Slow Change Context Research

SLOW CHANGE CONTEXT RESEARCH

SLOW CHANGE INTERACTION DESIGN (SCID)

Submitted by Denique Ferguson

Anusha RadhakrishnanSourjya Sinha Roy


WHAT IT DOES

• A research method to help designers identify the context in which SCID is to be used.

• This research method is to help designers identify culture, beliefs, attitudes, knowledge and practices within the target user group.

• This method helps identify how the context changes over time for an individual or group.

• The ultimate goal is to be able to identify realistic goals within the context.

• This is a proposal. The details have not been fleshed out deliberately due to time constraint. The details are open ended to allow for further discussion and tweaking. The examples we provide gives you an overview of what can be gained from such a method.

WHAT IT DOES NOT

• This is not a complete design process. It only addresses a part of the research phase.

• It is not a new research method. It appropriates workshops and journaling to get a holistic understanding of the context.

• This method does not tell designers how to solve these issues.

• It does not suggest realistic goals. It points out issues and considerations that may make a goal unattainable.

CONSTRAINTS

We used an example scenario to help us contextualize the method. We envision that the method can be re-appropriated for other long-term change scenarios (drug abuse, alcoholism, etc). However, we also recognize the special sensitivity and subject knowledge that is required to be able to design for those scenarios.

Example scenario: We are creating a new device for nurses to help them achieve their weight loss goals. The proposed method is for the research phase of the project, where we want to identify realistic goals for weight loss, and how those goals change over time.

A method to help the researcher understand the context in which SCID will be used

BENEFITS

• Reveals goals, bright spots and opportunities over time.

• Flexible and adaptable process.

INPUT

• Knowledge, Attitudes, Practices and Beliefs

• Environments

• Routines

WHEN TO USEOUTPUT

• Realistic goals for various stages of change effort.

HOW IT WORKS

In this section we give you a step by step overview for what the research method can look like. At this point, we are not going into the details of each step. Some of them for the time being are out of scope; some will be discussed later.

• Recruiting Participants: Define the criteria to select the target audience to be selected as participants in the research study. Our assumption is that these are people that are either trying or have tried to lose weight.

• Time: We envision this research to take place for a few months. This is specifically needed to be able to capture different attitudes and practices during different phases of their slow change. During this phase however, researchers can try design interventions based on existing knowledge. We are not discussing that in this document, although that is a possibility.

• Journaling: We want to be able to capture a participants context. This requires the participants to make journal entries of different types.

1. Environment. This could be photo or video. Example, pictures of pantry, fridge etc. Special consideration needs to be taken on what the user is willing to show and what the user is not showing. (future consideration)

2. Routine. This can be audio, blogs, calanders etc. This is to identify their lifestyle. Where they go, what they do. How much work they do etc. (future consideration)

3. KAPB: Knowledge, Attitudes, Practices and Beliefs. This is to identify what a user knows, what they believe they can achieve, what their practices are. (future consideration)

• Workshops: The designers help the participants create journey maps to qualify their journals to understand what goals are realistic. These journey maps will be in the KAPB format as mentioned above. (Our focus)

• Analysis: Since the data is emergent, we will not impose any analysis technique at this time.



RATIONALE

Technology should be a support, but not a crutch to slow change, where it becomes a trigger so compelling people are reliant on it to maintain new/newly developing habits. Because of this, we believe our methods should be participatory, looking at the knowledge, practices, attitudes and beliefs (KAPB) of a person with agency in the change process. We also want to identify what bright spots might look like, and how (and if) they are perceived by participants. What people gain (new features in their lives), what is stopping them (restraints), what people lose (what’s no longer a part of their lives), and how these are perceived can help understand the how the cost/benefit of the change effort evolves over time. Understanding the KAPB, cost/benefit and the bright spots can help us understand how goal setting (shrinking the change) may best be done over time and across various needs.

FUTURE STRATEGIES

In the following section we discuss what is missing from our method and how we would like to proceed next. Given that our method proposal was created in a short time, we have generated golden questions and tried to answer a few of them. We believe these are questions that need to be answered in order to proceed.



GOLDEN QUESTIONS

1. What is the nature of the participant journaling?*

2. When you say they'd be logging their daily lives, do you mean they'd be logging every aspect of them? Or would they just be going after certain details? If so, which details? And why those details instead of others?*

We want to be able to understand the context as well as possible. For example, someone may not be able to give up junk foods not because they are purchasing junk foods, but because they go to parties 5 days a week (where they eat said junk food). For them, a starting goal may be to go out 4 days instead. Without this recognition, it may be hard to create realistic goals.

3. Would you be asking them to identify competitors to change throughout the journaling activity? Or would the design team participate in this stage, too?*

We expect the designers to participate in the journey mapping to help the participant dig deeper. For example, a participant's goal may be to lose 50 pounds. The designer can help the participant qualify that idea into actionable, concrete goals such as : I want to hike a 1 mile hill, I want to play hide and seek with my nephew, I want to go rock climbing with my daughter etc.

4. Can we research slow change rapidly?

5. How much is too much? Can we over “understand” a change effort? Sometimes the biggest innovations happen while trying things you don’t know are “wrong”.

6. How can we get rich journaling without overwhelming the participants? Which details are important to capture? How do we know we’re not accidentally excluding things that we should be paying attention to?

7. Can we capture the observations/data from this method in a way that is true to the nature of the “problem”? Can the templates/steps we create accidentally introduce/reinforce assumptions where it should capture information that challenges them?

8. What level of participation is appropriate? Will this research involve concepting and research through design, or prototyping and feedback?

9. Does the research process take into account the dynamic nature of the research goal?

10.How often is the research goal modified/altered based on findings?

11.Will presumptions like “shrinking the change” work all the time? Are there some groups of people who respond, instead, to “adverse” change conditions? How do we capture that?

12.Should the designers/researchers be solely responsible for interpreting what the competitors to the change effort are? Or should the participants also be asked to identify these as well?

*These questions courtesy of Jordan Beck



Design

Slow Change Context Research