Assignment 6: research methods
1. Review pp 42-64 in the HCD toolkit, keeping in mind the “fieldsite” scenario specific to your topic:
a. Educational technologies: we will be working with a local school, and hopefully collaborating with the Ghanaian group as well, but that too is in a school, so the two are pretty similar.
b. Biochar: the primary challenge is throughput: how much biochar can we make per unit time? Thus much of the information to inform your design will have to come from your own experiments. Nonetheless, it’s good to practice getting input from humans too, so we will be speaking to both experts here and our collaborators on the ground in Ghana.
c. Textile dyes: it’s possible that we will discover new applications for the local context (solar syrup!) as well as Ghanaian ink, so in developing design criteria we need to think as much about creative marketing, appeal to consumers, etc. as we do about technical aspects.
d. Condom vending: as in textile dyes, this is highly contextual, so the users greatly matter. At the same time, things like economic considerations are highly important to this design: a mechanism that takes the 50 peswa coin won’t work if condom prices climb too high.
e. Low-cost computing: the sensor group here is interested in problems such as bacteria counts in the Hudson; so that project could easily apply to both developing nations and the US. On the other hand, classrooms in Ghana and similar developing nations have few computing facilities. So much work needs to be done simply gather ideas about needs and see where the design opportunities will be.
2. If you are in the education group, you are working with laypeople—in particular kids—so you need to skip to methods described in part 3 below. If you are in one of the other groups, then you are meeting with either experts or peer collaborators (other students studying technology design like you), and so you only need to come up with two lists:
A. Things you would like to know more about (based on what you learned in assignment 4)
B. Questions that help inform you about those things
Do not confuse A and B! We often don’t know what questions to ask, and even when we do, the answers from people will not necessarily be the information you needed. The #1 rule is, “don’t ask your informants to do your work for you.” For example, if you want to find out what potential sensor applications might be in Ghana, don’t ask “what do you guys see as the potential sensor applications.” Rather ask a question like “what are the risks to X” (where X is health, agriculture, etc.) —then it’s your job to do the research to find out if there is a sensor that can address that. See researchquestionstointerviewquestions for an example of how to write the relation between A and B in table format. See http://homepages.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/arm.dir/lectures/acquisition.htm for further discussion and examples from a sociological point of view. The table with two lists, A and B, are your only deliverable required for this assignment. Record in the usual folder at \\hass11.win.rpi.edu\classes\stsh-4610.
3. Create a short list (maybe 4) research methods that would be appropriate to your circumstances. In addition to the techniques in the readings, there is a brief description of methods here http://homepages.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/design.dir/ethnographic%20techniques%20in%20design.doc and a long list with descriptions and examples here: http://designingwithpeople.rca.ac.uk/methods.
Techniques that work with adults do not necessarily work with children; so those working with kids should also take a look at these:
1. Comicboarding: http://ocs.sfu.ca/nordes/index.php/nordes/2011/paper/download/382/224
2. Eliciting children’s social capital: http://her.oxfordjournals.org/content/16/3/255.full
3. Playdough neighborhood: http://www.ehow.com/info_7843800_neighborhood-activities-kindergarten.html
4. Mixing Ideas: ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/hcil/Reports-Abstracts-Bibliography/2004-01html/2004-01.htm
5. 15 writing exercises: http://www.eduguide.org/library/viewarticle/211/
6. Posing problems to children: http://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning-student-motivation
7.Drawing with children: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/v19n1/gustafson.html
4. Select from your list two methods to try out, either on your classmates or someone outside class. When you finished, write up a summary of the results, and use that to provide a rationale for choosing only one of the two to actually try out in your field site on thursday.
5. Your final write-up should include: the initial short list, the two you actually tried, the results, and the rationale for the final decision. (Keep in mind that at the field site these will be short meetings, and at least some of the time has to be devoted to just plain old listening and understanding, so you probably don’t have time for more than one method.) Don’t forget to include all names—place write up in assignment 6 folder at \\hass11.win.rpi.edu\classes\stsh-4610.