Design Ethanography - Brian Loranger

Brian Loranger specialises in methods to find out what people do, how they do it, and, perhaps most importantly, why they do it.

Brian proposed the "top-down" approach to design process. He has an understanding of how a minute problem with a design can compound in to a larger problem, affecting the success of the design. This seemed to me to be the best approach to product design, and although Brian only broached the tip of the iceberg as far as the subject is concerned, I found it very useful.

So what methods can we use to achieve this? Anthropologists often embed themselves in a culture to learn about it, perhaps going to live for months or years with a South American tribe. Designers don't really have time for this, so we have to find other approaches. One vital point is that people's behaviour is changed by your presence - people are not going to behave normally if you sit in the corner of a room with a notebook and record all their actions.

A good example is empathetic development, or putting yourself in the user's situation. Designers at Ford used a suit - developed by anthropologists - to simulate old age, allowing them to better understand how this affects their interaction with a car.

This reminded me of a presentation by Seymour Powell, who showed how they developed products. Rather than asking or interviewing people, they watched them using things. Ask someone if there is anything wrong with their iron, for example, and they will probably say no. But watch them trying to use one, and watch them struggle to fill it up with water through the stupid little hole that all irons seem to have for no discernible reason. Seymour Powell discovered this through observation and designed a product to suit.

But sometimes, interview is the only option available. Brian talked about "grounded theory" and how to use it to get the most from an interview. The idea is to go in to the field without much knowledge - that way you don't develop any preconceived ideas. Go out, observe and then develop focus questions. The idea is to ask only a few generalised questions - open, not closed, to get a wholistic viewpoint. Minimise note taking as well - use recording technology so you can focus on interviewing rather than writing. 

I found Brian's lecture very interesting and will no doubt find his methods useful now and in future projects.

Cheaply made, or made to be cheap?

So, I've been thinking about my study for my end of semester project. I was thinking about the difference between cheaply made products, and products that are made to be cheap. What does that mean? Well, I'm interested in the design of the product. There are two ways to make a product cheaper to produce:

1. Use the cheapest materials and the cheapest methods. This almost certainly will result in something rubbish that won't last and is ultimately a waste of resources. The standard made-in-China McDonald's toy.

2. Very carefully and intelligently design the product to be cheap to make. Design it to work well with cheaper materials; minimise the material needed; design for cheaper tooling; design for less waste. The list goes on.

I will be looking in to this topic further to see what examples I can find.

The Aesthetics of Technology

This week Hugh Pizey talked to us about the aesthetics of technology - does form follow function?

2001 - A Space Odyssey

Ben Craven - Magnitudes

This week, we had Ben Craven providing a very interesting lecture on gauging the feasibility of ideas. Often it is hard to get a scale of something - for example, how much does it cost? Precise numbers may be difficult to work out, but sometimes you can work out a good estimate - is it £100 or £100,000?

The point here is to start to put numbers in to an idea to quickly find out if the idea is feasible or not. Ben pointed out how he has seen final year students nearing the end of a project who still don't have a vague idea if their idea is feasible or not!

Exact numbers are not needed - usually educated guesses will give and answer at least in the right order of magnitude.

Example - can we get power from closing filing cabinet drawers?

Let's assume that the drawer weighs 20kg (this is being deliberately optimistic.)

Let's say the drawer moves at 1m/s.

Using Ke = 0.5*m*v^2 gives 10J per drawer close.

Let's assume (optimistically again) that the drawer is closed every 5 minutes for 8 hours every day. This is about 100 times per day, so the total energy is 10J*100 = 1kJ.

Dividing this by the time in a day gives a power output of 0.01W.

So even with optimistic assumptions, and assuming that the process was 100% efficient, we still get a useless power output, and the idea is not viable.

It works the other way too - if you use pessimistic assumptions and still get good results, the idea is likely to be viable.

Ben also raised the point of the difference between accuracy and precision:
Accuracy is how close you are to the actual answer;
Precision is the "smallness" of the units used.

Using the same techniques, the class worked out approximate values for a wide variety of things in the lecture. These included the number of breaths taken in a year, the mass of 1km of road and the steps taken to walk 100 miles. More worryingly, the area of land needed to grow enough biomass to power the UK worked out to be roughly the same as the area of the UK. Similarly, we would need to cover all of the land of the UK with wind turbines if we were to power the country with them alone, and this still probably wouldn't be enough.

Overall this was a fascinating and useful lecture in how to see if an idea will work - an extremely useful tool for a product design engineer.