Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 142
Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 142
Learning about Design Ethnography with Dr. Chanel Beebe
At the age of 19 years old I ejected from the startup that I had joined while it was still in incubator space on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto. Nice as it was, I wanted to complete my undergraduate studies before it was too late and went back to school. Instead of studying something tech-based I made a career shift into architecture and was excited to jump into this new world of design where I could apply what I had learned about creating interfaces on the screen to physical “interfaces” in the city. When the big design project was introduced in my first architecture course, I was flabbergasted that we started with form and shapes instead of talking about what people wanted or needed, like I would have a few months earlier in my role as a UX designer and engineer. Fast forward to 2020 when we were laying out the curriculum that became Urban Technology at University of Michigan and these memories came back to me. Qualitative research was an immediate “must.”
Inventing and developing ideas that shape life in cities cannot conscientiously be done in a vacuum. It must follow from close and careful observation, discussion, and co-creation with people whose lives will be affected. Research, and specifically qualitative research that brings to the foreground the complexities of everyday life, is the air that an urban technology design process breathes. Yesterday our students completed the first offering of a new course titled LISTENING: Design Research Methods, so to mark the occasion we’re bringing you an interview with the professor of that course, Dr. Chanel Beebe.
💬 Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology program at University of Michigan, in which we explore the ways that data, connectivity, computation, and automation can be harnessed to nurture and improve human life in cities. If you’re new here, try this short video of current students describing urban technology in their own words.
🎙 Design Research with Dr. Chanel Beebe
A sense of deep chill is the first thing I notice when speaking with Chanel. She’s chill and it’s making me chill. This is a critical skill for a qualitative researcher, I think to myself. We’re able to settle into a frank conversation about her interest in socio-technical activism. We talk about design research and education. We talk about her work at d.Ford, the design team that serves the big blue oval. And we talk about Detroit, the city of Chanel’s birth and upbringing.
With both a Bachelors's (from U-M) and a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education (both from Purdue) and experience in urban technology, she’s a perfect candidate to teach the required introductory course in design research that we’ve created for urban technology students. And so I was totally not chill when she said yes to teaching—I was ecstatic!
BRYAN BOYER: What is design ethnography?
DR. CHANEL BEEBE: Design ethnography is centered on understanding people's lived experience by living and engaging with them. In a nutshell, it’s about understanding the human condition, usually for the sake of designing some sort of intervention in that space. That could be through technology or products, or it could also be space itself, designing different public or private spaces that allow people to live according to their needs.
BRYAN: What’s a concrete example of something you’ve worked on?
CHANEL: One of my favorite projects was with a government-funded state housing agency who had noticed there was a stark gap in home ownership in their state based on race, so they came to [the place I was working] with this objective of understanding the barriers to home ownership for black and brown people in their state.
When they originally came to us, they really only wanted us to talk to black and brown homeowners. We helped them change their assumptions and expectations, saying that when you're addressing a problem as socially complex as this, you need to talk to all of the stakeholders. So we started with a series of virtual interviews talking to people from different groups—lenders, real estate agents, people who had recently bought a house, people who had bought a house within the last 5 years, people currently in the process…. And we talked to a few people who had recently either been rejected from a loan or whose offers didn’t get accepted.
Then we did a series of workshops with those groups where we solicited their opinions and walked them through a series of brainstorming activities for solutions. That was the most generative part, and where design research thrives – creating opportunities for people to brainstorm together, and then synthesizing it into design principles that our clients and stakeholders can engage with. Fundamentally the work we're doing is to translate real life, human experiences and human concerns into programs, initiatives, and proposals that can be addressed.
BRYAN: Much of the work you do involves very qualitative ideas, which can be imprecise and messy. What’s it like collaborating with colleagues like engineers who often desire for quantitative results to feel comfortable?
CHANEL: One of my favorite parts of being a design researcher in industry is that I don’t just work with researchers. I’m working with engineers, designers, policymakers—people who have entirely different ways of approaching work and understanding the world.
I approach my conversations with them with the same amount of intentionality and planning that I approach conversations with participants and customers and community members. They’re another stakeholder, right? So, how do I translate my findings in a way that matters to them, that they can digest and understand in their very quantitative world?
I find it so energizing to be in those conversations, trying to translate what I consider to be important and essential that others might consider soft, or just a nice little story. To help them see the value of what people are saying.
BRYAN: I'm curious if you have ever been in a professional context where you’ve thought “ethnographic research isn't the right thing for us to be doing here,” where there might be some other way to inform the design work you’re doing?
CHANEL: More often a company wants to do one thing, but I think a deeper engagement is necessary. Often I end up saying, “To do this in a way that is accurate to people's experience, we need to spend some time understanding what their aspirations are. We need time and resources to do a little bit more than you’re asking.”
I have had the experience where an organization has come up with what they consider to be very engaged research, and it looks nice on paper, but in reality it’s a 3-month engagement or a 6-week engagement. So I have to be very clear about how much can actually be accomplished in that timeframe: how much time does it actually take to figure out who we're going to talk to; how much time does it actually take for them to understand and consent to doing research with us; how much time does it take to do the research and analyze it; and then comparing [the timeline of] all of that to when the company wants the findings delivered.
Often people or organizations will have these really grand ideas and objectives, but they want findings the day after the thing ends. So I have to explain, “Given the resources we have, the story will not be complete. The conversations will have to be shorter. The data analysis will need to happen quicker. And therefore what we can actually do with that data will be a lot more limited.”
Then they'll usually say, okay, let me go find some more time and resources. Or they’ll say, well, this is all the time and resources we have. What do you suggest? What actually makes sense in this timeframe?
BRYAN: What’s the typical amount of time you have to do ethnography in a professional context, compared to an academic one? How do you navigate a shorter timeline for research?
CHANEL: I would say traditional ethnography takes 2 to 3 years, and that's because you're actually living in the space and engaging with people. In industry it looks a lot different. Studies will be called an “ethnography,” and that's a sign that the goal of the study is to develop some sense of the overall participant experience.
In an industrial ethnography, there are multiple touchpoints with the customer and with the participants, and the timeframe, like you said, is limited. Usually the study is designed to account for that limitation… A lot of what I was teaching in this class was giving students the tools to be able to design an appropriate study based on the human experiences they're interested in uncovering.
BRYAN: What are you all teaching in the course, LISTENING: Design Research Methods?
CHANEL: In this class we began with understanding ourselves, because with qualitative research, if you don't have an awareness and understanding of how you are situated yourself, it becomes difficult to understand the work you do and interpret what that work might mean.
So we started by talking about positionality and students’ individual identities, their goals and their backgrounds, and the ways in which those things could impact research. Then we got deeper into some of the theories associated with different types of research. We were focused on developing qualitative research skills, but we also talked about the difference between qualitative and quantitative research, and I made it clear that more often than not in industry, you're going to do a mixed method study. You're going to do some qualitative stuff to inform what the quantitative should be, and vice versa.
Then we honed in on the qualitative research space. I gave them high-level introductions to common methods – interviewing, surveying, observations – and the different ways those can be carried out.
Once they had a sense of that ecosystem, we let them start practicing and developing those skills. I asked them to choose a topic they were interested in and put them into teams where they could practice the collaborative nature of research. The teams had similar research questions or areas of interest, and then they developed a discussion guide – in industry it’s often called an interview protocol, but it's really just a list of questions – and we spent time refining those before the students interviewed each other.
After they conducted those interviews, we talked about data analysis methods. That process was for them to get practice with: What does it mean to have rich conversations with people, and then try to translate that to someone else? How do you describe or begin to understand what's important about what somebody else says? How do you go from, “This is what I heard in the interview” to “This is what it means” to “These are insights.”
We ended the class brainstorming around what their insights could be, and what are ways to present that research that could be generative for either more design or more research.
Design research, as a skill, is something best built experientially. The more time you have to practice conducting an interview and doing analysis, and then going back and conducting more interviews, the better you get at it.
BRYAN: What has been hardest for the students?
CHANEL: There were moments of discomfort, which are natural to the process of doing ethnography: there will be points when you have to make a decision, you have to weigh the options, and you really don't have anybody to tell you, “Do this.”
By the end I think students were more comfortable with being uncomfortable, which is part of what I wanted them to get out of the class—that mindset needed to engage in qualitative research.
BRYAN: How do you make sure that when you are doing design research that you are not being exploitative?
CHANEL: That was probably the most frequent question that came up in class. A lot of that is handled through the relationships you build with your customer or participant. In this course, students were interviewing [their classmates] with whom they already had some type of relationship. In practice, though, there are a lot of things you can do and different methods that prioritize relationship building. My favorite would be participatory action research, where your participants are helping you design the research so that they're not surprised and are excited about whatever they're going to share with you.
More commonly in industry, you don't have the luxury of the time it takes to do that. So then you're left to transactional recruitment methods: I'll pay you X amount of money in order to give me the information I want. We spent a lot of time talking about the space between relationship building and compensation. If you don't have the time to begin a relationship, if your organization doesn't have that mission, then it's important for you as a researcher to make sure you're able to account for that in some way.
We talked a lot about incentives and being creative with incentives, because depending on the people you're talking to, there's only so much you can do. You don't want to get into bribing people. And incentives can also take you to a place where people are just telling you what they think you want to hear because you're paying them.
So there isn't a clear answer to how to avoid it being exploitative. The most comprehensive thing you can do is to be aware of what all your options are. What options do you have for engaging and building relationships? What options do you have for compensating and making it worth your time? And what options do you have to make sure they're able to engage in a genuine way that isn't exploitative, but also isn't something where they're just telling what they want to hear.
BRYAN: Let’s end with a question that we ask everyone. What’s your favorite city and why?
CHANEL: I’m completely biased, but Detroit is my favorite city. The history of the city is so powerful, both because of the industries that have been here and the people who migrated here because of that industry. Detroit is historically a port city, which allowed it to attract different types of people from all across the country and across the world.
The energy just feels different here. The air of the city and the feel of the city is one that is both healing and forward-focused. We also have Belle Isle and the river. The nature here is often undersold. In all my travels I haven’t found a riverwalk that feels better than Detroit’s. I haven’t found a festival space that feels better than Hart Plaza or downtown. There's a lot of things that could be changed, of course, but definitely the best city in the world.
These weeks: Admissions events-a-go-go where the answers to all of the questions are: yes, no, they’ll be fine. Making bets. Talking about Detroit, site of our first Cities Intensive trip. Some careers and professional development work. We keep a running list of imagined t-shirts on the whiteboard that capture key phrases. One of them says, “agileish.” 🏃