Yet, we know our eyes can be fooled quite easily. There are optical illusions which prove the tendency of our own biology to have perspective, pattern, scale and color biases which can be easily exploited to fool the mind. More interesting to me is that we have selective attention. This has been illustrated in a now famous experiment in which viewers are primed to count how many times a group of players pass a basketball around. Most people can accurately keep the count, however in doing so they completely miss the fact that a person in a gorilla suit has slowly walked through and even danced in the middle of the scene they just studied.
So, we know these things about ourselves and they call into question our own abilities to conduct research of any kind. We are left to think we’ll need to consider our own blind spots and those of the people we may interview in the course of research. We will have to be cognizant of how we lead the interviewee. We will have to be aware of how we may lead ourselves toward an expected end.
Personally, experience in meditation has shown me how awareness can be buried under years of accumulated experience. Our past experiences tend to float along the surface of the mind. As we encounter information from the external world our previous data sets rush in and try to fit themselves to the moment at hand. For example, a disheveled person walking down the street is more likely to be cued up in our mind as homeless before our mind will find any story about the person having just suffered some accident, such as a mugging or a stroke or other momentary cause for their current appearance. The same is true for the ways in which we hear the words of others. Language helps us group people, but it can also gray out our view of what could be an exceptionally rich life.
Language can imply socio-economic status and intelligence. However, the very moment we place ourselves in any relation to the subject we have entered a biased relationship, composed of all the identities we have adhered to or rejected. So what can we do to increase our ability to perceive accurately and help our interviewees represent their own experience?
Step 1: Know our perceptions are flawed
Step 2: Practice awareness (sight, smell, hearing, taste, and feeling)
Step 3: On an interviewee by interviewee basis, practice empathy so that you may prime yourself to work within the specific challenges of each.
Well...at least this is how I would do it.
Hey Seth. Nice post. I agree with your process steps, that's how I would do it too. I think trying to be open and trying to be aware of your own biases is one of the best things you can do as a researcher and as a designer.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback, Rachel
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DeleteThere are a lot of directions that question could go! I think of a theories of knowledge philosophy class I took in college - from which I left with the sense that we can never prove anything outside ourselves exists, or even for that matter ourselves. There's a more practical interpretation of a similar approach - how can we know you and I ever see the same color. We both call it Red or Blue, but what are we actually seeing? And then there's the level of subjective association and layers of meaning. We will never experience anything objectively. We always layer our entire life onto it and perceive it through so many lenses. It's an interesting question to play around with, but what does it mean in a practical sense? It seems like you're suggesting being as open to different interpretations as possible, in an attempt to connect with the world outside yourself as fully as possible. That's kind of the classic post-modern, liberal arts view of the world that I got, but is it always right? Is it maybe sometimes important to decide something is right and stick to it no matter what? To impose your reality on the world around you?
ReplyDeleteI love this idea, Ross. "Is it maybe sometimes important to decide something is right and stick to it no matter what? To impose your reality on the world around you?". More and more I see the value in that method of sticking to it and imposing my own reality...however, there remains a part of me which is unwilling to close up. I know my ability to be open has taken me places in this world. It has found me unsuspected friendships and ideas. It has probably saved my life a few times. Yet, contrarily it has kept me in a room with a negative black hole of a person much longer than I care to admit.
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