Kristina Lustig is a researcher at Stack Overflow, and is currently based in London. She told this story live at User Research London. Update: the video is here.

Last year, I was in Bangkok with eight members of my product team. For our research, we planned to speak with people who we saw taking videos with their smart phones. We split into a few groups, each with their own interpreters. My group tried – and failed – to find people at an open-air market or around a couple of malls before we got the idea to look for parents taking videos of their children. Our interpreter, Kay, in a flash of genius, suggested that we’d probably see a lot of this behavior at a trampoline park, so off we went.

After riding several long thin escalators far into the interior of an extremely large mall, we arrived at the trampoline park and bought our tickets. Before we went in, we put on the mandatory lime green sticky socks and neon pink wristbands.

Now, I’ve done a good bit of international research in questionable situations, but at this point, this was the strangest research situation I’d been in. Let me paint the picture for you: two white people in business casual with neon pink wristbands and lime green sticky socks, holding notebooks, accompanied by our Thai interpreter, all wandering through a trampoline park full of Thai parents and children. On the 700th floor of an upscale mall on a Wednesday morning.

But really, it was also a research goldmine! We found many mothers with their smart phones out, filming their children. We spent about 30 minutes chatting as casually as possible with a few different women. We learned a lot about how they shared videos on social media. Then we were approached by a trampoline park employee. She began speaking with Kay, and although we couldn’t understand a word, we watched as Kay moved from confident to concerned and finally to incredulous.

As Kay translated for us, the employee was concerned that we could be spies from a rival trampoline park, or that we were we attempting to sell these women passes to a rival trampoline park!

Kay explained to the trampoline park employee that we were from a big company in the US and that we weren’t selling anything, but she didn’t believe us. We gave her our business cards (with potentially impressive or reassuring titles like “UX Researcher” and “Product Designer”) but no dice. She started to kick us out of the trampoline park, but in a last ditch effort, we asked “Well, can we just… stay and jump?”

So, we didn’t get to do too much research, but we did spend a lot of time bouncing around under that employee’s watchful anti-research eye. We observed as much as we could, while bouncing. In retrospect, we probably should have cleared our research with the trampoline park beforehand…but any research endeavor that starts with intercepts and ends with extreme trampolining is a win in my book.

We traveled to New Zealand to give a workshop and a talk at UX New Zealand. We had some time to explore after the conference; here are just some of the pictures (the whole set is here).

Six Barrel Soda

One of my favorite sheep.

Geothermal wonders.

The ice cream loves ice cream, or so the bad Photoshop job would have you believe.

I passed through Grand Rapids in October and was able to see part of Art Prize and see friends. Here’s a few pictures from the visit.

Welcome to The Understanding Group.

Bunny diners.

Technician 3 by Charles Jevremovic

MAYA 7624 by Seungmo Park

I was in Brooklyn in October to teach a workshop at the Delve event. Here’s some of what I saw when I was in town.

Hotel housekeeping messages left on the headboard. Have we reached Peak Sticky?

A tempting do-not-touch.

Branding.

I was in Kitchener-Waterloo to speak at the Fluxible conference. I had a bit of time to take photos and here’s some of what I saw

A promotion for a local cafe.

My alma mater as an infrastructure brand

The future of storage will be millennials.

I was in Toronto a little while ago, en route to the Fluxible conference. Here’s a sampling of the photos I took in my short time walking around the city.

There’s no end of photography projects documenting an ordinary aspect of life, across diverse individuals, with the hope of throwing some light on who we are and how we live now. Or how others live. It’s art with the frisson of anthropology. Here’s another two in the same vein, each looking at different elements of our consumption.

Dinner in NY by Miho Aikawa looks at people having dinner, in New York (hence the clever title).

Also see Dinner in Tokyo and read more at Slate.

With no nod to naturalism, Gregg Sega shoots portraits of people surrounded by 7 Days of Garbage.

Also see the fascinating project frogdesign did back in 2007, where staff blogged about the trash they found themselves accumulating throughout a regular week, and read more about Gregg Saga’s project at Slate.

Last week I was in New York to speak with two groups at SVA and at IxDA (also to see the city, eat desserts and hang with friends). Here’s some of the pictures I took during my trip.

“I Know A Guy, Inc.”

The New Colossus by the Bruce High Quality Foundation, public art at Lever House that references the ubiquitous labor action inflatable rats.

Blue by Anish Kapoor at MOMA, chock full of subtlety.

DO NOT WALK THRU ELEVATOR.

The Strand Book Store unloading some similar titles about the women behind the men of the sea.

Hyperlocal.

Papa Moozi

A mini-Jurassic Park seen as street art around sidewalk greenspace.

New York previously: Summer 2013, 2011

I spent a very brief in time in Toronto recently, taking a bit of time after the Fluxible conference to visit my old hometown. I got to visit with folks and of course walk around and take some pictures. Here’s some of what I saw.