Don't Personify Me: Design Research Conference report

Every year in Chicago, the Institute of Design, the home of the New Bauhaus in America, hosts several spring and fall conferences. I have been attending most of them since about 2006. This year, the spring conference focus is on the future of Design Research.

Monday was a day of elective workshops with the formal conference happening on Tuesday and Wednesday. I decided to attend the workshop titled "Don't Personify Me: Evoking the User in Ideation".

Since my personal experience is "persona creation = big time waster", I was eager to sign up thinking the afternoon would involve a lot of useful discussion about how to talk employers and clients out of spending time on this technique. WRONG!

After the usual round of introductions, the moderaters quickly dealt with personnas by saying something like, "Knowing that Sammy G made XX salary, drove such-and-such car, had N children and liked to do Y in his spare time never helped me design anything." AMEN.

Creating personnas means spending a lot of busy work creating a fantasy removed from the real users which dilutes the value you got from the original design research and usually, inadvertently adds in your own biases.

There were about 25 design professionals from around the world in the audience and they didn't seem to have any problem with this point of view, so we moved on to talking about the real problem...keeping the design research findings available to the stakeholders.

Research findings may be statistical, representative (documents and forms), narrative (journals and interviews) or illustrative (photos and videos); the main challenge is finding ways to easily reference them throughout the project to get a reality check on decisions.

With that in mind, the workshop moved on to its sub-titled promise, "Evoking the User in Ideation". Ideation, or brainstorming, is simply, whatever you do to brainstorm possibilities with whomever you need to involve from your initial set of subjects, researchers and stakeholders. Note that the keyword is "possibilities". At this stage, all you want to do is list out anything that is possible as a problem, or a need, or a solution, or an opportunity. Evaluation happens later after you've allowed time to recycle through the possibilities for refinements.

So we formed into groups and thought about what we would do to structure an ideation session. In short, it was a very useful exercise in thinking about what you need to do to facilitate any successful learning/sharing meeting, very similar to things I learned in my TWU "Train-the-trainer" classes for developing course and lesson plans.

We talked about the natural sequence of such meetings and the five stages the facilitator had to plan for:

Preparation: Is there anything you want attendees to study or do before the event?

Entrance: When attendees arrive, what will you do to break the ice and kick off the session?

Engagement: What do you see the attendees doing during the session? What will you do to keep them involved in the proceedings?

Reflection: What will the participants do to review and digest the results?

Extension: How will the group handle unresolved issues? What will you do keep the connections alive?

For each of these phases, the facilitator should plan in advance what they might need to handle the situation: how do they want the participants to interact - formal seating or free-form movement? What activities do they need to assign and instruct? What tools, supplies, technology, and environment setup should be on hand? What challenges and issues might they have to confront? What follow-up might be needed?