Design Research: War Stories

Steve Portigal is the principal of the consulting firm which bears his name.  Portigal provides customer research, advising, workshops, training and keynote presentation service as well as maintains a blog related to his field.  According to his brief bio;

"Steve is the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights. He is fascinated by the stuff of a culture - its products, companies, consumers, media, and advertising. All these artifacts and the relationships between them are the rules that define a culture -- the stuff makes the culture, but it is the culture that makes the stuff.

Steve has an informal Museum of Foreign Grocery Products, a fun diversion that celebrates cultural differences through mundane consumer goods.

Steve takes pictures steadily whether for consulting work, travel, or as part of everyday life. Photography helps him discover another "frame" on our surroundings and to practice seeing the world differently.

Steve built one of the first online communities (Undercover, a Rolling Stones fan group) in 1992, nurturing it from a time when the Internet was an underground academic technology through to today, as part of a global info-infrastructure."

On his blog he has a collection of more than 50 short stories submitted by various Design Researchers about their experiences conduction research in the field.

I read a few and found this one by Lisa Aronson Fitch to reveal just how surprising it can be to go into a stranger's home for an interview.  For Lisa and her research partner, the challenge came through an innocent child who asked to kiss her and her partner as a greeting at the front door.  It raised all sorts of boundary issues which reverberated throughout the interview, which was repeatedly interrupted by the child who wanted more kisses.  Lisa clearly disagreed with the kissing but knew she ran the risk of damaging rapport with the interviewee and therefor the quality of the data to be captured as well.  

What is there to do in this sort of scenario?  How do you maintain your own personal boundaries when you have a task to complete for the greater good of a larger project?  This is life though...isn't it?  We are constantly making quick decisions about boundaries.  These decisions can be subtle or grossly obvious.  Our sensitivity to them and relative performance is effected by our ability to be present or not.  This can be difficult and requires a good knowledge of our own values and boundaries.  

We rely on social norms to help us with much of our boundary formation and even with the development of our own values.  If that doesn't ring true for you please see the long famous Stanford Prisoner Experiment.   If you are going out in the field and you have a role to play, the Stanford Experiment should be revealing.  We are always at risk of losing touch with our own values.  A line which may be crystal clear to you in your own bedroom can suddenly fluctuate depending on a change in local social dynamics.  

Managing ourselves in relation to others is big part of design research.  After reading this short story by Fitch, I am actually looking forward to interviews as exercises in my own value and boundary management.