W11: Golden Rules for the use of video in Design Research

Approach

Goals
The workshop will address some fundamental questions around the use of video in design
research:

"How do you avoid getting hundreds of hours of video footage to grind through for the 30
seconds of insight?"

"What is the best way to get systematic and comparable results?"
"How to balance between scripting video tasks and keeping the approach open-ended and
exploratory?"

“How can video capture people’s everyday contexts and bring valuable data that can
transcend throughout the research and inspire and direct concept creation?”

Video in the hand of a person enables him, her and us design researchers to capture, show
and share difficult situations, live reflections and moments, that may otherwise be difficult to
access and share during field visits. Video is used by researchers and is at present handed
over to ‘users’ as an empowering and co-creative tool in design research studies.

Key benefits
We will share our global expertise with case studies of video use in design research including
projects with T-Mobile, Nokia, Philips.

Workshop participants will:

  • Have a chance to try out methods and techniques.
  • Gain insights into how to make the video material sticky throughout the design process.
  • Develop a set of golden rules that will inspire your next projects and way of working with
    video.

what to bring

  • If available please bring your own camcorder or digital camera (i.e. Flip Mino) or mobile
    phone equipped with video recording capability. Plus all the necessary cables or card
    readers, laptops as we will request the team to share their video clips with all.
  • We also like to encourage you to bring your best case studies to share with everybody in 3
    minutes presentations.

 

Structure

In the workshop, we will work in groups of five people. The workshop will consist of three
main sessions with the following goals: Learn, Try, and Share.

Learn: In first session, we will start by sharing some of our case studies from the previous
research projects from across the globe. As a part of the discussion we will share several
different approaches, such as the auto-ethnographic and the videographer approach. We will
also share case studies using probes and SMS-prompting.

Try: In the second session, based on the Learn session and your own experiences utilizing
videos, each group will try out some of the tactics discussed and create their own “golden
rules” for video recording during design research studies.

Share: The final session will be about sharing the outcomes across the group and to conclude
with the final golden rules. The session will discuss and conclude on how video clips will be
‘sticky’ materials that

 

Target Audience

Anybody who wants to use video in their research better.


Participants with or without prior experiences utilizing videos in design research will both
benefit from the workshop. There is no prerequisite in terms of videography skills.

As the workshop requires participants to work in groups, we expect you to be active in
communicating with other members of the group.

Organizers

Fumiko Ichikawa, Principal, Design research consultant; www.tokyo-stories.com

Indri Tulusan, Senior service design consultant; www.toSpur.me

Rikke Ulk, Chief anthropologist and founder; www.antroplogerne.com

Fumiko, Indri and Rikke are all part of REACH, www.globaldesignresearch.com. The global
design research network. They have over 10 years of experience in design research and
innovation projects covering areas such as mobile communication, emergent markets,
medical devices, care systems and food&beverages communication.