"I'm a cyclist, that’s how I have always defined myself." This is how a middle-aged man presented himself during a workshop that we facilitated for Copenhagen Cycle Secretary. The statement surprised me because during an in-depth interview a few weeks earlier he said he drove his car on trips around the city almost every day. He saw himself as a cyclist, even though his behaviour would show him as a driver.
There is a difference between what people do and what they say they do. This makes the anthropological method quite interesting when we need to understand people and create user insights. When we talk to people, take part in their lives and observe their behavior, we create insights, based on a complex understanding of how they think, feel and act in everyday life. In this way we capture more than what people can put into words, as what is verbalised more often reflects ideals and rationalisations.
On the Grand Tour of the user's everyday life
In the meetings with people, asking ‘how’ is just as important as ‘why’. ‘The Grand Tour’ is the name of a popular anthropological interview method that focuses on asking how a person acts, rather than why.
We often use ‘The Grand Tour’ method to get people to describe their everyday lives, daily routines and habits. The guided narrative tour through a person's everyday life paints a picture of who they are, and moves the focus away from reflection to the embedded, habitual actions that we humans do not usually reflect upon.
When we ask why a person bicycles or drives a car, we get answers that give an indication of how he or she would like to see themselves. But by asking how and experiencing the person's travel habits first hand, we get an understanding of when, and ultimately also why people, for example, might choose the car rather than the bike.
(In the project for the Bicycle Secretary of Copenhagen Municipality, which was attempting to move people from cars to bicycles, we got a group of locals to map out their transportation choices through a week in a logbook.)
Follow the people
To empathise with how other people think, feel and act requires spending time with the people you want to learn about. The anthropologist George Marcus uses the term "follow the people" to describe the effort of experiencing the relationships people enter into, rather than just being handed a report of the experience in questionnaires.
By remaining close to the experience, we maintain the nuances and reactions that are often forgotten when recounting an experience. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman points to the great difference in how you experience a situation when you are in it and how you would describe a situation retroactively. In other words, remembering is radically different from experiencing.
We're moving closer to the experience
When on a project, we therefore prefer to always follow people in real life. For Carlsberg, we followed a group of young people while they purchased drinks for the pre-party as well as for the party. By following them we gained insight into their drinking habits and an understanding of how context plays into their behaviour and choices. We also recently completed a survey of rail passengers' experience of personal comfort for DSB. Here it was natural for us get into the train and run around with people. From our seat in the compartment and from talking with passengers on board, we got an insight into the mood and interaction that takes place in a train carriage and thus a deeper understanding of rail passenger experience.
(On the train you need to agree with fellow passengers about behaviour and preferences on-board. For example, if the curtain should be up or down, and the boundary of how much space you are entitled to occupy with a computer on the common table.)
More than just participation
Participation is central to how we build insights. Anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup describes fieldwork as a balance between empathy on the one hand and keeping a distance on the other. The trick is to be able to empathise, but also to be able to step outside and analyse what you are experiencing. We have a double role. We need to be there and to listen to what people say, while being far enough away to focus attention on what is not being said.
In our work with user insights the anthropological "thick description" helps us to enter into people's everyday lives, while maintaining analytical distance. The dense description will be our tool to zoom in and out of context; through descriptions of observations, conversations and perceptions, documented in field notes, videos and pictures. Whether the goal is to understand what it means to have an addiction, or be a train traveller, the thick description gives us a holistic view of the relationship we observe and take part in, as a basis for our analysis.
In connection with a project on abuse we made for Odense we became wiser citizens through a series of in-depth ethnographic interviews.
That’s why anthropology is valuable
IS IT A BIRD uses anthropological methods in the development of user insights, recognising that people are seldom rational beings, but often paradoxical creatures who say one thing and do another. Of course, the man in the workshop considered himself a cyclist. But the contradiction in his statement testified that there was more at stake calling for exploration. The anthropological methods are so valuable in IS IT A BIRD’s work because they enable us to create insights and solutions that embrace the complexity of human behavior.
