Methods
This section gives an overview of some of the more unusual design methods I have experience with or have developed myself. These are methods that have been tailored to the specific situation they were deployed in order to gather insights, facilitate participation or communicate understandings to a broader audience.
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User Portraits and Practice Portraits
User portraits are and alternative to personas where a real person who represents a typical user is portrayed. In the Pre-user project we realised understanding the interactions between people, especially doctors and patients, were a critical part of the process of beginning to use medical devices, so we created ‘practice portraits’ of typical and exemplary interactions that we had documented in our fieldwork.
One of the most ambitious experimental methods I have explored was the creation of an exhibition as a form of organisational communication. The exhibition combined stories from fieldwork with design concepts that represented a range of different design strategies and was intended to be provocative in order to challenge visitors to reflect deeply on the insights and ideas presented.
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Co-Analysis
Co-analysis is a powerful approach for bringing fieldwork insights back to others within organisations, which gives them ownership over the knpwedge developed. The A-frame method takes raw stories from the field and gets participants to analysis them, first individually and then in a group. It can also be used with the original informants as a way to get further reflections on their own practices.
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Reflective Design Games
Design games can be used to facilitate participation in many parts of the design process, from insight sharing to ideation. Here we used design game like tools to help workshop participants reflect on specific issues we were interested in. These games were also a form of indirect enquiry, serving a double purpose as prototypes for communication tools for health care professionals.
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Critical Artefacts
The Critical artefacts method is one of indirect enquiry in which provocative and often unrealistic product concepts are used to prompt informants to reflect in a different way on issues that relate to technologies. We also used this method to abstract potentially sensitive issues so we could introduce them in an non-confrontational way in co-design sessions.
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Doll Scenarios
Doll scenarios is a method that was developed at the Danish design school for working through ideas and scenarios in co-design sessions. We used it with employees at Oticon to get their input and visions for how some of the design strategies that had emerged form the fieldwork could be developed.
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Like most design researchers I have experimented with design probes, this is a particularly interesting example we handed out to informants in the USA as part of the Pre-user project. While on one hand the kit served as an auto-ethnography tool in order to get closer to the experience of living with hearing difficulties as they emerge in everyday life. However it was also a way to test self reflection tools that would encourage people with hearing loss to think about how it was causing them problems.
