My interactions article Content, The Once And Future King has just come out. Here are some other examples, articles, resources, and so on that build on the topics of Big Content and Big Data that I explored.

99 Problems (Explicit Political Remix) [YouTube] – Jay-Z’s 99 Problems “covered” by Barack Obama. Astonishing.

Look to the skies. The flying saucers will always be there [MetaFilter] – Overview of Dickie Goodman and break-in records.

After Buchanan and Goodman got sued for copyright violations, they exploited the situation for more publicity, by releasing Buchanan and Goodman on Trial, in which the district attorney was portrayed by Little Richard. Their actual trial turned out even better, establishing a precedent for parodic fair use quotations of hit records, as long as copyright holders were compensated. Goodman would then spend several decades making more “break-in” records, where snippets from Top 40 hits were used to “break in” with commentary on the action. Because the records exploited contemporary news events and pop cultural trends, Goodman’s break-in records sound like little time capsules, inspired by topics as varied 50s folk music (The Banana Boat Story), Sputnik (Santa and the Satellite), Westerns (The Flying Saucer Goes West), monster movies (Frankenstein ’59/Frankenstein Returns), the Cold War (Russian Bandstand), TV cop shows (the Touchables in Brooklyn), the Berlin Wall (Berlin Top Ten), the 1968 Democratic convention (On Campus), the Apollo moon landing (Luna Trip), blaxploitation (Superfly Meets Shaft), Richard Nixon (Watergrate), and gas shortages (Energy Crisis ’74)

Raiders of the Lost Archives [YouTube] – “Shot-by-shot comparison of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ vs. scenes from 30 different adventure films made between 1919-1973.

Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity [McKinsey] – Definitive report on Big Data, with downloadable reports, podcasts, and more.

The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets-so-called big data-will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus, according to research by MGI and McKinsey’s Business Technology Office. Leaders in every sector will have to grapple with the implications of big data, not just a few data-oriented managers. The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future

How Big Data Became So Big [NYT] – A brief cultural history of the concept of Big Data and how it’s tipped into the mainstream this past year.

Rising piles of data have long been a challenge. In the late 19th century, census takers struggled with how to count and categorize the rapidly growing United States population. An innovative breakthrough came in time for the 1890 census, when the population reached 63 million. The data-taming tool proved to be machine-readable punched cards, invented by Herman Hollerith; these cards were the bedrock technology of the company that became I.B.M.

The Ethnographer’s Complete Guide to Big Data: Small Data People in a Big Data World [Ethnography Matters] – Jenna Burrell has a three-part series of posts looks at qualitative cultural work and both traditional and emerging approaches to larger and larger data sets.

Being an ethnographer makes me more of a “small data” person. It seems counter-intuitive at first, but I find there are good, sound reasons to sometimes forgo the opportunity to collect more data. This gets to ever present questions about how much is sufficient when doing qualitative or, more specifically, ethnographic research (i.e. how many people to interview? how many months to spend in the field? etc). I find memory limits are an important bounding factor. Can I remember key points from each interview, distinctive elements of that individual’s story? Can I recall the setting and some of the things I observed there? Reading a transcript or my field notes, can I put myself back in that time and place? To have good recall and mastery of your data helps you to move through it with agility and to draw the kinds of surprising thematic connections across data that make ethnographic work, at times, profound.

Designing for Big Data [Jeffrey Veen] – A 20-minute talk from Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Veen describes how “technology has enabled massive amounts of data to be recorded, stored, and analyzed. Putting those things together has resulted in some fascinating innovations that echo data visualization work that’s been happening for centuries.”

Jaimes Nel of Connected Futures collaborated with Aico Shimuzu to tell this story about their rapid research in post-quake Japan.

Research often feels like a process of managing confusion and uncertainty until we find conceptual tools to understand a situation. Failure (and subsequent redemption) are, after all, a well-worn trope in ethnography. The journey from outsider to insider is an effective literary technique that boosts the credibility of the storyteller.

My experience is an ordinary day’s work on a more asymmetric battlefield than a typical client project. On the 11th of March 2011, a magnitude 9 earthquake struck off the east coast of Japan, causing a tidal wave that devastated towns up and down the coast of Tohoku province. Travelling to Japan later that year, I was interested in how the earthquake had affected people around the country. They had been experiencing rolling power blackouts for several months in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear emergency and I wanted to get a sense of whether this might prompt change in a country that has experienced sluggish growth for nearly two decades. I was only in Tokyo for a week, with other commitments, but managed to set aside a day for some research time with Aico Shimuzu, a friend who works as a design researcher and innovation consultant in Tokyo.

Our very straightforward approach was to meet at a busy train station, a little way away from the usual Tokyo hotspots of Shibuya or Shinjuku, and simply approach people in the street, asking for a few moments of their time. We spent around 3 to 4 hours wandering through the streets around the station, striking up conversations when we could. As you might expect, more people said no to us than yes. It was probably quite helpful that we were a man and a woman, and Japanese and a foreigner. In a culture that can be very reserved, it was much easier for me to approach strangers than it was for Aico. This small cultural sin was more easily forgiven of a foreigner. My faltering Japanese also made for a great opening line, as Aico would have to step in and rescue our victims! In all we managed to have brief conversations with 7 people (some in pairs and some on their own). They kindly agreed to let us photograph them and told us about their experiences since the earthquake and what they thought had changed in Japan.

Their stories were moving, and worrying. They all agreed that things had to change, but the events of 11th March had shaken their confidence in the authorities. Some emphasised the need to appreciate daily life, as the things that are ordinarily taken for granted had become impossible for people in Tohoku. One woman felt Japan had become selfish, and needed to re-emphasise connections between people, telling us “In the end, we can never live alone. We have to help each other.”

Aico and I were struck by the earnestness with which the people we spoke to desired change. This was truly an event that made people notice that the infrastructure around them could not always be relied on. In a way, an event such as this is like a giant “breach” experiment, in which the unspoken assumptions we rely on to get along with each other have broken down. As we walked, Aico and I talked about all of these issues and the people who took the time to chat with us helped us learn a little bit more about our own perspectives and gave us fuel to think about things. In many ways, this type of guerrilla work is as much a tool for your thinking as it is a way to understand a topic. This is what I mean when I say it’s almost inevitably a failure. I don’t mean that it’s not successful, but rather that it can never hope to represent a coherent view. It’s simply too random. The people we spoke to had little connecting them, apart from the fact they were all going through the same experience in some fashion Doing this work outside Tohoku, we were a little distant from the events there and so were our participants. We also noticed that many of those who were willing to break stride and talk to us were from outside Tokyo, which says a little about both big cities and our process!

Our guerrilla tactics may limit the claims we can confidently make from this data, but we can still explore them as individual cases, and use them to frame our own thought processes. Eventually, our day of guerrilla research left us with more questions than ever, just like our participants, but often that’s entirely the right place to be in a situation which is fluid and unresolved. Discussing this piece now, a year and a half later, Aico makes the point that repeating the exercise would help understand whether the social ripples from the quake were still being felt, or if people were forgetting and moving on. At the time, Japan was still working on making sense of what happened to it all those months ago and this day helped sensitise us to that atmosphere of uncertainty and doubt.

See Aico’s pictures from Tokyo just after the quake and from Tohoku a month later.

Our latest interactions column Content, the Once and Future King has just been published.

Christian Marclay’s The Clock is a 24-hour film, in which each minute of the 24 hours is depicted by images of clocks (or other depictions of the time) from other movies. Creating The Clock was an intensive, meticulous process. For at least several months, as many as six people spent their days watching DVDs and ripping potential clips; Marclay spent three years working at his computer for 10 to 12 hours a day. With at least 90 years of cinematic history to work with, and perhaps 90,000 movies available, there is a substantial corpus of moving images to draw from. Let’s call this Big Content.

Get the PDF here.

Previous articles also available:

• Persona Non Grata
• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Living In The Overlap
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting with Advertising
• Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
• Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity
• The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It)
• What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It
• Elevator Pitch
• Kilroy Was Here
• Never Eat Anything Raw

Welcome to a new week!

• It’s fascinating and challenging at the outset of a project as there’s sometimes more enthusiasm than momentum, and many parallel pieces to get rolling that move by inches instead of miles. At the bullet-point level, we’re in much the same place as we were last week except we realize we need to push our fieldwork til after Thanksgiving so we can have time to get fully immersed in the topics and build a great fieldwork method.
• I’m expecting to see publication of one, if not two, of the articles I’ve been working on lately.
• Last week we published Apala’s War Story. I think a few other people are close; I saw some outlines last week and am excited about what those will turn into.
• Ten years gone: From November 2002 – Fresh Meat at the American Girl Store
• What we’re consuming: Strangers podcast, Cartems Donuterie, Letterpress

In a previous post I wrote about Losing All Hope Was Freedom, a series of social experiments on video, where the “performer” takes the hands of strangers.

Now comes Surveillance Camera Man, who does nothing more than take video in places where you don’t expect to be recorded. Perhaps part of his point is that we are semi-surreptitiously recorded in all of those same places but we ignore it, and when it’s made explicit by a dude standing in front of you with a device, then it becomes wrong.

But there’s some other things happening here besides social commentary/activism. Michael Moore and Borat have created familiar entertainment forms around the unwanted and uncomfortable intruder. Watch the video below (which is at times almost anthropological, exploring context after context – including one heartbreaking example) and see if you don’t start to root for the cameraman. We become co-opted into voyeurism, curiously wondering who those people are or what’s in that room. I’m sure there’s some film theory bit that would explain why the POV shot is so easy to empathize with, regardless of how we would feel if we were in the viewfinder ourselves.

Updated: videos now here

Apala Lahiri Chavan, Chief Oracle and Innovator at HFI relates a tale about her own distress when faced with a difficult household situation.

In one of the very early research projects I worked on in India, we learned many best practices that became part of our research guidelines. However, there were parts of the experience that I have not quite gotten over even, after 12 years.

We were researching in-home media usage in India for a multinational tech company from the USA. The research targeted lower middle class households from across the country, both urban and rural. My colleague Amita and I were covering the northern Indian state of Punjab. This particular evening we were visiting a semi-urban household near the city of Chandigarh.

It was 6pm when we reached the location. We had to leave the car behind and walk the last few yards since the lane was too narrow. As we entered the gate of the house, a group of ladies came out of the house and welcomed us. They had marigold garlands for us to wear and a lit earthen lamp with which evil spirits were warded off.

We were welcomed inside the house and ushered into a tiny but neat living room. One elderly lady who had garlanded us was the mother-in-law. She invited us to sit on a rug on the floor. She sat down too and so did a number of other people – the entire neighbourhood was there.

The mother-in-law and some of the other elderly women from the neighbourhood did their own in-depth interview where we the participants! We were asked about our age, income, husbands, caste, education, number of children, size of house, TV serials we watched, and so on. On hearing that neither of us had children though we were married, a hush descended upon the group. After a few tense moments, the mother-in-law told us to have faith in God and not give up hope. We looked down into our plates, wondering what would happen if we told them we did not have children out of choice!

Some young girls had also joined the gathering inside the living room (which had spilled out to the gate and into the kitchen). One girl rushed home to get us some dessert that she had made that day!

By the time the gup-shup (friendly chatter) was over it was 7:30pm. Even though we were used to the fact that time stretched quite a bit in India and hence a session slated for an hour could stretch to an hour and a half (after all, the concept of time in India was circular unlike the linear concept of time in the West) this was beyond what either of us had experienced. But there was no possibility of hurrying anybody. How could we tell a group of extremely hospitable and warm people that our time was more important than their company?

At last, we started the session with the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. As we realized that the neighbours were not about to leave, Amita and I looked at each other and decided that it was fine to have the neighbours since they were clearly like a large, extended family.

As the father-in-law, two sons and the other daughter-in-law were not back from work yet, this was women’s time. However, it became clear within the first ten minutes that this daughter-in-law was not going to speak her mind in front of her mother-in-law and the other neighbourhood matrons. We did some quick improvisation: I asked the daughter-in-law to show me the house (they knew this would be part of the interview) while my colleague continued to speak with the mother-in-law. This worked very well and while she showed me the house I got to hear the daughter-in-law’s story (e.g., how she never got to watch any television she wanted or listen to any music she chose, and so on).

It was 8:30pm or so when the men of the house returned from work. Instantly, the atmosphere changed. Until then the mother-in-law and the other matrons had been the ‘bosses’ of the session but now everything changed. The father-in-law and the two sons were clearly in control. Mother-in-law now scurried about between kitchen and living room and many of the neighbourhood matrons and girls left. This was a very high power distance culture after all!

We were fortunate that we had the time to speak with the ladies while the men were not around. Had they been around from the beginning, we would have not heard any of the ladies speak. Even as we carried on the conversation with the men, we suddenly noticed that there was a young lady standing at the living room door. There was a hint of aggression in her posture that made it difficult to ignore her. However, everyone else in the room seemed to not even see her.

Then as the elder son was telling us about his media usage preferences, a most unexpected thing happened. The young lady at the door suddenly stormed into the room and started addressing us.

She screamed and howled about the physical abuse and dowry harassment she was being subjected to by her husband (the son who was speaking) and the mother-in-law. She shouted “He made my poor parents buy him that expensive TV that he has been talking about. Now he wants them to buy him a VCR. Where are they going to get the money for that?”

We were absolutely stunned and just as we began to get our wits together, her husband got up, caught her by the hair and gave her two resounding slaps across the face. He told her – in the most abusive language – to go up to her room.

Enough was enough. Both of us sprang up to our feet and stood between the man and his wife. He was unperturbed and tried to pick up the thread of the conversation with us, as if nothing had happened. His parents said “This daughter-in-law is a bad woman and needs to be kept in control since she shames us.”

We were still standing in front of the daughter-in-law who was now alternating between weeping bitterly and screaming in rage. We had to make a critical decision. What should we do? What was our role in this situation? We were researchers who were supposed to maintain our neutrality and objectivity but was that the right thing to do? Should we not call the police’s Crimes Against Women section and complain about the husband and his parents? Should we not protect this woman who was being abused?

But before we could do anything, the daughter-in-law ran out of the house screaming and made a dash for the main gate. Not one of her family responded and told to ignore the nautanki (drama) and continue the conversation.

We said to the family that we would not be able to continue, given what had happened. We handed over the cash incentive and walked out of the house. We looked up and down the lane but we could not see the daughter-in-law anywhere. It was little after 10pm when we got into our car and drove off.

I have not been able to come to terms with that one incident even today. I felt that in order to be a “good” researcher I had betrayed that girl who was being abused and a much larger cause. Should one not be an activist ethnographer, when the situation demands?

During a recent hotel stay I came across this familiar tag, hanging in the bathroom.

As hotel guests, we’re empowered to make the decision about whether to reuse our towels or get fresh ones. They’ve framed this as an environmental issue, which it is, but it’s also about customers improving the bottom line for the hotel. So it’s a wisely-framed message; I suspect it works reasonably well (although I wonder about housekeeping staff in this equation; if they are seeking tips then perhaps that’s why I see fresh towels as often as I not).

In the shower itself, I found this dispenser.

Here’s the message in detail

A similar dynamic; if you give up a little something, you save the environment. However, in this case, you don’t have a choice, and more importantly, the packaging has a significant impact upon the experience

. That dispenser connotes generic, low-quality shower goo, not the delightful little cleansing treats found in hotels.

This is a design/experience/messaging challenge that they just ceded. The goodness of environmental contribution could be better conveyed (even that blue tag is better looking and more enthusiastically written than the dispenser copy). The dispenser could reward you in the interaction. The quality of ingredients, normally messaged by the packaging, could be explicitly demonstrated (an interesting, if not entirely successful example is Method on Virgin America).

Related: The rooms in Seattle’s Edgewater Hotel have lovely big bottles of shampoo ($25 if you take them) but they lose some of the appeal when you see these bottles used by housekeeping to refill ’em.

Despite early-morning soupy fog, it turns out to be another gorgeous Monday. Here’s what we’ve got going on

• For one project, we’re working hard to both immerse ourselves in a new business area (interviewing experts, scanning the media, planning a walking tour) and charging ahead with project logistics (getting a recruiter lined up, finalizing a screener, setting up briefing meetings on fieldwork best practices, developing participant homework exercises, etc.).
• We’re looking at an innovative combinations of methods this week that we’ll be proposing to a prospective client. Wish us luck in landing the work!
• Last week we published Carla’s War Story. I’ve got a near-final draft for another in my inbox, and have been swapping email with some other folks finalizing their stories, so stay tuned for more.
• I’ll be leading a class on user research for the Industrial Design school at Academy of Art University this week.
• I’ve got a handful of lunch and coffee meetings this week to catch up with different folks, both local and visiting.
• What we’re consuming: underwater dogs, Izakaya Yuzuki, McSweeney’s Issue 41, pumpkins as many ways as possible.

Consumer insights professional Carla Borsoi encounters the outlier that illustrates a greater truth.

There is nothing like home research to challenge your notions of whether or not everyone lives like you. Earlier this year, we were doing research on how people use multiple devices (phones, tablets ad computers) – what they are doing with each, what they feel about each device and how these are shared (or not). We were particularly focused on three audiences: Moms, Entertainment Junkies, and Earlier Adopters. Yes, in my world, we use Title Case to label our different audiences. At any rate, we picked three areas with high density for devices and plenty of each of these audiences in spades: NY, Seattle and Austin.

I headed to Seattle in late March to meet with people and to talk to them about what they do. The first interviews went swimmingly: one Dad told us how he used his tablet to collect coupons, his computer to develop his Saturday shopping plan with coupons, and his phone to go through with his plan. He also told us about watching movies during lunch at work on his tablet. An Earlier Adopter told us how he obsessively followed tech news as he rode the bus. Good, I thought, these interviews are going really well. The Seattle weather was appropriately grey and rainy, but these folks lived in warm and welcoming homes. Normal, to me, at least, with the typical toys in the home with kids, the nice entertainment system, clean kitchens, and so on.

It was our last day of interviewing. The rain had been pouring down the night before and I hoped it would hold off until I got to the airport at the end of the day. We were interviewing a young Mom who lived past Sea-Tac. I drove down pseudo-country roads and pulled up to the property for the interview. The driveway was full of mud. Thankfully, I was wearing wet weather boots. As I walked up with my colleagues to the front door I passed a dirty diaper sitting in the mud. Huh, I thought. Their garbage probably got torn apart in the storm last night. The house was old, but that’s how these things go. We were greeted by the young Mom and entered the house. Immediately the stale smell of cigarettes and mildew hit my nose.

Uh-oh.

The mom proved to be a bright young woman, who tended bar a couple nights a week, while going to school and parenting the rest of the time. I looked down at the dirty table in front of me while we continued talking. She had some great insights about how she used her tablet (often on loan to her parents who would watch the kids), how critical her phone was to keeping in touch, and how her computer was there as she worked on projects for school. However, the smell assaulted my senses. I could feel my two colleagues shifting in their seats, covering coughs. Our interview was scheduled for two and half to three hours, but after about 45 minutes, I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle it much longer. Someone asked if anyone had more questions. I quickly spoke up “Nope, think we’re good.” No one disagreed.

We walked out the door and I noticed more garbage outside – but breathed in the sweet clean air. I realized that as researchers we occupy a place of privilege. People allow us into their homes, without embarrassment or shame. This is their life. They allow us to see a window into it. People often participate in research for the chance to earn a little cash. This woman had spoken of how much they had saved to be able to rent this small, mildewed space. It reminded me that I have a lot of advantages that other people don’t. It’s a reminder that when we’re creating products, we’re doing it not just for some sexy early adopter, but real for people who are just trying to make ends meet and get started with their life. It also reminded me to go home and wash down the walls of our stairwell, covered in grime.

Steve spoke at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University about best practices for design research.