Interview workshop

On 3 November we had a day of discussing the proposals everyone made to involve the people they design for in their design research. One method almost all will use is interviewing people. In a workshop on the same day, we explored how these interviewed can be semi-structured conversations rather than an interrogation. With conversations I mean that interviewee and interviewer both contribute ideas, as opposed to the interviewer only absorbing stories and not adding to the conversation. This is another example of the design researcher not being neutral and aiming to remain invisible, but instead bringing her/his ideas into the exchanges with the people s/he designs for.
Below are some photos of how we worked with the stories told in the conversations. We made notes of little pieces of paper that we could sort to discover themes. These themes were then the starting point for creating insights, deep understanding of people's practices and motivations. These insights were consequently the starting point for generating ideas, which you see in the lower picture, as sketches.






Sketching is actually a nice way of working through this process. Adaptive Path have perfected this approach as a recent workshop they organised at the EPIC2008 conference demonstrated. You might find some approaches there that could be useful in your design research.