Design with people in multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural project

Design with people in multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural project
consortia. A set of Guidelines
Hanna Hasselqvist, Cristian Bogdan
KTH-Royal Institute of Technology, CSC, MID
{hannaha, cristi}@kth.se
Introduction
Multi-disciplinary projects such as EU projects are constructed based on the desire to secure financing in highly competitive grant application environments. In such circumstances, methods that imply people participation are not necessarily seen as an asset by project consortium leaders, who may come from a discipline (e.g. engineering) where participation is not important. Therefore design activities in general, and people participation in particular, are often not present in the project description, as they are not regarded as a competition-winning argument. Instead, traditional engineering requirement specification activities are planned, typically at the very early stage of the project, with little chance of iterating and improving the design, and without involving end-users.
However, after the project starts, we have seen the need to apply our competencies in involving people in design (Bogdan et al. 2009) in a cooperative design manner (Greenbaum and Kyng 1991, Carroll et al. 2000) in various ways. First, ‘usual’ end-user participation becomes necessary because many such projects aim to produce demonstrators to be tested by end-users outside the project, thus people participation is deemed suitable to design such demonstrators in a more informed manner. Second, we are increasingly regarding the consortium members as ‘stakeholders’ and ‘participants’ in the design process we drive. This is not the usual take, as one would be tempted to regard consortium colleagues as part of the design team. Their experience with design is very heterogeneous, they come from multiple disciplines, and they have their own agendas and desires in regard to what the project should produce, which should be, if possible, beyond the state of the art in their research fields. As such, we tend to increasingly regard consortium members as more like research subjects, on par with end-users, rather than as researchers.
In this paper we describe our experiences stemming from previous multi-disciplinary EU projects, and reflect upon our currently running EU project, which focuses on behavior change for sustainability. We describe a set of guidelines that we learned so far from working in such multi-disciplinary, geographically distributed projects, and we illustrate how we are adapting and refining these guidelines to our current project which we feel poses even more challenges. Previous multi-disciplinary project experiences
One early EU project experience that we were part of was a semantic desktop project running between 2006 and 2008. At the request of the Eurpoean Comission, the project proponents added a Human-Computer Interaction work package at the last moment, as a condition for the project being financed. The project cases were around Personal Information Management, and we as HCI partners ran a classic design process, working on field studies with end-users (office workers), personas, scenarios, prototypes etc, often together with end-users, using video techniques (Mackay et al. 2000, Westerlund and Lindquist 2007, Westerlund 2009). However, we felt constantly that we did not communicate with the other project partners, and that we did not understand the ‘magic’ that semantic technologies could bring. We felt that our role was reduced to graphic designers and interaction evaluators, mere consultants of the semantic desktop project, rather than having a researcher role. In retrospect, we believe that our mistake was that, while we duly studied the needs and desires of the office workers, we did not study the visions, needs and desires of the semantic technology researchers. In terms of the work guidelines we will explicitate soon, we did some design with end-users, but we were not serious enough about design with researchers. Also, recognizing the research nature of the project, design with researchers should have been the main part of the project and design with end-users should have been subsumed to it.
The following EU project that sparked our principles for design with people in multi-disciplinary consortia has unfolded between 2007 and 2010 and aimed at testing some communication theories on the test case of a “robotic shopping trolley” that was supposed to help a shopper in a supermarket. Unlike our current project, the project plan specified a HCI (actually human-robot interaction) work package, along with the usual work package called requirement specification, of the classic engineering discipline sort, which does not involve communicating with end-users. During the project kick-off meeting, a number of requirements were specified, despite the our protests as HCI partner, saying “we have not done our field studies yet”. After a few months the consortium realized that the requirements specified were incomplete, and that it is hard to specify in detail e.g. the robot touchscreen user interface. At that moment of consortium confusion, we stepped in and organized a series of previously unplanned design-with-people workshops where the touchscreen, and later the many other parts of the robot interaction were specified (Bogdan et al. 2009).
We chose to design the robot touchscreen via enactment sessions where a person from each consortium member stood around a mock-up robot (a usual shopping trolley borrowed from a supermarket), drew a touchscreen user interface on paper, and then enacted its usage as a group (Figure 1). In the enactment process, besides the person who played the user, there was a person who played the robot motors and only moved the trolley if the third person, playing the robot communication system asked them to do so, based on interpreting commands from the user. The touchscreen design and other human-robot interaction design was documented as a video prototype (Mackay et al. 2000, Westerlund 2009) which was then used as reference for the consortium.
Figure 1: Enactment during design-with-researchers. Cast: robot researcher playing user (left), gesture detection researcher playing robot motor controller (middle), software engineering researcher playing communication system (right).
Such collaborative enactment helped us prepare a pilot platform for enactment with end-users (‘usual’ design-with-people), which we performed later on. But beyond that, it taught us several lessons:
● getting at the concrete level of enacting the robot helped to achieve a common ground among the researchers coming from various backgrounds related to robotics (autonomous robotics, communication systems, gesture interfaces, human robot interaction). This helped to uncover many existing misunderstandings in the consortium, which went beyond the actual user interface
● in regard to design, researchers and end-users share many features: they have their needs and desires that may not necessarily overlap (they want to push the state of art in different directions, which may not be compatible with each other, or with the design that would be suitable for end-users), they are not knowledgeable about design outside their area, etc.
Therefore our working principles (or guidelines), even if not conscious at the time, became to (1) even if design-with-people activities are not specified in the project plan, such activities can be proposed and lead in moments of collective confusion, typically about an artifact design in the project and (2) consortium members should be regarded as stakeholders rather than as design team colleagues, because their research area influences the design, and because their design skill varies a lot. Therefore, consortium members are people to design with, along with the end-users. (3) The role of video as a sharing and documentation medium between designers and researchers, is important in such a geographically distributed consortium. It may also be important to (4) set a relation between design with researchers and design with end-users, for example in the robot project we chose to achieve a common ground with the researchers first, before going on to workshop with end-users. One can also consider working with end-users for inspiration first, or mixing researchers and end-users. However, since such projects must deliver first and foremost scientific results, it may be more important to drive the design based on design-with-researchers, and then to refine it based on design-with-end-users. The next section will describe how we currently apply these principles in our current EU project.
Design approach in our current project
Our current project is carried out by a consortium consisting of twelve European partners, with backgrounds in Computer Science, Telecommunications, Sociology, Energy and Economics. The goal of the project is to reduce energy use and carbon emission within a ‘Smart Cities’ agenda by “leveraging on the potential of social networks and communities” (as described by the grant application). In the three-year project we are working with ICT solutions for testbeds in Stockholm and two other European cities. Our main responsibility is the Stockholm test bed, which has Swedish housing cooperatives (bostadsrättsföreningar) as an important characteristic. Private apartment housing in Sweden is organized in cooperatives whereby most energy (heating) use is paid for in common, and not through individual metering. Energy is also a significant part of the housing cooperative budget.
Since the testbeds are very different from each other, and many of the consortium members are not familiar with the local cultures, forms of home ownership and energy services, it is an ongoing challenge to adapt the design of the service and system to the local contexts. In addition, the project has a classic engineering “requirement specification” work package, therefore no activities to interact with end-users or study their context are included in the design and development phase of the project, and end-user participation is only planned for in the project evaluation phase. The first formal design task of the project is to create use cases and service requirements as part of the requirement specification work package, which we encountered in our previous EU projects as well. The mix of cultures and disciplines in the project has caused a lot of confusion in regard to the use cases, and this was the point at which we could step in with our design-with-people techniques. We decided that uses cases are too formal and too small in granularity, hence we proposed to try to arrive at concrete shared representations in the form of narratives (called “user stories” in the project). In regard to the characters involved these narratives, while we could not do a field study and derive enough data to make proper personas, we started by creating a set of characters involved in energy use in a housing cooperative. These characters may later evolve to become proper personas if we get enough data from the field.
In the narrative-creation workshop with the consortium members it became obvious that the group’s knowledge about the testbed culture in relation to home ownership and collective energy practices was too limited to create the desired stories. It was therefore decided to appoint a “story responsible” for each testbed, from the respective culture. The rationale is that since stories are written at such a concrete level, the cultural aspects must be separated to start with. At later stages, common project-level aspects (including use cases) can be abstracted from the stories.
As story responsibles for the Stockholm testbed, we started workshops with only project members familiar with the Swedish culture and context. For the workshop we prepared props representing the characters, the places they move between and technologies they might use. With the props the participants concretized the stories of how the characters interact with each other through various tools and which behaviours this can address. The stories were documented with video and rewritten as a first version of the use case deliverable. The written stories were then shared with all consortium members for feedback and further development. We received very little input on the stories, therefore the next step, based on previous experiences, is to use video rather than text. Since we are communicating and designing with people spread out all over Europe, video can be a suitable way of more directly engaging consortium members in the process (Bogdan et al. 2012). Video may also better support understanding of the specific context we are working with.
After establishing a first draft of the user stories internally in the project we proceeded to take them to the end-users. Using the props, we made a video presentation of the stories and we have shown it to a number of representatives from housing cooperatives in the testbed. We will later use the same props to create new stories together with the end-users to make the stories more relevant to the people and context. It may seem like a backwards process to start with design within the consortium and only later engage end-users, but we have found it necessary to work in this way because of the limitations of the project. Within an iterative process, the input from the end-users can still be incorporated in the solution. For this we are planning on using video as a form of dialogue between designers, researchers and end-users.
Figure 2: A sample of the props used for the workshop and video making.
Let us revisit our guidelines as derived from our previous projects. From the outset, it is clear that power relations within the consortium led to a traditional project planning focused on requirement specification. However, when confusion arose within the consortium on agreeing on use cases, our design-with-people experience came in handy and we were slowly able to take over the process. We first resorted to design with researchers to get to an initial version of the user stories. We then decided to represent the working artifacts (stories) as video and show them to both end-users and researchers in the geographically distributed setting. We are planning to set up a relation between design with researchers and design with end users by successfully revising our videos with end users and researchers, through a “dialog of videos” (cf. Bogdan et al. 2012). To these multi-disciplinarity-focused guidelines we are now planning to add guidelines referring to multi-culturality, sustainability and behavior change.
Conclusion
Designing for behaviour change is difficult, and even more so when activities to include the people whose behaviours we are studying are not formally a part of the project. We have developed a set of guidelines that we find useful for increasing user participation in projects where a design focus is lacking. An important part of this, particularly in projects that are both multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural, is to consider all members of the project team as people to design with. This approach and the guidelines are being adapted to our current project and we believe they could benefit from other approaches to and methods for designing with people.
References
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