Last Wednesday I attended a talk by Richard Rogers and Bruno Latour organised by Goldsmiths Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process.

The talk, Digital Societies: Between Ontology and Methods (a recording is available here) dealt with issue of studying through digital methods, but also how the digital can resolve longstanding tensions about scale in social research.

Judging by the number of designers in attendance, I thought perhaps some of my readers would appreciate this summary and links by Phd student David Moat, who is studying Wikipedia at Goldsmiths. David and I stood way in the back row of a packed lecture hall as it seemed almost all of Goldsmiths turned out for the event.

To very briefly summarise, Richard Rogers runs the Digital Methods Initiative in Amsterdam and spoke about his efforts to develop ‘digitally native’ methods of talking about society - in other words, studying the offline through the traces it leaves online. He contrasts this approach with previous perspectives that either studied the online as a potentially new ‘cyberspace’ or studied online activity through offline efforts. These are things like Google Flu Trends that are now able to predict flu epidemics well in advance of traditional survey methods by monitoring search terms.

Google Flu Trends predicts flu epidemics through search terms

Bruno Latour is a very well known, and often controversial, sociologist. He’s famous for his work on theories of networks involving humans and non-humans, which is partially why he has been so influential in design circles.

He presented a fairly dense discussion that neatly complemented Rogers’. Latour argued that the digital, and primarily the hyperlink, has given us the ability to move conceptually from profiles, what he called CV’s, to collectives. In other words, we are now able to achieve a relationship between the individual and the group, with big implications for the divide between qualitative and quantitative research.

Despite objections from the audience that such a divide has largely been moved past in the social sciences, I think this is a subject that is just shy of becoming a major factor for research with the growth of Big Data, and issues like the end of the Census in the UK.

Whilst no research tool that I currently know of is able to seamlessly move between individuals and large scale groups, the concept is intriguing enough to pay close attention to what these two researchers are saying.

I’ll leave it to David to give you a more detailed walk-through of the event, or if you’re really interested, fire up the recording and listen for yourself.

My friend Jacob Garber, of Participle, and I decided to spend some free time finding out. We spoke briefly to 5 people that we met on the streets of Central London, all between 30 and 60, 3 men and 2 women. We asked them how they spent money on a daily basis, how they managed their money to make sure they always had enough at the end of the month, if and how they saved, and what they spent it on. The radar plots below sum up what each of our respondents told us.

This kind of guerrilla research is a useful technique to quickly (and cheaply) gather a little understanding on a topic. It can’t be expected to tell you everything you need to know, but it does make a good starting point. In this case, there were a couple of things that stood out to us. You might recognise something of yourself in these stories!

1.“If I have cash on me I spend it.”

Of the five people we spoke to only Mike (names have been changed), a 53 year old social care manager, uses cash for day-to-day spending. His friend Eric, 49 and also a social care manager, uses his card for most purchases, though he typically has £50-£100 in his wallet, which he doesn’t consider a lot. This is well illustrated by these photos of our participant’s wallets.

Most are small and thin, designed for cards rather than cash. As Eva, a 32 year pastry chef, told us, “I draw £40 max if I do cash, because I sort of know the limits, like £40 you know more or less is not the end of the world.” Cash comes in handy in situations like pubs where many transactions will quickly follow each other, so evenings out were mentioned as the most likely prompt for a trip to the cash machine.

2. “Apparently a jar filled with 1 kilo of honey equals to €700!”

This change from the physicality of cash to the abstraction of a bank card makes understanding how much money you’re holding a little more difficult. Alex, a 32 year old set designer, told us how he only started using a card when arriving in the UK to study. At home, he found putting €2 euro coins into a glass honey jar could quickly add up, and used this method to save for holidays and his first car. Such tactics were mainly used by the two 30 year olds we spoke to. Older respondents, with more stable incomes, had less need to pay close attention to spending on day-to-day items.

3. “Don’t spend more money than you have.”

Perhaps the obvious advice comes from Eva, who told us simply, “Don’t spend more money than you have.” A quick glance back to the newspaper is all that we need to tell us this is easier said than done! Our respondents had a variety of ways to keep their accounts in the black, but they all related to ways of keeping things simple. Eva for example keeps to a weekly schedule, which means she can keep track of how much she spends (and can afford to). Eric, whilst more comfortable enough with daily spending to not need close attention at the grocery store, allows himself only occasional luxuries (like an electric guitar) and is by default cautious about big-ticket items like holidays or cars. Alex checks his balance online once a week or so.

Whilst we should be careful about taking such discussions as straightforward representations of how people manage their money all the time, the way people talk about money is nevertheless a helpful start to thinking about designing better financial services, and also financial education.

You can see hints of such insights in services such as Lloyds TSB’s Money Manager or MyBarclaycard’s automatic categorisations of spending.

Lloyds TSB’s Money Manager helps you understand what you’ve spent

MyBarclaycard automatically categorises all your spending

However, our 5 respondents didn’t speak about money in terms of past spending wasn’t front of mind for our 5 respondents. Their spending behaviour was more timely. They focused on daily activities and potential spending. They were concerned with choosing how to spend (or not spend) better.

Some obvious ideas that spring to mind are things that help you have a more physical relationship with your money or help you divide it up into pots for future spending. BankSimple’s (US only) Safe-to-Spend total is an example that starts to get at this type of feature but could do more to help you think about what you should spend in order to achieve longer-term financial goals.

BankSimple’s Safe-to-Spend total subtracts pending payments from your total

Given the state of the economy, it’s not surprising that money is very much on people’s minds, and even quick and simple research highlights plenty of opportunity for people-centred money services. If you’re interested in learning more about our day looking in people’s wallets and some of the ideas that came from it, or think your own challenges could benefit from such approaches, please get in touch.

I was interested this morning to see Last.fm’s visualisations of the effects of physical events on their listening data (courtesy of Flowing Data).

The graphs show events such as the death of Amy Winehouse or the birth of Jay-Z and Beyonce’s daughter Blue Ivy Carter prompting spikes of interest in these artist’s work that show up in the listening data of services such as Last.fm.

These are obviously aggregated and talk about events in the lives of the artists concerned, but they’re constructed through the listening habits of thousands of individual listeners and such data would make fascinating portraits of individual lives.

In this post visualising his own listening habits, Gavin Wray provides both an example and instructions on how to produce visualisations from data collected by Last.fm.

The top 50 artists listened to by Gavin Wray in 2010

This example simply visualises counts, but could tell us more about patterns in his life through his music listening habits. Similar data could be provided by other services such as Netflix or Spotify. Facebook Timeline represents an already aggregated source of data on all these services.

These are all opportunities for longer term studies that design researchers could accomplish relatively easily and relatively inexpensively, and could go some way to alleviating the ‘snap-shot’ nature of what is often practically required from design projects. They also obviously raise a number of issue for how we think about and negotiate participation with those whose lives we are researching.

I don’t believe these issues are irresolvable however and I’ve setup the Last.fm scrobbler on my iTunes this morning to start gathering my own data. I’ll post back in a couple of months when I have some interesting stories to tell with it!

I was fortunate enough to spend some time talking this past weekend with Aico Shimizu (on Twitter and Flickr), from Hakuhodo, one of Japan’s top advertising and design agencies.

We were talking about her experiences during and since the 11th March 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake, which claimed 15,811 lives. Aico has been conducting design research in the affected area and beyond for this year’s issue+design competition. This annual competition was originally a response to the Great Hanshin or Kobe Earthquake that occurred in 1995 and this year it’s challenge focuses on Tohoku.

Two things struck me whilst talking to Aico about the many issues raised by the earthquake.

The first was that in a situation like this, the body re-emerges as a primary, and very conscious concern. In advanced economies, quite often the body has become an illicit subject, still much talked about and served, but often in the shadows. With everything peeled back and concerns about feeding, sleeping, toilets, hygiene coming to the fore, we are starkly reminded of how animal the human body is.

The second issue I was intrigued by was that the tsunami’s disruption of certain networks prompted a shift to alternatives. Synchronous networks such as cash machines, telephones, electricity, the things we use immediately, became unreliable during the crisis (across large areas of Japan) and people turned to alternatives that offered asynchronous communication. Mobile data and social media usage saw spikes, and people stepped in to fill information gaps by sharing information about available food and fuel on Google Maps. Amazon wishlists became a means of communicating needs (and reportedly fulfilling them too, which is impressive given the logistical difficulties).

People used Picasa to take photos of the messages looking for loved ones in evacuation centres in Tohoku and share them more widely, and the destruction of paper stock prompted publishers of popular manga or comic books to distribute them digitally (and at the time for free). The destruction of paper based identification has also prompted discussion of digitisation.

These issues speak of abrupt shifts in the usual patterns of behaviour, and together with the response to the crisis at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant have prompted much soul-searching from the traditionally deferential Japanese who haven’t experienced much public dissent since the 1960’s.

One of the most intriguing stories Aico told was of a small region of Iwate prefecture where a local folklore (Japanese only) saying has been preserved in oral tradition since the Meiji Sanriku tsunami of 1896. The folklore encourages people to escape to safe ground immediately and individually, instead of waiting to see what happens or to travel with others. This swift and comprehensive action helped the region escape much loss of life. This reminds me of a similar story about local knowledge from the Indonesian tsunami in 2006.

I’m going to be in Japan next week and am looking forward to speaking more with Aico and others about all these issues. I’m particularly interested in what shifting ideas of power between people and the authorities could mean for Japan’s economic troubles. What questions do you want to ask of people in Japan?

If we focus far into the future, the subject of design research plainly becomes less clearly defined. We can draw lines of possibility forward from today to meet a distant future but need to fragment those lines into scenarios that cast a wide net. This perspective, which I’m going to call far-future, often entails looking at large-scale trends, quite rightly as at that distance our ability to perceive detail is severely curtailed. Research at this perspective is about drawing a picture of the changing world we might have to design for.

Dialling back the zoom and looking into the near-future, say 2-5 years from now, we are looking at an entirely different type of research. This research has firm connections to the present. We’re looking at the outcome of strategic decisions and programmes undertaken right now. The trends we’re examining are often present in embryonic form today, possibly in technology, possibly in cultural practices, quite often in the form of existing products or services that are yet to find their mature form. This type of research is now grounded in real experiences and we can create rich, nuanced understanding of what that world might be like by engaging with real people, understanding it’s embryonic form in their lives now and helping them imagine their lives a short time into the future.

Next we focus our lens firmly on today. Here we see flesh and blood prototypes, things that we can hold in our hands right now, things we can use and measure the usage of. This is the perspective occupied most often by User Experience researchers who are developing and shipping a living, breathing product.

These perspectives can be cast in opposition to each other, but viewed as time-frames, each provides a unique and necessary perspective at a precisely appropriate moment.

This time-framework perspective of the future draws on the comparative method and Michel Foucault’s archaeological/genealogical methods that can be hugely illuminating when looking at the past, and so it’s worth noting that the lines of ideas that we can draw from today into the future will all eventually come to pass in some form and stretch back into the past. The final perspective that we need to incorporate into a time-framework of design research must be the history of all the ideas that have brought us to today. Their trajectory is what carries us forward and establishes the direction of the lines we take as we look forward into the near and far-future.

How do you differentiate these research activities in your work? Are the lines clear or do they blur? Can time-frames help you to avoid boundary-policing and integrate your design research activities?

In this video IDEO’s Tom Hulme presents a business model visualisation to participants of their HackFWD project. It reminds me of Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur’s Business Model Canvas, though I have no idea if there’s a history or connection there.

For what it’s worth, I think I prefer Tom’s version. It’s a little more straightforward, in a way that I think clears up some of the issues with the Osterwalder version in use. Most of my practical experiences of the Osterwalder model have tended to get a little tongue-tied with some of the distinctions and Tom’s version simplifies somewhat so there is clear water around concepts.

I also like the inclusion of competitors and growth strategy. This version feels more like an argument and less like a collection of bullet points. That said, I have been using the Osterwalder iPad app quite a lot and I love the way having a tool enforces a kind of disciplined thinking, so I’ll probably be sticking with it for now, but using this version when appropriate. There is a tool version available on the web, and a blank canvas here.

Discussion in the comments, as ever!

In this article, cross-posted at Livework, I highlight 9 reasons why the “post-pc” mobile world is ecology-centric, rather than device centric.

At Live|work, we often pull apart fashionable ideas and of late we’ve been thinking about the term “post-pc” – a term that has been doing the rounds in the tech world. It refers to a world of user-centred, highly portable and highly connected devices such as smart phones and tablets. Steve Jobs famously used the phrase to describe Apple’s iOS platform offering when he launched the second iPad iteration.

A quick scan of tech blogs reveals that “post-pc” is encountering as much ridicule as “web2.0” suffered in it’s day. We feel, however, that just because this term is overused it does not mean that it doesn’t point to something interesting and infact that it may reveal insight into the way we should design services.

We have outlined nine characteristics of the devices and platforms we’re all using day-to-day that indicate that “post-pc” is a service-centric model. These nine points can help us to think about designing services that excel in a post-pc world. In a lot of ways, we’ve been waiting for many of these for a long time and are really excited about leveraging these platforms for incredible services.

This list is not comprehensive and not all of them will hold true in every situation and at every time, but they’re worth thinking about as foundational principles when designing post-pc services.

PERSONAL

The first three points all relate to something that we always talk about as a core component of a service – that they are (or should be) intensely personal. These three points all demonstrate how post-pc is intrinsically related to the personal.

1. Do it any way you want

The first point is the age-old chestnut – personalisation. The post-pc world makes personalisation about more than just how things look by making it incredibly easy to choose how you interact with services. These are devices that interact with a rich-world of services and we get to choose how we interact with them. These could be through native applications or via other applications and services. It’s never been easier to construct an entire ecology of services to get what we want in the way we want it.

2. Contextual shortcuts

Post-pc devices mean we carry an abundance of sensors and preference data around with us. All this data can be used to bring an incredible level of context awareness to service interactions. Whether it’s where we are located, our stored preferences or the signalling of a specific intent by choosing a particular application, we can arrive at a service encounter with a lot of the legwork already done – meaning we can design quicker and smoother interactions.

3. Trusted proxy for identity

Post-pc devices can be used to positively identify individuals with a relatively high level of security. They are physically available at all times, are unique to the individual, are linked with powerful identifying services through operators, App store id’s or banks, and are able to leverage password authentication or SMS verification. In a sense, our mobile devices can stand as proxies for our identity. No need for the dystopian vision of an ID chip embedded in our bodies, if we are committed to carrying a device with such a chip at all times.

Google Maps, HSBC Banking App and The National Rail Journey Planner all know enough about you to help you get the job done.

EXPERIENCE

The next three observations all point to what is unique about the actual experience of interacting with post-pc devices and services.

4. Many, small experiences

Post-pc devices excel at small, targeted interactions, done frequently rather than for extended periods of time. Interactions with these devices are highly atomised.

We carry them in our pockets or bags all day, and are able to use them surreptitiously in any situation. People are able to respond to most situations almost immediately with an available mobile device.

This, combined with the fact that they are small, means that interactions with a mobile device are frequently compact and to the point. Whilst this will almost certainly change as they become more capable, for many interactions this is in fact ideal. Think of things like sending a quick email or tweet, checking a map when leaving the Tube, on-the-fly price checking in a store or capturing a new idea or task to your to-do list.

These interactions are ideally suited for an immediate response to a single, targeted need. We might make 10, 20, 50 of these interactions in a day. These are highly atomised interactions compared with sitting at a computer over the course of several hours.

The interaction is broken out of a relationship with a fixed time and place and freed to plug in to our actual lives (although of course we might not always think of this as freedom!). This is possible because interactions become highly specific, requiring small, regular interventions, rather than continuous use.

5. Swiss-army knife of computing

Whilst with personal computers, we’re used to machines being capable of many tasks, with portable devices we’re not. Post-pc devices bring this potential to accomplish just about any task to almost any situation we find ourselves in, because they’re mobile computing devices. Most of us now carry a device with us that is capable of performing complex tasks and interacting with the world around us. We now bring a computer with us when we go to the kitchen, to work and when we climb on the bus. Ubiquitous computing is a reality.

6. On-demand computing

Thanks to post-pc being an ecology model, rather than a device model, the post-pc user is able to immediately adapt to any given situation by simply adding new tools to her Swiss-army knife at the point of need.

When we encounter a new situation, it’s possible to download an interface for that specific situation right then and there and use a dedicated device for that interaction. We can always adapt to the situation at hand. This is probably the most theoretical of our points as there isn’t necessarily an app available for every situation, however the point is that if you are designing the experience you can make complex interactions available to every participant.

Facebook, Ebay and RHS Gardening App all enable you to adapt to a specific situation

PLATFORM

7. Extends the computing power of other objects

The post-pc device in your pocket has more computing power than NASA had available to put the first men on the moon. These devices change the long-held image of ubiquitous computing as your toaster with a computer in it. There’s no need to put a computer in toasters, fridges, musical equipment or point of sales equipment. These other objects can simply supply the right mechanics for the situation at hand and leverage ubiquitously available post-pc devices for computing power.

This doesn’t mean these other objects don’t change – they just don’t necessarily get smarter. Instead they get better at measuring their own contributions and feeding the data to the post-pc device.

8. Brings a tall friend

Actually, it’s best not to think of any one element as the post-pc device. The computing device, the ecology of connected objects and the networked services they all connect to are the components of a post-pc ecology.

An incredibly key part of this ecology is the data-rich, always on, highly networked services that feed data to the device. The connection to payment services, social networks, data storage, processing services and a myriad of other services add huge weight to the power of post-pc devices. The sum is a lot more than just what sits in your hand.

9. Ubiquitous means no assumptions

The last point is somewhat of a caveat with regards to the previous point. The fact that post-pc devices rely so heavily on connection to powerful networks can be one of their weakest points. Designs for this model should be able to leverage the power of networks, even where such networks aren’t currently available. This may mean duplication of data, pre-caching whilst connected to the network or just smart ways of failing gracefully, but elegant design for this paradigm needs to recognise that each element of the post-pc ecology must be able to operate independently of the others as well as powerfully together.

Barclays Cycle Hire App, Audi Car Data App and the Streetcar Booking App all add computing to other devices providing you with access to new networked services.

Summing up

Taken individually, each of these nine points represent an intriguing aspect of contemporary technology. Taken together, you start to see the shape of a meaningful phenomenon emerging. Post-pc may not be the best term for what we are seeing (“post” anything always betrays transition). This phenomenon may well have started with the laptop and the web, long before smartphones and tablets. However the rise of these devices and the ever increasing interconnection of data services is what may well come to define it. As services are increasingly designed for the post-pc era, these characteristics will help us to build propositions that face towards the emerging model.

The name Connected Futures references the philosophy underpinning my approach, which is to connect threads of understanding from the past, through the present to the future.

After 4 and a half thrilling years as a researcher and consultant at pioneering London service design studio Live|work, I’ve decided to create a new, independent entity that will enable me to work more widely within the design and innovation industries.

I’m retaining my strong relationship with Live|work as an associate there, and at the same time growing the network of agencies that I work with, starting out with a fantastically exciting project with Sidekick to re-invent giving to good causes through mobile.

I bring a robust and grounded approach to research and a curious, creative and importantly pragmatic discipline to strategy, so if those are qualities you’re looking for, please get in touch! I’d love to meet and chat about how we could work together.