Design Thinking Week

Design thinking refers to creative strategies designers use during the process of

designing.It has also been developed as an approach to resolve issues outside of
professional design practice, such as in business and social contexts.

Empathy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG46IwVfSu8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_-rNd7h6z8

Ethnographic Interviews - Framing

The Ethnographic Interview - Framing
source: University of California San Diego http://ucsd.edu/
The Big Picture
For generations, "participant observation" has been the prime source of data for
cultural anthropologists. This normally involves residence among one's informants
for a long time, typically a year or two, sometimes ten or more. For class purposes,
this is not feasible, and data collection is more dependent upon formal interviews.
Informants are usually delighted to talk to you, especially to tell you about things
that they are expert about and interested in, such as themselves. However never
forget that they are you doing you a favor, however much they may enjoy it. Be
courteous, obliging, and interested. Bringing them cookies is absolutely in order.
So is thanking them profusely.
Framing The Interview
Informants' Comfort. Formal interviews require the full knowledge and
cooperation of the informant. To conform to modern "human subjects research"
standards, informants should always be told that there is no obligation to answer
any particular question, and that the interview can be stopped at any time. (This is
different from journalism or police interrogation. Journalists and police
interrogators have standards too, but they are not considered to be dealing with
"human subjects" and therefore have less obligation to make informants feel
comfortable.)
Informants' Privacy. The informant should be told what level of confidentiality to
expect. For example, "I don't plan to discuss what you have told me in a way that
can be traced to you. Or, "Barring the unforeseen, only my professor and I will be
able to link your name to the material you provide to me." Or, "I expect to discuss
specific cases only with pseudonyms."
Time Commitment. You should tell your informant in advance roughly how much
time you think an interview will require, so the informant knows how to plan and
how extensively to answer your questions. (In contrast, be sure that you yourself
have enough time for it to go much longer if the informant turns out to be
providing good information and enjoying doing so. Some informants love talking
and can be longwinded.)
It is possible to conduct an interview over Skype or on the telephone. It is not as
fecund as a face-to-face interview, but it can still be useful. Interaction through a
keyboard, however, should not be considered an interview. It is simply not realistic
to imagine that your informant will type more than s/he will talk, and pretending
that an Email exchange is all your informant understands about something is unfair
both to your informant and to your reader. Conquer your inner wimp and face the
world of living humans.
Preview of the Topic. Tell the informant ahead of time what the broad topic is that
you are interested in. That way you will probably avoid being turned down after
you start if the discussion goes in directions your informant didn't anticipate.
Sometimes you are interviewing an acknowledged expert about something (a
famed potter, for example), and most of the interview will probably focus on that
person's expertise. Sometimes an expert is in the position of speaking for an
institution (a person such as the founder of a company or the head of an office).
That is more difficult, since such a person may try to make the institution look
good, or anyway, not to reveal anything that might make it look bad. In these
examples, the potter may be happy to tell you how many pots break during firing.
The head of an office will probably not tell you how many people get fired for
various reasons. (That is one of the reasons why journalists often like to talk
to former politicians and military officers rather than the ones still in office.)
Whether this complicates your project depends, obviously, on the goals of your
interviewing.
At other times you may interview a person who does not consider himself to have
any special knowledge of what you say you want to know about, and who tells you
to go find an expert. ("I don't know much about history. Go look it up in the
library.") To avoid that reaction, keep the topic broad, but also stress that you are
interested in the informant's particular perspective or in what the informant may
have heard or learned from others. (For example: "We have been studying about
the goddess Mazu, and I am really interested in what individual Taiwanese people
know about her or think about her and how they learned about her.")

Conducting The Interview Tips

Non-Directive Interviewing. In general, you hope to learn from informants
something you don't already know. This means it is important to ask questions in
such a way that you don't accidentally "lead" informants into saying what you
already think rather than what they mean. In other words, you need to conduct
"non-directive" interviewing.
A non-directive approach would perhaps ask, "Tell me a little bit about relations
between Chinese and Japanese at that time." This doesn't presume that relations
were good or bad, or even that good-bad is the relevant axis on which to describe
them. (You may have surprises. For example: "I thought the Japanese soldiers
were incredibly cool, and I felt really inadequate not being able to speak
Japanese.) Once the informant starts on a discussion, you can then ask for
examples or clarifications that gradually elicit what it is that you are trying to learn.
Directive Interviewing. Despite its advantages, non-directive interviewing is not
usually very efficient at getting around to what you most want to know. You nearly
always need some specific questions to set the topic or to follow up or clarify. For
example imagine that you are eliciting a life history and have reached the school
years. You might say, "I'd like to start by learning a little about what your school
was like when you lived there."
Sustaining Flow
Most informants prove pretty talkative if they are on a topic they both know and
care about. HOWEVER:
Normal people don't like talking to the wall. You need to show continuing interest
with nods and grunts and little conversational tags like, "I see" and
"Really?" ("Hallelujah!" is a bit over the top, but you get the idea.)
Sometimes repeating a striking word that the informant has used will result in an
elaboration. For example:
"She gave Jeff some money."
"Money?"
"Yeah, about $20, I think; that's all she had."
Such elaborations by informants can often lead to surprisingly useful discussions.
Some other useful ways to keep people talking if they seem to run dry are
questions like the following:
Why did that happen?
Tell me a little more about that.
What happened next?
How did that make you feel?
How did he explain that to his brothers?
A yes-no question is rarely useful except for lawyers and congressmen trying to
bully witnesses. That is not your goal. One problem is that you are formulating the
answer when you create the yes-no question, which means it did not originate with
the informant. For another, a simple yes or no does not tell you how the informant
actually understood the question, if at all. (Especially if there is a language barrier,
saying "yes" is often a polite way of indicating that one did not understand the
question.)
A good rule of thumb is that if an informant answers "yes," it doesn't count as
information. If an answer is "no" you need to ask for a clarification of how you got
it wrong. A better rule of thumb is to avoid such questions.
Pauses.
Some people have higher tolerance for pauses in a conversation than other people
do. The fact that your informant stops talking for a time doesn't necessarily mean
you should move on right away. It may be no more than a normal pause to organize
what to say next.
Actual lags in the conversation are opportunities. Sometimes an informant has said
something provocative but somewhat beside the point at the time. If so, you may
want to shift to that topic when the conversation seems to run down later. As an
attentive interviewer you may wish to return when opportunity presents itself.
("We never really got back to the issue of your violin lessons." "I don't think I really
understand why you didn't think he should know about it.")
Biased Questions.
We all know that how a question is worded can affect the answer. That is why the
opposite of "right to life" is "right to choose" when both phrases refer to the
legalization of abortion, or why "freedom of religion" is sometimes a code word for
opposition to "gay rights." However even very minor shadings of difference can
affect the outcome of a question.

Organizing Your Notes and Being an Expert

Once you have interviews from more than one informant, your interviews are
your claim to fame because they are a data source available to nobody else.
They are subject matter about which you are the unique world authority.
Whatever their limitations, they are what justify your claim to the attention of
your readers or listeners. They are critical supports for your best analyses
and they are the first-order disconfirmations of your wrong hunches. They
should be as organized and helpful to you as you can make them. You don't
have to put them on an altar and sacrifice chocolate-chip cookies to them,
but treat them with the respect they deserve.
1. The first step in that is making sure they are well organized and adequately
indexed so that you can find information when you look for it. Beyond simply
backing stuff up, three "best practices" should be observed almost fanatically:
2. Assume that your information retrieval system may some day have to
accommodate thousands of pages/bytes. Paper pages need to be uniquely
numbered. Computer files need to be well organized. Do it immediately! For
paper notes, create an index and update it whenever stuff is added. For
computer files, identify keywords and put them all in caps. List them
somewhere. If you collect pictures, pamphlets, or other materials, have a
system to link them to your notes. It should be infinitely expandable.)
(Suggestion: I have found it useful to tag everything possible with a six-digit
date: YYMMDD. These can be sorted in order by even a very stupid computer,
are unambiguous for a century, and can easily link things like pictures, diary
entries, pamphlets, regular fieldnotes, or even financial records.)
3. The key to all this is to assume that you will look back at your notes fifty
years from now and will have forgotten entirely whatever was not written
down, including any abbreviations or arbitrary conventions that you adopt.
(Don't assume you will remember anything at all. If you plan on being dim or
 dead by the time the notes are next used, you will make the written lists and
explanations that can avoid the embarrassment of forgetting what conventions
you adopted)
4.Assume that all computer operating systems and data standards will have
changed before you are through with the notes, and that you will need to be
able to convert them from one system to another against the resistance of the
computer industry. (Don't use fly-by-night software. Don't depend on
metadata, "tags," or "smart quotes" for anything that matters. Stick with
mainstream file formats.)

If you make those three assumptions, you will soon find yourself
organizing things adequately. Well, actually, you should probably also
assume that if you procrastinate in organizing and indexing, you will be
eaten by a big, bad wolf.

Nethunting - Ethnography Online

Nethunting is the art of finding relevant information online. It uses ethnography
principles applied to to online environments.
Part of your team will go out and conduct real time interviews while two or three of
you will stay in the room connect to the main social networks and reserach on
relevant opinions related to your DTW18 challenge