Creating Socionas

Abstract

This work presents the research into Creating Socionas, a step-by-step approach to building creative understanding of user experience in the early stages of new product development (NPD). Creative understanding is the combination of a rich, cognitive and affective understanding of the other, and the ability to translate this understanding into products and services that are pleasurable and easy to use (Wright and McCarthy, 2005). It draws on information about the user and his/her everyday life, and it includes inspiration for design and empathy or “a feel” for the user. Several approaches to building creative understanding of user experience have been developed over the past years, including critical design, generative design research and empathic design (Sanders, 2006). They have been successfully used by their creators in projects for and with clients in the industry. Despite these successful efforts, designers and user researchers may experience two important challenges when trying to implement and practice the approaches in an industrial organization. The first challenge is to make sense of users’ experiences for design. Recent societal issues and socio-technological developments, including the mass adoption of real-time social media services, have made “the social” an essential topic for design. The social denotes the idea that human activity is fundamentally social, as opposed to individual. In the design research literature, it has been suggested that holistic approaches to understanding user experience that include the social are needed to develop products and services that delight users. However, most existing approaches to understanding user experience for design build on frameworks of user experience that focus on the individual, and leave design teams unequipped for understanding the social. The second challenge is to build creative understanding of user experience in the context of NPD practice. Existing approaches to understanding user experience often suggest that members of a design team adopt the role of user researcher, and directly interact with users to ensure that the user perspective is included in design. In NPD practice this interaction is not always feasible as the user research is frequently sourced from a third party, e.g., an external consultancy or an internal user research team. Thus the users researchers who perform the user research and the design team members who manage the concept design are usually not the same people in NPD practice. This means that the user data that has been gathered in user research needs to be shared with the design team. The richness and basis for building creative understanding is often lost in this process. The current research seeks to address these two challenges; it investigates what design teams need to understand about user experience to develop products that delight users, and how they can build this understanding under the constraints of NPD practice (chapter 1). “Creating Socionas” is proposed as a possible solution. Creating Socionas is an approach to building creative understanding that addresses the two challenges by offering a conceptual framework that helps designers and user researchers to make sense of user experience for design, plus five steps that guide them through the process of building this understanding under the constraints of NPD practice. The approach builds on empathic design – an approach to designing for experience that is characterized by a design attitude of respecting users, being committed to understanding users’ needs and desires, building holistic understanding of users’ activities, and relying on personal insight and creativity (Mattelmäki, 2006). The research into Creating Socionas proceeded through cycles of developing and evaluating the approach in ongoing NPD projects at Philips. Design practice and design theory were closely integrated in the research process. In chapter 2, the research approach is described as research through design, by which I mean, “generating new knowledge or understanding through cycles of developing and evaluating experiential artefacts and process prototypes”. The chapter explains how action research methodology was used as a framework for practicing a research through design approach in addressing the research questions, after which it introduces eight empirical cases at Philips in which instantiations of Creating Socionas were developed and evaluated. The following four chapters explain the development of Creating Socionas and the knowledge and insights that were generated in the projects at Philips. Chapter 3 provides a critical reflection on the use of user-centered design approaches in industry, and the differences between industry and academic research settings. In this chapter, we review the literature of empathic design, and discuss our own experiences with introducing and practicing empathic design in several NPD projects at Philips Research over the past years. Having experimented with empathic design in an industrial context, we experienced success but also encountered eight challenges that relate to discrepancies between the theory of empathic design as described in literature on the one hand, and the application of empathic design in an industrial context on the other. An example is the earlier described discrepancy between empathic design’s advise to engage design team members as multi-disciplinary experts in user research on the one hand, and the common practice of sourcing user research from external consultancies or internal user research teams on the other, which raised questions of who, when and how to engage design team members in user research. Three cultural and methodological changes are proposed for addressing these challenges in the future. These include changing focus (a) from rational approaches to including empathic approaches, (b) from users as informers to users as partners in new product development (NPD) practice, and (c) from being informed of user research to being engaged in user research. The first two changes are consistent with those proposed by Sanders (2006), which endorses our conviction that other industrial organizations face similar challenges when introducing and practicing empathic design. The third dimension is new. It highlights an area of empathic design that is still largely unaddressed in the literature, but may be key in successfully embedding empathic design within an industrial organization. Chapter 4 introduces the concept of “trialogue”. Trialogue is a framework for sharing rich user data in NPD practice that was developed by using Wright and McCarthy’s (2005) concept of dialogue between designer and user to explore the tri-partied interaction between users, user researchers and design teams in NPD practice. Existing approaches to understanding user experience for NPD often assume that designers build creative understanding in direct interaction with users. In NPD practice, the interaction between users and the designers is often mediated by a third party performing the user research. In these cases, the rich user data gathered in user research needs to be shared with designers in ways that enable them to build creative understanding of user experience for design. In chapter 4, we identify and discuss four requirements for successfully building creative understanding in situations of trialogue, after which we discuss five implications of trialogue for sharing user data in NPD practice. One important implication is the active engagement of design teams in reading and interpreting user data for NPD, rather than in gathering user data, as is suggested for situations of dialogue. Creating Socionas builds on this implication. Chapter 5 reports our search for a conceptual framework that design teams could use as thinking tool of the social in empathic design. Despite the fundamentally social nature of life, most existing frameworks intended to generate perspectives of user experience in design still focus on the individual. Therefore, a conceptual framework is needed to sensitize design teams towards both relationality and individuality in designing for user experience. Building on the idea of engaging design teams in reading and interpreting user data for design, we set out to find a conceptual framework that design teams could use as thinking tool of the social in making sense of rich user data. In chapter 5, we review a number of possible frameworks on the basis of literature and describe our experiences in applying candidate frameworks in NPD practice at Philips. A set of criteria for assessing the usefulness of frameworks for empathic design and five groups of frameworks are identified, “special effect theories”, “relational frameworks”, “catalogues”, “metaphors”, and “scaffolds of context”. Activity Theory (AT) (Vygotsky, 1978; Leont’ev, 1978), as a scaffold of context, is found to have the best fit between design teams’ needs in empathic design and the frameworks’ offerings. An important advantage that AT brings is that it addresses the individual’s experience and social context. Having experimented with AT as thinking tool of the social in NPD practice, we found that AT is a potentially powerful framework for structuring, discussing and sharing rich user data in empathic design. Chapter 6 proposes Stanislavsky’s approach to play-acting as an intuitive way for practicing Activity Theory in empathic design. Activity Theory provides a comprehensive framework for analyzing user experience data for design, but is generally considered to be “hard to learn” and “difficult to put into practice”. More intuitive ways are needed for design teams to grapple with AT in interpreting user data for NPD. We found Stanislavsky’s System, an approach to acting that supports actors in the process of embodying and enacting a role (Stanislavsky, 1961), to provide these intuitive ways. In chapter 6, we discuss the conceptual relations between Stanislavsky’s System and Activity Theory, and show how Stanislavsky’s System was used to translate Activity Theory for empathic design in an NPD project at Philips. Our approach in this project was successful in that the design team built creative understanding of user experience from an AT perspective, without perceiving the approach as “too theoretical” or “difficult to grasp”. Chapter 7 consolidates the knowledge and insights from the previous chapters into a five-step approach to building creative understanding of user experience, Creating Socionas. In this chapter, I explain how user researchers and designers in Philips and in similar organizations might implement and practice Creating Socionas, using examples from NPD projects at Philips to illustrate the approach. Looking back on the research into Creating Socionas in chapter 8, I find that Creating Socionas is unique from most other approaches to understanding user experience for design in that the approach (1) sensitizes design teams towards the individual’s experience and social context in building understanding of user experience, (2) explains how design teams can build creative understanding of user experience in situations of trialogue, and (3) combines a conceptual framework that helps design teams to make sense of user experience for design, with a hands-on approach that guides them through the process of building this understanding under the constraints of NPD practice. A limitation of the approach is its transferability; Creating Socionas reliably applies to NPD practices similar to those at Philips only, and practitioners will need to adjust the approach to fit with their own contexts of NPD. Therefore, it is recommended that further research investigates the transferability of the approach. The results of such research may raise confidence in the success factor of Creating Socionas, and may persuade managers and other stakeholders to implement and invest in the approach in their organizations, and thereby develop products and services that resonate with users’ social lives.