The Queen Mother Building. The staff lounge balcony is where the banner reading 2008 is hanging.

On Thursday from 12 pm to 1:30 pm, I observed various individuals interacting with the microwave in the staff lounge in the Queen Mother Building on the University of Dundee campus.

The staff lounge is a bright room with a southern exposure on the third floor of the Queen Mother building. The southern wall, composed of windows, is curved like the outside of the building; a pair of double doors open out onto a balcony where tables and chairs are stacked, presumably unused, for the winter. Two white coffee mugs sit on the stack of tables to the east of the door.

There are two doors into the staff lounge of the QMB, both on the north wall of the room. Along the north walls between the two doors there is a kitchenette, with (from west to east, or left to right when facing the kitchenette), there is a microwave, a water dispenser, an espresso machine, a hot water kettle, and a sink. Underneath the countertop (again from left to right) is a refrigerator, and then drawers and cabinets.

The Microwave in Question

A close up of the interface:

The first person I observed was a young woman, who read the sign I had posted indicating that microwave usability observations were in progress, and immediately informed me of her primary problem with the microwave. “You can’t see the display in this room,” she said. “It’s too bright.” She said that you have to lean in front of the microwave and cup your hands around the display in order to read it. She also mentioned that she can’t see if the food is cooking properly by looking through the door. Instead, she opened the door once during the cooking process to stir and check that it was heating evenly. She pressed the start button 4 times to put time on the clock; every time you press start it adds 30 seconds. She mentions that this is the only way she knows how to operate this microwave.

The next participant, a man perhaps in his thirties, interacts with the microwave in this way.

1. Presses the door open button to open the door of the microwave
2. Removes the lid from the tupperware to be microwaved
3. Sets the lid to the counter to the right of the microwave
4. Presses the power button
5. Cups his hands around the display and leans in to read it
6. Presses the “10 sec/1 min” button twice
7. Presses the start button

When the microwave finishes, it beeps three times. The gentleman does not immediately return, and approximately a minute later, it beeps three times again.

The next several participants did not have anything to microwave, but regaled me with their comments. The first was a young man who was eating a sandwich on a baguette purchased from the Uni shop, along with fair trade orange juice. He demonstrated his primary complaint with the microwave by leaning over, cupping his long fingers over the display to see the numbers, a move that is necessary to read the display. He explained that the problem with the display is that it is designed to be read from eye-level, but that was ridiculous since most microwaves sit on worktops, well below eye-level.

His compatriot, another young man, explained his distaste for timer knobs. He described a microwave in which the scale on the timer knob was 5 minutes. “People stop trusting it to tell time,” he said. “It effectively becomes the on button”.

Another young lady said that she always forgets to press the start button. Her microwave at home does not have one, she explained. “I can’t say the number of times I have keyed in the time, gone away, and come back 5 minutes later to find that nothing at all happened.”

The following participant explained that he didn’t know how to control the temperature with this microwave. Instead, he employed this method. He would press start, which microwaves for 30 seconds, then check the dish to see if it was an appropriate temperature. If it was not hot enough, he would press start again and let it microwave for another 30 seconds. He would repeat this process until the dish was hot enough.

A middle aged woman came in to microwave her lunch. She pressed the start button six times, then holds a paper towel in front of the display to read it. When she finishes microwaving her lunch and leaves, she does not successfully close the door of the microwave.

Not all of the participants used the microwave. The first, a man in his mid-twenties, exclaimed, “I don’t use the microwave…I am a weird person. It might just be that I am technologically challenged.”

That gentleman’s sentiments were mirrored by another gentleman perhaps in his late 50s or early 60s, who declared, emphatically, “I never use that blasted box!” I inquired why that was, and he said that initially he and his wife were uncomfortable with the notion of microwave radiation in the kitchen, and so they never had one. He mentioned that on one or two occasions, he attempted to use the microwave in the staff lounge, but “found the interface so non-intuitive as it beggers belief”, and therefore gave up.

The gentlemen having lunch with him nodded in agreement, with one of them adding that an “interface should not need instructions to use.” The other chimed in with a further tidbit of information–apparently knobs when out of fashion in microwave design is that they were a point of mechanical failure in the microwave. When a microwave broke, it tended to be because the coupling in the knob had gone wonky.

Here’s a quick description of what is common to both prototypes:

There are two variables you can adjust on a microwave–power level and time. For our microwave, we have a slider for power and a knob for time. If you turn the knob slowly, it adds time in small increments (such as 5 second increments). If you turn it quickly, it adds time in large increments (such as 30 seconds). (This is similar to scrolling through songs on an ipod–small movements scroll through individual songs, faster larger movements jump letters). The time and power level appear on the display as you adjust the slider or knob. Additionally, the microwave can be set to announce the time you are setting as you are setting it, in the language of your choice (thus making it more accessible for the visually impaired). Fiinally, the interior of the microwave is rounded, leaving no hard-to-clean corners.

Our second physical prototype, a beautiful creation crafted by the hands of our amazing resident MacGyver, Alicia Dudek

Our second rendered prototype, created for us by Bader Aldurai

What is different between the two prototypes: On the rendered prototype (the second door), the window on the door is also the screen. Also the interface is actually part of the door, so the whole front of the microwave opens.

Both microwaves have a timer bar, which fills completely when you press the large green concave start button and ticks down to zero so that you can tell from a distance how far along in the cooking process you are. However, on the physical prototype, the timer bar is the border on the interface. On the rendered prototype, timer bar is on the screen/window combination.

This usually takes me approximately three times as long to write up field notes as it does for me to do the field work initially. I feel that this is in part because I drag my feet. It feels weird to me, writing just for myself. After all, field notes are traditionally a jealously guarded part of an ethnographer’s net worth.

It occurred to me the other day, however, that I should write up my field notes in such a way that they can be directly posted onto the internet in blog form. This has several advantages:

• Data would be stored on WordPress’s servers, floating safely and happily away in a computer cloud
• Tagging system is built in
• Accessible anywhere
• Helpful to other people who can build on my research
• Helpful to teach other people what field notes look like (since they are so jealously guarded, it’s hard to know what field notes are supposed to look like)

The primary disadvantage that I see is that it is possibly an ethical nightmare. However, as Kate and I have been discussing at length lately, ethics is going to have to move fast to catch up with modern ethnography.

So for things that are ethically appropriate, I will be posting my field notes on the internet, under the same CC license that I use for all my work. Perhaps you folks will even find them interesting!

I welcome discussion on this experiment!

You see, all of my life I have been cautioned–be careful what you put on the internet. No one will hire you if you they find that picture of you drinking or kidnapping a baby or eating a hobo or looking–god forbid–like a liberal or an iconoclast! Nothing is private, I have been told, and everything is used as a tool to judge fitness.

This worried me. I became concerned that there was no way I could establish myself as a professional computer scientist and design ethnographer while also giving myself the freedom that I need to establish myself as a writer. Further, it made me begin to think that I was somehow wrong or bad or broken, that my thoughts and work were so outrageous and innappropriate that I needed to conceal them from the world at large.

I fretted over this for a long time, and asked for advice from professionals in various industries. The general consensus was that I should play nice with the big kids, and lock down everything that could even possibly be construed as inappropriate or too personal. I felt sure that I was going to have to create a persona to write under.

And then Kate Saunderson offered this wisdom to me. She said, “If you are going to work for someone who would hate you as you are, then that’s a lifestyle decision. That’s you saying, ‘My work is all I am.’ And some people can do that. Some people can compartmentalize their lives that way. If you can’t, then that’s your decision made. “

And it was, in fact, my decision made. I am opting out of this mindset. I refuse to be made afraid. I will not hide simply because I have been told that I should do so. I will be the open book that I always hope to be–I am laying all of my cards on the table.

What does this mean? This means that I am drawing compartments in the ether of the internet. I am drawing a professional space, Rachel Shadoan Muses, and a personal space, Being Shadoan. My professional webspace will fit the standards of the general professional community. My personal webspace (within the bounds of law, ethics, and good sense) will not be censored for the comfort of the world at large. My personal webspace is the online equivalent of the table in my kitchen; you are welcomed into my home as a friend, and I will communicate with you as I would a friend. I would appreciate not being judged as a professional for the content in my personal webspace, but I recognize that it will likely happen anyway. I am just not going to live in fear of that happening.

Why am I playing it this way, when it appears to be so professionally risky? In the modern work world, you don’t work 9-5 and shut off when you go home. Design ethnographers in particular never seem to stop contemplating our work, networking for new participants, and mulling over strategies. So if my work is going to infilitrate my life as a person, then my person-ness should not have to be hidden from my work. Because at the end of the day, it is my humanity–the fact that I am a whole person with a rich array of experience, desire, and thought–that makes my work good.

In 2008, I made the near-fatal mistake of taking two 4000 level and two 5000 level computer science courses simultaneously. The second to last week of the semester, affectionately known as “Dead Week”, I had two presentations, a poster session, two projects, a paper, and a couple of homeworks due.

I did not sleep that week. Zack’s flat, where we were running the machine learning algorithms, was littered with coke cans, coffee cups, and wrappers from whatever food-like substances we could grab in between engagements. (It was a year and a half before I could drink Coke again without feeling queasy and anxious.) I have virtually no recall of that entire week, (other than vague, watercolor washed memories of endlessly arranging CAPTCHA images in Powerpoint while lying on the living room futon that I grew to hate with a fiery passion), but I remember that Friday evening.

I was working on the last deliverable, a project for Data Networks. It was some modification of the Go-Back-N networking communication protocol. I was operating on five or six hours of sleep grabbed in one or two hour increments over five days, and running mostly on caffeine, high fructose corn syrup, and sheer force of will, with a turbo boost of desparation. But damn it, I was still writing code.

And then my project broke. Something somewhere went wrong, and it wouldn’t work anymore. Nothing I tried could coax it back into functioning the way it was supposed to, and I hit my own breaking point. Thus, two hours before my deadline, I found myself sitting on that hateful futon, computer on my lap, crying over my keyboard because the project refused to work.

But you know what? I finished that project. Still sobbing from frustration and exhaustion, I finished that project on time. I even received good marks for it. For ages afterward, Zack teased me that I am a finite state machine that inputs misery and outputs productivity. To a large degree, that was an accurate assessment. I spent my undergrad consistently taking on too much and then accomplishing it (generally quite well), at the expense of my health and happiness.

The reasons for that are probably complex. Puritan work ethic, maybe. American cultural myth, perhaps. Ludicriously high personal standards, definitely. Chronic abject stupididty probably played a role as well. Who knows? It’s possible that the reason doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that I can’t do that anymore, possibly because I no longer have the stamina of my 18-year-old self. More likely, I think, is that the kind of work I am doing has changed. You can write code when you are miserable and exhausted and frustrated. But you can’t do good ethnography under those circumstances. You need to come to ethnography calmly, openly. A compiler doesn’t care if you are crying while you code. Bursting into tears during an ethnographic interview, however, is going to alarm your participants mightily.

In some ways, an ethnographer is just a vessel, a sieve through which the world is organized and presented. Our bodies and minds are our instruments. A harpist wouldn’t dream of performing on an untuned instrument–so why would an ethnographer try to work in a body dissonant with exhaustion, mind a dischordant clash of frustration and misery?

An ethnographer must be able to listen–mental anguish blocks vital information from the outside world. An ethnographer must be flexible, to accomodate unexpected situations and serendipity–exhaustion stiffens a body and mind. An ethnographer cannot afford to be distracted by hunger, thirst, misery, and exhaustion–important insights sometimes arrive only once, and an ethnographer must be alert and prepared. A good ethnographer is well fed, well hydrated, well rested, and mentally and emotionally in order.

This is something that I learned the hard way last semester, and it is a lesson that I see many of my compatriots encorporating into their working styles. We have come to realize that we must care for ourselves before we can care for our work, or our work will suffer.

Kate, whose wisdom never ceases to surprise me, came into the Design Ethnography studio last Saturday with a mission. She was going to take Caoimhe and I to the university shop for a treat. Then we were going to sit in the sunshine. We were taking a break from our work, and she was not taking no for an answer.

So we did. Kate bought each of us an adorable tiny carton of ice cream, complete with spoon, and we sat in the sunshine in front of the Queen Mother Building. We laughed and exposed our winter-pale skin to the sun to produce Vitamin D, clearing our heads of analysis and information presentation and scoping and management and nemawashi and stories and post-its and affinitizing. We took a few moments just to be.

It is only after those moments of “just being” that we can be good ethnographers.

It generally takes three occurences of something in a reasonably short period of time for me to learn something new. I noticed it first in learning German. I will hear a new word while I’m listening to Harry Potter in German during my morning swim; then maybe a few days later I will overhear Cora say it, or I will see it written. By the third time I encounter it, it is incorporated into my vocabulary and I begin to see it everywhere.

It is as though the idea has to reach a certain energy level before it can enter the “daily use” part of my mind, like the way an atom has to absorb a certain amount of energy before it will begin to emit light. Each encounter with the idea in the wild increases the energy of the idea in my head. However, the ideas leak energy over time, so there is a time-based window in which they have to reoccur to become part of my thoughtspace; if an idea loses all of its energy before it becomes permanent in my memory, it slips from my mind. Different ideas lose energy at different rates–concepts lose energy more slowly: I might have several months for them to reappear. Words lose energy quickly: I only have several weeks to encounter them enough to learn them. Occasionally, one or two encounters will provide enough energy to cement an idea in my mind, but in unaccented and unemphasized daily life, the third time is the charm.

In general, there is so much information out there that I will sometimes gloss over new jargon and concepts the first time; if they are
important, they will turn up again later. If something shows up three times, I consider that the universe demanding that I sit up and
pay attention.

This week, a concept hit a high enough energy level to move permanently into my thoughtspace. It is the idea of design ethnographers as gardeners.

Catriona mentioned last week that design ethnographers are like early spring gardeners. We trudge out when the frost still decorates the ground, and prepare the soil. We turn rich organic material (stories) into the soil, and plant the seeds (insight) that the designers (like the summer sun) will use to grow good design.

But ethnographers work as gardeners not just within the overall design process. We also prepare the soil in interactions between people. It is a design ethnographer’s job to facilitate communication, not just between ourselves and clients, but also between various other experts and stakeholders. Philip Jo from Microsoft spoke to us on this topic during his Ninja Whiteboarding workshop on Friday, only he provided the “preparing the soil” concept a name: nemawashi.

Nemawashi is the process of preparing a group for an idea. It is making the brain garden of the group into a supportive and nurturing environment for concept seeds. It’s diplomacy and persuasion, and it’s all design ethnography.

As a result, my journey from quantitative researcher to qualitative researcher has not been without frustration. In general, both communities seem to scorn the contributions of the other. Qualitative researchers can be heard to say, “But when there are numbers, people think that it is concrete and objective! And nothing is ever objective!” Quantitative researchers, on the other hand, scoff, “But how can you possibly know that, with such a small sample size?” Neither side of the razor-wire fence separating the two forms of data seemed particularly keen to bridge the gap.

I have been waiting, dreading the moment when both communities turn to me and say, “Well? Decide already! Which will it be, quantitative or qualitative?”

I wouldn’t have an answer. I didn’t think I could choose.

Imagine my delight, then, when I was greeted by this poster on my first day of Design Ethnography this semester.

Catriona explained that in the early days of design ethnography, the ’80s and ’90s, practitioners of the discipline thought that the real challenge in design ethnography was doing the fieldwork. Through the early part of the 21st century, however, it became apparent that the real challenge was communicating the findings of a study.

Now, on the cusp of a new decade (depending on how you count it), it has emerged that while communicating the findings is important, and good field work is vital, the difficulty facing us now is interacting with other kinds of people and other kinds of data.

I heard this and a little light went on in my head. This challenge left room for me to build a career that combines design ethnography (my qualitative research of choice) and machine learning and data mining (my quantitative research of choice). There was hope!

It was not until the following Wednesday that I realized exactly how much hope there was. We had a guest speaker, Tye Rattenbury from the People and Practices Research group from Intel. He gave us a presentation on how his team does user research, and it blew my mind.

Essentially, what Tye’s team does is collect a bunch of quantitative data on a set of participants in a study. They mine the data for trends and create innovative ways to visualize the data to make it easier for the participants to understand. They take the data visualizations to ethnographic interviews and let the participants use the data as a prompt to launch a story. They let the participants give the numbers a voice. They let the participants make the numbers talk.

Not only is it a brilliant approach, I think it might be precisely what I want to do.