The art of making always fascinates us as design researchers. And also, we should never overlook the creativity people have to offer as research participants. Even in a remote research setting, a simple element of physical making opens up an extra dimension to the stories we collect as data.
In this world where efficiency and fast-pace seems to dominate all aspects of our lives – including design research – it’s worth creating moments that allow participants to pause and think about the stories that reveal relevant aspects of their lives, feelings, and deep emotions through a bit of physical story making. With research becoming more and more hybrid, we have been experimenting with what that means for co-creation.
Offline co-creation with physical prompts
STBY has a long tradition of bringing design elements to our research activities. We always have so much fun making stimuli for each workshop and interview we carry out in person. Both the STBY team and participants enjoy using them to facilitate conversations as well as to take notes (see examples here). We have the participants add to our stimuli, shape it, modify it, and make it their own. The simplicity of pen and paper always works its magic, the attention put into making these prompts is much loved by our participants.
Online co-creation with digital prompts
In more recent times, we moved quite some of our research activities to online. Like many of you, we were super excited to have discovered the magical world of online digital whiteboards, like Miro, Mural, Jamboard, you name it.
At first, we tried to make online co-creation fun and visually appealing, by adding metaphors of real life workshops into the 2D world. We also created virtual sitting rooms using colour and shapes to help people navigate around different virtual ‘tables’ and ‘worksheets’. Colourful Miro boards were designed and used alongside Zoom calls. Participants usually carried out simple actions on these boards such as; adding post-it notes, writing text, moving an item, or uploading images.
Hybrid co-creation by mixing physical making and remote research
Experimenting with online prompts was great fun for us, but we also noticed that this type of remote set up can be challenging for some. Participants with lower digital confidence can get frustrated, which can impact their engagement in conversation. We also found that people can get distracted by unfamiliar technology, which detracts from what we are really doing the research for: the conversation, the stories, and the imagination. So we wondered, how can we bring the physical making into a remote research setting?
In 2022 we did some experiments to further evolve this idea:
Experiment 1:
For one project we organised an online workshop with 6 participants on Zoom. We knew beforehand that participants would have a mix of digital capabilities. We added a simple element to the online group workshop by asking participants to bring a pen and paper to the session. We offered two options to all participants, they can join us on the Miro board if they feel comfortable with it (and a few did) or they can copy the framework we showed on the screen onto the paper and write down their contributions as we go through the workshop.
People scribbled notes during the workshop and easily picked out key points to share and discuss with the group. At the end of the session, we asked everyone to take a photo of what they had written down and email it to us.
It’s a simple yet effective tweak, which gave participants a lot more control of how they interacted with stimulus during the session.
As researchers, we didn’t have to worry about people failing to use Miro during the session anymore. After this success, we decided to push this further in our second experiment.
Experiment 2:
Tania Ignat; who was an intern at STBY at the time, added a few modifications based on Experiment 1 to bring physical prompts to her one-to-one online interviews as part of her intern project. It looked at people’s perceptions of working after retirement in an ageing society.
The prompts are still simple to make, which requires stationary accessible from their homes or work from home space: 3 A4 paper, 1 scissors, 1 black pen, 1 red pen and 1 green pen.
In the first part of the interview, the researcher asked the participants to draw a ‘life timeline’ (starting with their first job, up until the present day) while also drawing a few sad/happy faces as references to their experiences regarding work/life balance. And then holding the drawing in front of the camera while telling the stories of these up and down moments to the researcher.
In the second part of the interview, the participants are then asked to create 8 cards out of folding an A4 piece of paper and then cut it with scissors. They are then asked to bring another sheet of A4 paper, and draw 2 lines to divide the paper into 3 areas where they are then asked to imagine future scenarios of working after the ‘retirement’ age. The participants are asked to make up a little future live events and map these against the 3 areas.
With 8 cards the 1 piece of A4, we managed to create a board game like set up for participants to play with their imagined future selves.
Though it sounded a bit complicated to carry out, the participants found the exercise very meaningful. It’s not the instinctual response they usually give in an interview, speaking out whatever comes to their mind first. They had some time to write, to think where they placed these cards before they could explain to the research what’s behind these decisions. It adds a reflective meaning to the stories – a quiet dialogue with oneself in the few minutes they are given to make and play with these cards.
Conclusion
This hybrid way of combining online and offline exchanges works very well for both the research team and the participants. It helps to make the dynamic and experience of the session fun and stimulating. Going back and forth between a joint conversational style and moments for personal reflection and tinkering, makes the stories we collect more rich, personal and inspiring.
Tania Ignat & Qin Han