One of the more important benchmarks for a community’s development is whether or not homes and shops include fridges – simply because they require continuous, stable electricity to be effective. This from a shop in a well-served community in Dire Dawa.

Been tracking the contents of people’s bags, pockets and car boots for a while now, to understand how people equip themselves for what lies out there.

Bag mapping is a useful method to get a sense of activities and priorities when people transition between their home space and what lies outside – the participant is asked to bring their ‘most often carried bag’ and lay the objects they carry on a flat surface, talking through the purpose and last-use of each item. Things to look out for – where the bag is kept in the home and what is clustered around it, what is packed/repacked on arrival/departure, and the use of different bags for different activities.

Women tend to be far more sophisticated bag carriers than men, in part because they utilise pockets less and because the social pressures to carry more, such as appearance related objects (make-up, mirror, tissues) or sanitary products is greater. But this sophistication sometimes comes at a cost – handbags carriers (and to a lesser extent other carriers of daily-use bags) are confronted with the handbag paradox that states: it is nearly always easier to add additional items to the bag than to sort through items to be removed, with the net result being that people walk around with significantly more stuff than they need. The moment when the bag carrier appreciates that the bag is over packed is often when they are in a hurry to step out the door (with no time to unpack) or when they are out and about (with nowhere to place and retrieve) what is taken out. It is common for the carrier of an over-filled bag to switch priorities on returning home – deprioritizing the ‘empty bag’ task with something else – such as the ‘empty bladder’ task or ‘make tea’ task, until they are again confronted with an overfilled bag when out and about. The handbag paradox also applies to other everyday bags, hard drives and car boots (trunks). In private-car ownership cultures e.g. the United States, the car (not just the car boot) becomes the overfilled container. (There’s also useful lessons in prioritisation switching depending on context that can apply to many situations).

Bag mapping is a useful exercise to become acquainted with the norms of a society – what we do or don’t decide to carry being a reflection of our selves and the environment in which we live and work.

See also: Scott Mainwaring’s paper on Living for the Global City – Mobile Kits, Urban Interface and Ubicomp and Mobile Essentials: Field Study and Concepting by myself and a number of ex-colleagues at Nokia.

I’ve written a long-form piece that seeks to answer these two questions – you can read it here.

Photos: Feeling the sinew of history – Cairo not so long ago.

It might seem counter-productive to travel half way across the world to observe or take part in an activity that we would otherwise try to avoid back at home, but observing or partaking in queues can reveal any number of things about a society: from the kinds of activities that people engage in whilst they are forced to wait; to understanding which groups have priority in that context; peoples tolerance towards waiting and how long; to motivations for, and reactions to social rule breakers. A society’s propensity to queue can teach us about service expectations and scarcity, and in a world that values convenience – can point to opportunities can point to how to shorten the path. The ways in which people overcome or by-pass queues whether its sneaky moves or pulling rank, paying bribes or ultimately giving up, can teach us about consumer and contextual literacy.

In many cultures queues are artificially created: to suggest demand (outside a nightclub, whilst it is empty inside); to reinforce power relationships (the fact that I’m making you wait reinforces my power over you); through to creating new business opportunities (bribe me and I’ll let you save time and jump this queue); or are simply a necessity to cope with continual or contextual demand.

Related: Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd – A Study of the Popular Mind.

Syncing with the team in Chongqing – the city of 30 million souls that most non-locals have never heard of. If you want to understand mainstream China you need to understand the aspirations and dynamics of Chongqing. And so it flows.

In week that has taken in Tokyo to San Francisco to Portland to Chongqing and, if this next plane leaves on time Shanghai in time for the weekend, I can’t help but pause for breath.

A critical part of any ethnographic/design research project is recruiting the right participants for the study – they are the foundation on which the research is built. The default way of recruiting in the commercial research space is to use recruiting agencies to help connect the researcher with relevant participants – generating a list that is often fleshed out by contacts from the team’s extended social network. The ideal recruiting agency list-of-potential-participants contains hundreds of millions of entries and document every aspect of potential participant’s lives – what they are doing, who they are doing it with, the causes they feel passionate about, the brands they connect with, the music they listen to, the places they go – and all updated in real time. Thanks to social networking sites like Weibo, Facebook, Orkut and Mixi this ‘ideal list’ already exists, and comes with a built in mechanism – their advertising platform to engage participants and proximate participants to opt into the study.

The ability to recruit through extended social networks has always been an important part of the researcher’s toolkit – with varying degrees of success depending on the focus of the participants’ profiles, the physical and spiritual distance between the study location and the team, and the breadth of the team’s extended network. The internet has made the planet smaller, social networks more apparent – making remote studies that much easier to run. Today the tools to rapidly and consistently reach and screen participants in any part of the globe are in the hands of every internet connected researcher. My estimate is that 80 to 90% of current recruiting for design research/ethnographic studies (excluding focus groups) that is currently placed through recruiting agencies could from a skill and work-flow perspective, be carried out in-house. This internalising of an otherwise outsourced practice has a couple of costs, which in most cases are easily outweighed by numerous benefits

As the literacy and awareness of these new recruiting practices grow in the community, so will the number of organisations that build out their internal capability to recruit. Recruiting agencies that make money from facilitating connections will require specialising on niches that are not easily met by social networking sites or the kinds of relationships that they support and they rapidly need to find alternative ways to add real value to the process beyond the usual logistical planning, translators, transcription. For researchers this means learning new skills: maintaining an online identity that is a suitable interface for potential recruits; knowing how to gauge reach through which social networking sites, running and iterating an ad-campaign; effectively screening and knowing how to turn leads into participants. Whilst it is relatively early days the effectiveness of the platform and the low barriers to entry will mean that the change will be rapid. You are the agents of this change.

Try Before You Buy

As I’ve written before, Facebook has a particularly effective ad platform to place an advertisement and target all the usual demographics and then some: age, gender, college, degree subject, year of graduation, profession, languages spoken, living within a certain distance of a particular locale and so on. Take 5 minutes to try the following:

You don’t need to run an ad campaign to make use of the Facebook data – the targeting parameters are good at gauging the likelihood of finding local bilingual guides and feeling out the landscape in which the team will work – especially when combined with satellite data from Google Maps – for understanding the spread and shape of the city/town/village which works whether you’re planning to run a study in Estonia or Ethiopia, and have a diverse understanding of living types around the world.

The basic process for running at study in a ‘foreign’ country is:

Google Docs make the screening process painless. As with other part of the study having a ‘live’ shared document used by the whole team makes tracking current progress easy – and is particularly useful when working with a large, distributed team on tight deadlines.

The quality of targeting data such as location, age, gender etc varies from country to country – somewhere like the US and Europe it has proved sufficiently accurate, for our recent study in Nigeria where more people are filling in their profile information through a mobile phone, and where bandwidth costs remain an issue it can be patchy. Despite Facebook’s dominance it is not universal by a long stretch – especially in China where there are strong local competitors and anyway access requires a VPN. Knowledge of multiple social networking sites and their ad platforms is a must.

As much as I’d like to think that the platform can be used to raise quality, it also lowers barriers to entry for fly-by-night companies and less critical clients. Even without social networking sites problems occur- in China recruiting a participant in a less-commonly used second tier city can cost 800 Euro (1,000 USD) for a full day’s access to a family – and it is no surprise with such high potential rewards unscrupulous agencies are driven to fraud. In China we’ve had to deal with a local agency that not only falsified participant data to fit our screening profile, but had family members act out the part. A team that conducts the screening themselves and is able to delve into a person’s online profile allow them to make a judgment call on the accuracy of the data being collected. Data trails and shadows will increasingly be tricky to fake to a researcher that knows how to look beyond the headlines.

Assuming you have a Facebook profile and a credit card or PayPal, it can take as little as 20 minutes to set up an ad campaign that points users to an Facebook Event, Page or other web page that can list more details about the study and contact details. Facebook Ad Manager makes it easy to track click-through and other measures of success – and tweak under-performing ads on the fly.

Dynamics

How many participants are sufficient to run a study? Using an example from a recent study – lets assume we want to run a 10 in-depth interviews in participant’s homes in Bangkok, where nobody on the team speaks Thai. The first advert targets potential bilingual guides – I prefer not to use professional translators – since they are overly motivated to creating billable hours, rather than getting in the spirit of the study which in the way that I work requires considerable flexibility. Once hired, the local guides can help write an advert in Thai. Thai’s are generally curious about foreigners, tend to have more variable income than more economically developed countries and many want to practice their English making finding participants relatively easy. Several iterations of a well targeted ad costing around $150 Euro can be enough to generate 30 – 100 leads which can be filtered down to 12 potential candidates – 10 + 2 spares. My preferred sweet spot is 30 to 50 leads – too many and the team spend to much time on filtering, too few and the gene pool is not diverse enough to sustain interesting life. Of course it is about quality candidates, not click-through – it takes a while to figure out the appropriate place to filter-out candidates: in the advertisement; in the landing page; in the screening questions; and in the follow-up screening of the responses.

The cost of Facebook Ads varies considerably according to the demographic you are targeting – it could be as little as a couple of Euro cents a click, as much as 5 Euro a click. The ad platform makes it easy to control daily or total spend.

Every recruiting medium has its own social dynamics and inherent levels of trust. Being able the check out the public profile and photos of candidates that have opted into the study gives the team a far better sense of what they are about. Similarly it can take a few passes before understanding what is the appropriate language, visual, tone for the advertisement. Likewise potential participants can screen the recruiting company or individual when the event page is associated with an individual Facebook account.

Relying solely on respondents to advertising can naturally skew the participant pool and can make the study feel brittle. I like to add breadth, depth and flexility to the team by utilising extended networks, and having a strong local crew. It is worth spending time to nurture local talent around the world both on and off the project for times like this.

In many instances you will want to reach demographics that are not active on social networking sites – probably about ~6 billion people worldwide. – which is where the notion of proximate participants comes in. A proximate participant is anyone or organisation that can provide a connection to an off-line participant – local NGOs, relatives, government agencies and the like. Understand their motivations, use incentives wisely. The biggest failure I see in recruiting is people throwing money at the problem – when the critical success factor is in framing the relationship.

This Is Why We Do It

The key benefits of carrying out recruiting in-house are, making effective use of social networking platforms and online tools are:

Carrying out recruiting in-house using these tools changes the very nature of the study – making it easier to compress ramp-up and turn an already dynamic process into something that is totally fluid.

Want to join a field study as a fixer/researcher/guide?
Fill in the Fixer/Guide/Researcher/.. Screener

See also the Fixer/Guide/Research Assistant List on Facebook

Four transcription services: Cloudwords, Casting Words, Verbalink and Way With Words.

Over the years I’ve had the (mostly) good fortune to interact with a wide variety of folks from the media – journalists, reporters, photographers, writers, editors – they tend to be smart, opinionated and appreciate what it takes to have a good conversation. For the researcher of the human condition being on the other side of the notepad is a busman’s holiday.

In the rush of everyday corporate life its common to have close to minimal preparation time prior to an interview – and whilst going in totally cold can work more often than not it makes the process harder work. In one of the more extreme examples – at last year’s Mobile World Congress I conducted a marathon ~15 media interviews in 3 days alongside the keynote/workshop/panels/judging, at some point it becomes about survival.

Many larger corps/orgs (and I’m not talking about my current employer) compile anything from 1-pagers to dossiers on journalists which are used to target interviews with the talking point of the day, and prep their spokespersons for the encounter. Mostly these documents focus on the news organisation, but can go into surprising levels of detail. Knowing that many of you reading this don’t have a solid marketing/communications infrastructure in place – there are a few very simple things you should know before stepping into an interview beyond the basics of the media organisation that the journalist represents – circulation, readership etc.

The 5 most-overlooked things you want to know about the journalist before stepping into an interview:

1. basic background info including how to pronounce their name especially if ‘foreign’ sounding
2. a photo – especially for phone interviews
3. their beat – what they write today, what they’ve written before
4. interests outside their beat – drawn from their public online persona
5. where they’ve worked before and for how long

Most journalists baulk at supplying questions pre-interviews – with the exception of telephone interviews where the need to speed up the process often overcomes the desire for spontaneity. In some countries (hello China, …) much of the media is there to be bought, or to put it another way the line between advertising and editorial would make Matisse blush – hand the journalist the copy you want them to write along with a payment for getting it placed. Social media in this landscape is an even bigger disruptor than elsewhere.

My new piece up on The Atlantic today – Seoul on Display. Related english language media.

Photo? Chilling with Tibetan motorbike dudes at a checkpoint in the mountains. I’m reminded that some people need media-handling skills, others just want to ride their motorbike no-hands across the plateau. Horses (and motorbikes) for courses.

Popular content is available in China, with Chinese subtitles within 8 hours of being broadcast almost anywhere in the world – a short presentation, co-authored with Francesca Wang on the crowdsourced translation scene in China, below. (Text is easier to view full screen).

Presented this, and related Afghanistan material to the Broadcasting Board of Governors inaugural Commission on Innovation in New York.

The title uberrima fides refers to the legal doctrine covering insurance contracts – where all parties must enter into the contract making a full declaration of the material facts – in “utmost good faith”, in contrast with the legal doctrine of caveat emptor – let the buyer beware. What are our obligations as designers, developers, service designers as more of what is designed is embedded, integrated, passively consumed?

A few links for today’s UBICOMP keynote Kilimo Salama – automated harvest insurance payouts, Free Libyana network, and dynamic pricing based on cell phone load.

“Welcome to the ghetto.”

A half-day spent in one of Ibadan’s tight shanty town communities, sniffing out sufficiently conducive contexts and people to conduct interviews. The game centers you can hear echoing through the alleyways – kids playing FIFA 20xx, the sound of Premiership commentators and the crowd’s roar.

Ad-hoc interviews are easier to conduct in a tight physical space – the element of genuine surprise, less opportunity to size you up, more opportunities to move the conversation to meaningful. Despite, or perhaps because of, the poverty, the heat, the open sewers, these are the days.

A guest post, and a method here.

We’re professional, we travel for a living, decoding culture for paying clients. But the very nature of our outsider status, our constant travel means that we don’t understand the nuanced etiquette that separates appropriate from not.

Over the years I’ve: pointed body parts at the wrong people; said the wrong things to the wrong people at exactly the wrong time; sat in the wrong place; touched things that should have been left untouched; and behaved in an otherwise wholly inappropriate way for that moment, place and time. And over the years I’ve developed strategies for minimising the risk of it happening again, and for when it does happen, recovering gracefully.

4 questions:
- When is the last time you breached local etiquette?
- What was the cost/reward of breaching local etiquette?
- How do you minimise the risk of committing a faux pas?
- How did you recover from the situation?

Photo: A gent from Covent Garden Carhartt.

Heading off to South African and Nigeria shortly for a field study looking into [redacted]. Ping if you’re in the neighbourhood – putting together a crew and considering folks for a fixer and 3 x local guide positions.

Photo: The morning commute in Northern Uganda, earlier this year.

A simple and very effective technique for simultaneously putting the participant at ease and putting moral boundaries around the data that the team captures is to clearly state up-front that the participant will be prompted to review all the data that is held on them prior to the team’s leaving the session. In theory this could apply to written notes; audio; video and photographs, but the reality is that it most participants are only interested in reviewing the photos, and sometimes video.

At the beginning of the session, when asking permission for the photographer and/or videographer to start recording, the lead interviewer informs the participant that they will be asked to sign a data consent form at the end of the session, but that just prior to this they will be asked to review and delete any data they don’t like. During this part of the interview the participant is handed the camera and shown how to move from photo to photo, shown how to delete a photo, and is asked to “please delete any photos you don’t like”. If the participant wants to delete all the photos, then frankly the team doesn’t deserve to have them, but the reality is that most people delete a few where the split-second captures their worst side. Some people are particularly image-conscious for example teenage girls and people with high media exposure, and any fears are magnified by the interview covering sensitive topics.

If multiple memory cards are used, then each should be reviewed in turn. Using a separate memory card for each session ensures that no participant will review another participant’s data.

A photographer that knows that the participant will review the photographs instinctively frames the session differently is less likely to sneak a shot when the opportunity arises, and is likely to prune the worst offenders before handing the camera to the participant. Working to the full-circle principle provides the team with a strong moral foundation on which they can then build – it doesn’t mean that the team is freer to do whatever they like, the team that adopts this approach tends to sustain that awareness throughout the project.

The principle of full-circle data collection can be extended to share data back to the participant – which can involve anything from delivering a physical print from the session, sending a selection of shots by email through to providing a copy of every photo on a memory drive. Photos of the participants and the international research team together are particularly valued in emerging markets, and a physical copy is appreciated because computer ownership is less common. If leaving a momento is the primary motivation then a Polaroid photo can deliver the goods, but the symbolic link between bulk of the data and the participant will be missing. Sharing back obviously creates additional workload, and once committed to must be seen through.

In one user study that documented all the content and data generated by a number of families in the UK and Finland the shared back data was an integral part of the protocol – a momento of taking part in the study.

Today we live in a world of data servitude, where commercial organisations own and have the rights to exploit the personal data that lies on their servers. Whilst the effort taken to harvest, sift and draw value comes with the assumption of being able to then seek commercial returns fro this investment, the relationship is one-sided, the process for the most part opaque. To truly go full circle is to give participants the rights and access to their personal data both now and for ever more, something that will enabled by the prevalence of always-on connectivity and a shift the expectations of participants.

Boot note: been writing a lot offline these days – this is a sneak-peak of 4 principles participant data collection.

Friends visiting Shanghai, looking at the city through similar lenses.

The act of recording as a signifier of ‘interesting’.

The act of recording the recording as a way of ‘underlining interesting’.

And the way in which the first to document the scene influences the direction of interesting.

There are 3 audiences to every presentation: the people in the room; the people tuning in online in real or close to real time; and history. The presenter needs to consider all three.

‘History’ is increasingly the digital memory of event – it starts with the conversations leading up to, during and after the event – it’s the photos posted online, the retweeted quotes, the barbs, the likes, the references, the downloads. The presenter can’t control history but she can nudge it in the right direction.

For any given presentation what artifacts do you leave behind? Where are they linked from? How can they be repurposed, reused? And what is the thread that links them back to you and what you’ve done?

Who is the gatekeeper of your history?

What is their motivation both now and in the future?

Presentation to the Finance Forum CIO CEO Summit, Beijing.

Related interview (Chinese).

施仁? Shi Ren, my Chinese name.

Photo? My neighbourhood mega-brothel/KTV is having a refurb, loving the contrast between whisky displays and pure, wanton destruction.

Or not.

Short radio interview here with the Economist.

Summary: the tools to help us negotiate today’s (heavily loaded notion of) impartiality is going to be further eroded by our, our participants and other peoples ability to pull an additional layer of information into social situations – before you or they initiate an interaction. For some it will be about pulling up a Facebook profile, other’s will prefer looking up sexual preferences or tax brackets, and for the researcher out in the field – what you’ve published and where, professionally or otherwise.

Sure all of this information can be pulled up one way or another today. And sure if you’ve been researching the digital realm the link-back to your online you(s) is something that you’ve been dealing with for a while. The significant shift comes from those out in the field – whether journalists, researchers or spooks, and the most significant impact will be in environments where there the consequences lie at the extremes.

Like here.

The moment after the interview – when yours truly, the fixer, the connector and the participant – a hawala agent in the local money bazaar leave the working space and negotiate the stepping stones of footwear. The temptation when traveling in Afghanistan is to go booted – hardy all-terrain gear – whereas the practical reality in any social situation is for footwear can slip-on, slip-off without interrupting the flow of movement or conversation. Ease in, ease out.

Any idiot can roll up in para boots – I’ve see a few in my time.

Hearts and minds is not enough.

Think feet.

Trend spotter bonus points – the TJTJ branded brown dress shoes pictured above, hand-crafted in Wenzhou by Yiwanda Shoes Co. Ltd – purveyors of taste for Afghanistan’s upwardly mobile entrepreneurs since 1995.

The slides from my The Economist: Ideas Economy talk, and the text below.

The title of my talk “no photos”.

The age of the impartial observer is dead.

A full workshop day in NYC – a lot of time spent thinking through the activities that help us culturally calibrate in a short space of time.

Sleep and coffee.

This photo is illegal, apparently.

One of those ‘you can’t take a photo here’ situations that over the years has dulled my enjoyment of working in the US.

This is the frontline on the war on terror.

From where I’m standing the victor is clear.

In a land of imploding bank, and a distinct lack of ATMs that support withdrawals on an international card the man with cold hard cash is king. Which presents a risk when you’re running a study and need to monty up for all local expenses including salaries.

Hence the pile of cash before stepping on the plane. Expensing this kind of work can be real bitch, but as every SOX compliant worker drone knows you gotta account for it all.

It still surprises me that teams let this one slip: if you’re running a field study – remove a simple barrier to communication by buying all team members local SIM cards, have an assistant pre-load the necessary phone numbers and make it part of the welcome pack when you arrive. If you’re expecting a local to call and international number its not going to happen.

In Afghanistan an iPhone leeching WiFi from the guesthouse will last about a day.

The Nokia 1110 lasts closer to two weeks.

Don’t leave home without it.

Darting around Mazar e Sharif on the back of a trial-bike doing ad-hoc interviews with manual labourers. There are consequences to asking questions and taking photos where-ever you go, but I haven’t felt experienced the risk/rewards quite as acutely as these last few weeks.

Take a photo of a building site in London or Los Angeles and the biggest issue you are likely to come up against is illegal labour – undocumented and/or untaxed. But in Afghanistan the primary issue of turning up on a building site is likely to be who owns the property being built, and where they got the money to fund the construction.

Some conversations you want to get into, and some you don’t.

Having said that – working at the pace we’re at – hopping onto and off of the bike to shoot photos, and the fact that my motorbike driver’s identity is obscured by a headscarf that covers his entire face save for his dark glasses, I suspect that we’re the ones under suspicion.

One method we’ve experimented with here in Afghanistan is a varient of the ad-hoc, group street interview – an example above showing Panthea (interviewer) and Hamid (local fixer/translator) with a group of manual labourers in Jalalabad.

Group interviews are tough to pull off and gather meaningful data in any culture or context, in part because everyone wants to chime-in – but with the right approach they are an acceptable way to take a broad snapshot or pulse on a topic. Group questions like: “how many people here ….” work well to get the crowd aligned with the theme and process before targeting individuals with questions.

To start with the interviewer & translator approach the target participants in the street an act that typically draws a crowd. There’s a critical opening moment in any group interview that is especially pertinent here, where the team need to understand and react to the crowds’ intent – if there is any hostility what level of risk does it present and (how) can it be mitigated? For example the photos on this post were taken on a day when there were demonstrations in Jalalabad protesting against the continued occupation of ISAF forces in Afghanistan, a day when there’s a greater likelihood of crossing paths with someone with a bone to pick.

Intense day-time heat aside, our experiences with this method were positive – in the push-and-shove of the crowd strangers were looking out our female interviewer to ensure she wasn’t jostled or touched, and the crowd dynamics were just-about manageable. The team needs to stay aware of the crowd sentiment throughout the session.

Given that a smaller team is nearly always better, three people works best: an interviewer + translator + photographer, with the fixer/translator focusing one the interview the photographer can hang back and keeping an eye of the dynamics at the edges of the crowd. As well as exploring the subject matter, the interviewer + translator need to take on the skills of a circus ring master and occasionally strict school teacher.

One sweet moment on this study came during the an interview with a crowd of opium junkies under a bridge in Kabul – the interview circle was at any time between 20 and 30 people, with a pretty grim backdrop of ~200 people/junkies either chasing the dragon plotting how to get their next fix or passed out. Panthea’s warm up questions included the wonderfully perky “so, show of hands, how many people here rob to feed their habit?”. Hands are raised.

Memorable stuff.

During out wake-up-with-the-city session this morning, ad-hoc interviewing grain merchants, and under the watchful eyes. Talk one of our local fixers through Hitchcock’s The Birds.

How does Ramadan – the Islamic month of fasting during which time the devout avoid eating and drinking between dawn and dusk, impact on your ability to conduct field research in a country with a large Muslim population? In the past few years I’ve run a couple of such studies – in Iran, Egypt, Malaysia and now here in Afghanistan. What does the non-devout researcher need to know in order to function effectively and appropriately during this time?

The impact of Ramadan on field research falls into a few distinct categories: social dynamics; participant dynamics; and team tactics each of which is covered in turn.

Social Dynamics

A wide variety of social situations are lubricated by the act of offering something to eat or drink. In ad-hoc street interviews accepting the offer of a glass of sweet tea moves the relationship from passing strangers to giver/receiver, and suggests to both/all parties that it’s OK to be there for at least enough time to brew and drink the tea. In the early stages of a home visit a glass of water and a snack can put an otherwise nervous host at ease by reinforcing the role of host and guest as opposed to participant/researcher. Food and drink helps us overcome those little moments of awkwardness that can stifle the rest of the conversation. A lack of food or drink can feel like there is a void to be filled and makes it more difficult to break down social barriers.

Here in Afghanistan a number of participants have offered us (non-Muslim researchers) water and/or tea during the fast – and on all but one occasion, where the host was ultra-insistent we’ve politely declined – citing our respect of the fast, a decision that appears to be itself respected.

Participant & Team Dynamics

In countries where the heat of the day tops ~40 degrees celcius (~104 fahrenheit) don’t expect local participants or team members to exert much energy during the day – many will have been up since before dawn – for breakfast and/or to pray and will be conserving their energy for what will be a long day. My experience on this trip have been overwhelmingly postive, but there is a general perception that tempers are shorter during Ramadan. Try to avoid scheduling interviews that overlap with prayer times; and provide a clear indication how long an interview is likely to last. Some but not necessarily all household members may want to pray, and observance is likely to be higher at this time. Do assume however that both participants and team members will want to spend iftar – the evening breaking of the fast with their family.

The time pressures of corporate field research tend to lean towards dynamic, high pressure situations, and this definitely needs to be recalibrated to local conditions.

Here in the crazy heat of Mazar e Sharif the non-Muslim team members have each carried a small bottle of water which has been sipped/chugged during small moments of solitude. Drinking water in front of team members who are abstaining is not great for morale. And don’t expect any restaurants other than those catering to non-locals to be serving food.

Not all Muslims will be fasting: for example it is not required where abstinence is likely to cause physical harm; on travel days; or simply through personal preference.

Here in Afghanistan where the Taliban are framing the conflict as a jihad Ramadan could increase or reduce the odds of being caught up on violence: on the one hand one might expect an uptick in Taliban attacks on non-believers; but on the other hand Ramadan is a time for self-restraint and good deeds.

Team Tactics

I’m a firm beliver that every challenge presents a unique opportunity: understanding the dynamics of the day makes its possible to explore different kinds of researcher/participant relationships: from the types of conversations that come from overnighting in the home and joining the family in a pre-dawn breakfast; to doubly-enjoying the shade of a truck with a group of resting labourers (photo above, from earlier today).

Given all this – is it worth shifting the study dates to avoid Ramadan? On the one hand Ramadan does make it tougher to conduct research and could be the reason why a novice team/novice team members are unable to perform to the level that is required. But on the other hand the inquisitive researcher that truly wants to understand the culture and context of their study participants will be missing an important piece of the puzzle. Just how important depends in part on the goals of the study. And to put it into perspective – how does experiencing Sangha, Oshogatsu, Passover, Christmas, Diwali, Nanakshahi or Ramadan shape an understanding of your own culture?

The research crew takes to motorcycles the only way to beat the Kabul traffic – otherwise slowed by the concrete barriers, roadblocks, poor state of roads and a keen local set of first-come/first-serve road rules.

Thanks to everyone who squeezed into the Design Mind speaker series event on Design Research – we expected 200 and over 400 turned up, and contributed to what was quite a memorable evening. I’ve embedded the slides for your viewing pleasure.

Many of you will recognise this as the moment when many of the audience were separated from their phones.