information overload with design.

Re-thinking Interaction Design
Johnny Kolko claims interaction design should move away from talking both branding and user experience. I don’t agree with everything Kolko writes, specifically I find he’s muddling macro and micro perspectives on the role of interaction design (there’s both a critique of UX and branding as ways of maximizing profits, and a critique of using design for that purpose in the first place, and neither are fully explored), but there are some interesting points made about design’s role in culture.

Don Norman’s attack on design research, and ensuing debate
If you have missed this somehow, the debate goes on about what actually drives innovation, technology or design – and whether there’s actually any point in ethnographic and similar research into the consumer’s deep, subconscious wishes. Norman’s answer is basically no, as he finds that technology more often than not creates the needs it fills. Design research is only useful for small incremental changes, he claims (compare this to what Roberto Verganti says in Design Driven Innovation, a book I wrote about earlier this year!) Three responses to this claim: Bruce Nussbaum, who disagrees, Adam Richardson, who thinks Norman’s definition of design research is too narrow, and Steve Portigal, who raises some interesting questions around several points in Norman’s piece.

(Use fullscreen…)

David Armano – Thinking Visually

Chris Finlay – Visual Thinking

Kelsey Roger – Visual and Creative Thinking: What We Learned from Peter Pan and Willy Wonka

Sara L. Beckman & Michael Barry: Innovation as a Learning Process: Embedding Design Thinking

2007 Article
Article in the California Management Review linking innovation, design thinking and ethnographic methods. Awarded the 2009 Accenture award by CMR. Authors work at PointForward, where you can find lots of short case stories of ethno-informed design.

Download article PDF, or, yes there’s a lazy option, see the Vimeo video.

AIGA: Design Meets Research

2008 Article
Article from AIGA giving a concise history of the evolution of market research for design and discussing the pros and cons of different approaches. Argues for ethnographic methods as a way to dig deeper into a consumer’s mind.

Read it here

Dori Tunstall: Design anthropology: What can it add to your design practice?

Adobe Design Center Tutorial
Quote extensive introduction to design anthropology (not a tutorial of any sort, in fact), underlying ideas, challenges, possibilities, etc. Written by Associate Professor of Design Anthropology at University of Illinois Dori Tunstall, who’s also worked for Sapient, Arc Worldwide, and AIGA’s Design for Democracy.

Read it here. The author’s blog, posts tagged ‘design anthropology’ here.

University of Dundee: Master’s Degree in Design Ethnography

Degree
If you can’t get enough of design + ethnography, well, there’s the opportunity of getting a master’s in design ethnography from the University of Dundee, UK. (Actually it sounds quite tempting … I love Scotland.)

More about the degree.

(A little disclaimer: sometimes, the design world uses the word ethnography a bit more liberally than I would. I’d say some degree of immersion would be necessary? Sometimes, the simple word observation would seem to cover some of these practices just fine. Which is fine. Non-participatory observation is fine. If you’re designing new airport signage, say, you’re very much helped by observing how many travellers that are currently confusedly circling the arrivals hall hunting for a restroom. But it won’t really help you gain much deeper insight, will it? Anyway, in one or two of the links in this review (not necessarily in this part though) it’s not all that clear how ethnographic their ethnography is, but the links might still provide for some interesting thoughts.)

Christina Wasson: Ethnography in the Field of Design

2000 Article
Much quoted academic text on the use of ethnography in a design context. Christina Wasson is an anthropologist, and associate professor of anthropology at UNT. She’s has worked for E-Lab, a design firm that uses anthropological research to develop new product ideas, where she developed an interest in design anthropology. She’s also done consulting class projects for clients like Motorola and Microsoft.

Download PDF of article here, or if you unlike me don’t have a certain sentimental fondness for badly scanned academic article PDFs, it’s online here.

Leslie MacNeil: Design Ethnography: Strategy for Visual Communications

2009 Graduate Thesis
Very, very good text that covers just about every way design and ethnography can meet (at least when speaking about tangible design and not applied design thinking), including case studies of designer-ethnographer collaborations. And, which makes it even more relevant for me, it specifically discusses visual communication, as opposed to product design which otherwise tends to be synonymous with “design” in this context (all those mobile phones!). Academia-phobics have nothing to fear, either, from downloading this since it’s a beautiful and inviting booklet designed by MacNeil herself.

Download PDF here.

IDEO + WKK Foundation: Tangible Steps Toward Tomorrow

2007 Case Study
IDEO is a human-centered design agency more or less impossible to miss talking about these subjects. In this case study, they’ve used ethnographic methods + design thinking to come up with solutions for evolving early education. Do explore other case studies from IDEO as well, many are interesting.

Download PDF case story here.

AIGA + Cheskin: An Ethnography Primer

2007 Information Leaflet
Quite basic primer, veered towards how design can be helped by ethnographic insights. As it’s targeted to designers and pitches ethnography to them in their daily practice, the role of designers solving other types of problems with the aid of ethnographic fieldwork (as in the IDEO case study) is not covered, however, it’s a nice introduction text. Cheskin is a US-based consumer insights consultancy.

Download PDF leaflet here.