Applying User Research to romance and friendship
By: Camille Ronceray
Tags: Social Design, Reflexive Praxis, Social Relationships, Design Research, Social Experiment

Here is how I applied User Research to romance and friendship Camille RONCERAY Follow Nov 23 · 6 min read

Back to working-from-home! Days will never feel the same, because this time around, I have neighbors to contemplate through my flat’s windows and myself to conduct research on. I am sharing these few thoughts with you as of a reflexive practice, and hopefully this will inspire some of you to incorporate fun into your daily routine.

With this article, I intend to fuel a reflection that has to do with critical and fiction design: how/can/should Design tools help frame and solve our daily problems and answer our inner questions? In other words, can design help me decide whether I should commit to a relationship or withdraw from it? Can it help me create more coherence between my interior design and wardrobe? Can it apply to our most intimate concerns?

Neighbors

How to create connection between people right now? Before the lockdown, I know that in some buildings here in Paris, people used to get together and go upstairs and downstairs to each other’s flats, sharing food and drinks and re-creating a community.

The fear of a new lockdown definitely helped creating more social connections and quality time between what usually stands as an untied community — unknown neighbors, cold stairs… That was not happening in my own building.

However, now that most of us are staying home, I initiated what I thought would be an asynchronous conversation between my neighbors and me. As I was curious about what all these people in little squares (their windows) were doing all day, I decided to draw and stick three posters on my own window.

It reads:

“Chers voisins” [Dear Neighbors]

“Quel est votre métier ?” [What do you do for a living?]

“Designer Stratégique, Esc B, 5D” [Strategic Designer, Stairs B, 5th floor, on the right]

A casual activity

The latter sign aimed at providing 1) an example, a nudge, an evidence of my sincerity and willingness to play and 2) a typology of answer I was expecting. Had I happened to get an answer from the neighbors living in the opposite side of the building, across the courtyard, I would have re-written and displayed it at my own window.

Pretty simple, pretty frugal, and could bring a lot of fun in regards to the effort invested (that is, by the way, my definition of minimalism). However, after three days, I had to admit this attempt to create social connection with my neighbors had not been bringing any results. I can only assume that it was difficult to create a relationship from scratch.

Because we did not have any kind of previous ties, maybe the people from the opposite building felt shy. Alternatively, they could also just not have felt that my messages were directed to them. This leads us to the argument of diffusion of responsibility. The effect of such a socio-psychological phenomenon is that people addressed to as a group will feel less concerned than if I had addressed each neighbor individually, or pointed at a specific one. As I did not specify who I was initiating the dialogue with (“you, neighbor at the 3rd floor, central window, white ashtray”), it is very likely that… no one felt this message was relevant to them.

Fine! I then turned to another kind of potential connection…

Dating

Dating is quite difficult these days; which leaves even more ground to theorizing about dating. As I tend to like creating tabs and lists for any area in my life (professional and personal), I thought I could adapt one of my design researcher’s Observation Grids to assess the evolution of a relationship. I was curious to test the relevance of such an Observation Grid when it comes to assessing my next romantic partner.

Are they slowly falling in love with me?

Do they have any romantic interest in me?

Are we just friends?

I wanted to help my mind settle down and get some clarity, by rationalizing — at least trying — feelings, using and adapting one of the Design Researchers’ favorite tools: the Observation Grid.

Pre-requirements

The Romantically Interested Subject is sincere (ie. not playing games)

The Romantically Interested Subject is emotionally available

Note: this grid was built in relation to the specific people I feel attracted to, mostly: men; ambitious, connected to their sensitivity, creative, fun, curious. A cool wardrobe is a plus.

Hypothesis

H1: The Romantically Interested Subject will want to present themselves in their best light, meaning: groomed, looking their best, funny, witty, etc.

H2: The Romantically Interested subject will try to get my attention; spend some quality time with me; build a specific bond with me; communicate with me

Observation Grid

You can read the full version of the Observation Grid here.

Find an excerpt below:

Please bear in mind that this grid is tailored to my own dating style, interests, and partners (as of 2020). Feel free to iterate and improve this Observer Guide, for fun or for real use. It would be very interesting to create one Observation Grid for each dating culture, taking into account specific countries, genders, sex orientation etc.

Ideally, you would carry this grid during every date and closely observe every interaction you have with this person. While I would not actually bring a sheet of paper and a clipboard to a date — and it’s not even possible to date right now anyway — I realized I had simply internalized all these criteria. And that I was naturally assessing Romantically Interested Subjects traits according to my own ideal, desired vision of a romantic relationship. Is that creepy? I am not sure. Does it prevent me from purely and carelessly enjoy the moment? Pretty sure it does.

Self-Confrontation

I feel that building these tabs and lists and criteria helps me go around my discomfort of the unknown and the uncontrollable. However, I also feel that my sensitive side does win. Deep inside, I know what resonates with me. As Liv Strömquist states in “La Rose la plus rouge s’épanouit”, we fall in love with people as a whole — meaning, you cannot extract, dissect or deny a part in them you dislike and see only characteristics you like. They are a whole, they are one of a kind, and criterias cannot do much against that.

As a Design Researcher, I have to keep this reflective posture and imagine fair ways of reading and interpreting people’s behaviors.

Moreover, sometimes, I was caught into my own grid. After gathering almost no signs of romantic interest from the other party I was observing, one contradictory feeling remained. Intuition. No matter what the grid would show, or not show, I had a strong intuition that they were somehow caring about me in some kind of romantic way.

So there I was, having to draw conclusions from, on one hand, a strict Observation Grid and on the other hand, my Intuition, that demonstrated opposite results. That is where the humanity and sensitivity of the researcher within me could start having a conversation and modulate the results.

Closing thought

We could use Design tools to fix our daily problems — after all, they are just like organizational issues brought by our clients, right? However, some of us might feel funny and uncomfortable. Why? I suspect this is because it looks frightening to collect and — coldly? — analyze data about emotions and situations that are supposed to “grow organically” and “go with the flow” such as friendship and romance. Touching this magic and somehow sacred aspect of relationships also questions our ability to control and monitor our feelings with external tools.

I will leave you with a few questions: