Kelly Goto is a design ethnographer. She had a lot to say about designing things, approaches to finding the emotional charactersitics that make people respond, and many interesting examples. She almost had too much to say… She rushed the last part of her talk, just as she was bringing all the threads together into an explanation of a coherent design research methodology.

Here is some of what she covered:

empathy

We are trying to be connected to the materials we design.

She tells the story of her children going through a hospital experience, and how that made her really want to make a difference to medical interfaces.

Connected experiences

Connections between things, devices and lifestyles and products for creating change in behaviour.

Connection=meaning, Systematic and connected. Systems are connected things

addiction and fun

We want you to create addictive experiences

How can we evolve back from stooped computer beings to people with open, good posture? Open to real physical interaction, being physical together is being connected. Posture.

Functional, usable, pleasurable.

Understanding people’s rituals is the key to understanding an addictive experience.

devotion

Example of the fun and effortlessness of driving a mini. Mood is so important. Context is everything. Experience, trust. Relates to brand. Human machine communication. Efficiency. Usability.

Challenge is to make machine to human communications fun.

research

Focus groups don’t give accurate information. Observation in context provides more rich understanding of complex things like lifestyle and emotion.

Break down the experience into emotional functional comfort.

beyond usable

We are now at the point that things should at a baseline, function. We have moved up mazlows hierarchy of needs. Usability is covered, we can start thinking about some of the higher values.

sensory engineering

(And this is where it started getting a bit rushed)

Kensei engineering.

People Input sensory and knowledge. Moved Demographics Psychographics Emotional

Contextual interviews

“Deep hanging out” allows researchers to discover emotions.

experience mapping

Identity public private Satisfaction wonder comfort connection Context timeline Understand hidden needs

Kensei Aware, unaware.

We have to understand the spacing in between things and understand connections and lifestyle.

I hope she posts her slides sometime, it was hard to get the last 10 minutes of her talk, but plenty keywords to thing about.