Completed in 5 weeks as a participatory design and design ethnography exercise during year one of the Interaction Design MFA at Umeå Institute of Design.
Role on Team
This project was completed in three main phases ethnographic research, analysis and workshops, and final exhibition. I aided in the creation of workshop structure and execution, probes, as well as elements of the interactive final exhibition.
Reflection
The aim of this exercise was to gain a comfort and understanding of how to go about user research. I built on my previous training within anthropology and added a design perspective on how ethnography can be conducted. I gained a great deal of comfort when it comes to staging workshops. The end exhibition was also a great format for me to practice exhibition design.
Design Ethnography
During this project the team utilized ethnographic techniques like direct observation and interviews as raw material that informed probes and provotypes. These probes were placed in public as a way to engage with the community on the topic of autonomous transportation. It was also used to create a ‘speculative ethnography’ displayed in the final exibition.
Autonomous Buses
After conducting workshops with stakeholders from the municipality we focused in on one location in specific. The Östra Train Station in Umeå is unique because it is completely unstaffed. There is a trend within Sweden and our society as a whole to more and more automation. This is leading to other services picking up the slack that is dropped by automated services. We Then began exploring how citizens felt if this trend continued into another form of public transit, namely buses. What we found was that there is a apprehension to riding in a driverless bus and most felt a lack of human contact and an unsafe feeling.
Less human: Exhibition
The goal of our workshops and final exhibition was to get stakeholders to empathize with the citizens that we had talked to during our research. More specifically the final exhibition was created to provoke the stakeholders about what the municipality would look and feel like in an autonomous future. In order to achieve this we created a speculative future and created artifacts from this future and structured the exhibition as a mock history of the autonomous bus service in Umeå during the year 2027. Each of these artifacts was created through the ethnographic information we had collected. At the end of the exhibition we held another workshop where the stakeholders were challenged to solve some of the issues that had been raised.
Process Highlight: Co-Creation Workshops
During the course we staged multiple co-creation workshops. These workshops were designed to breathe life into some of the ethnographic material that we had collected. We created personas that the stakeholders were asked to role play with and take a step into the shoes of those we had talked to. The photo below is of a workshop we created to gain a better understanding about the commuting choices citizens of Umeå make and how the different modes of transportation effect these choices. It was structured somewhat like a board game and decisions were made and then explained to the group.
Interactive Exhibition: Artifacts of the Future
For our final exhibition of the project material we chose to create a speculative future that was tied to the ethnographic material we had come in contact with. In an effort to make the material more engaging and understandable we had various interactive elements ranging from a comment box to recorded phone conversations. The photo below is of the phone artifacts that I made as a part of this interactive exhibition. When exhibition goers picked up the phones a conversation from our research plays. These conversations were recorded as a part of the exploration of how the unstaffed Östra Train Station makes customers feel when confronted with an issue at the station.
