Studying those who shape our world.
By: Martin Dubuisson
Tags: Ethnography, Design Research, Design, Anthropology

I am not implying that researching about decision makers — their needs, their workflow, their professional relations — makes our endeavor more worthy of interest than your grandma’s tea drinking habits. Yet, this focus does bring different implications in terms of methodology, scope or ethics. It also implies a different lived experience of doing research. For example, here are some anecdotes of our research with decision makers at Vizzuality:

The tricks of the anthropology trade do not always work as planned. During an interview with the CEO of a consulting company my tactic to play “naïve” to probe for information completely backfired, and made me look uninformed and unprofessional.

The research territory with these decision makers is often quite different from the probably more familiar fieldwork settings (the domestic space, the public square, the mall…). For my colleagues who’ve been doing fieldwork with these decision makers for a few years now, the main ground for ethnographic observation has been the formal intimacy of committee rooms at a convention centre or the office space in ministries.

While setting up some interviews with executive-level staff, I’ve often faced the puzzle of finding a time slot within their often overflowing calendars. Monetary compensation for their time won’t really do the trick, which frustrates the standard recruiting practices of design research. For most of our projects, we are lucky to be able to use the contact list of our clients for reaching out to the target users, as finding them via agencies (as I would have done in my previous research) would be most likely unhelpful.

Looking into a new direction

With these observations and experiences in mind, I could not help but recall “Studying up,” a seminal article for the field of anthropology written by the academic Laura Nader (1972). Traditionally anthropology has been “studying down,” namely focusing on marginal social groups or on non-Western, preindustrial societies. But in her thought-provoking call to action, Nader urges us to look at the other end of the spectrum of political and economic power: society’s elites. Nader argues “studying up” is greatly needed to unearth and dissect the structures of power — public institutions, corporations, industries — that affect the lives of so many in the United States and beyond.

Whether the evolution has been self-conscious or not, things have changed since the publication of her article, and a number of anthropologists have responded to her wish. Although much remains to be done, some famous ethnographies “studying up” now include an immersion in the world of Wall Street traders (Karen Ho), an investigation into the House of Commons in the UK (Emma Crewe) or fieldwork among the members of the French Council of State (Bruno Latour). More generally, doing ethnographic fieldwork has evolved so much that anthropologists nowadays explore virtually every human-related context: internet practices, consumer culture(s), the relationships between human and nature, etc.

How ethnographic fieldwork and anthropology all started: Here anthropologist Malinowski and villagers of the Trobiand islands, Wikimedia.

Design research, admittedly, is less openly and visibly political. It has also never really been concerned with tribes, and perhaps barely more with what has sometimes been referred to as the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” or the “unexotic underclass.” Equally, I have not come across much design research focusing specifically on highly positioned decision makers.

Getting the research right

Yet, “studying up” in design research is far from trivial. Our goal at Vizzuality is to create tools that help decision makers, well, make decisions. These are choices that can potentially affect entire ecosystems and populations. Therefore, getting our research right becomes a task of paramount importance.

The role and influence of design and technology in shaping societies has been frequently pointed out in the past years. Many articles I came across were usually denouncing the (unintended?) consequences of design in a negative fashion and their devastating impact on societies and individuals. Design, for example, has been incriminated in the rise of information bubbles on social media, online trolling, and plummeting self-esteem among teenagers — although some efforts are done to design these behaviors away.

When designing for a group of decision makers, the undesirable side-effects of flawed design take on another kind of dramatic tone. Of course, the choices these decision makers take are never solely based on their objective understanding of data and on the information provided by the platforms that we build. Their streams of reflection are informed by many more sources of input and, as most behavioral economists would say, decision-making is probably never fully rational anyway.

Yet, the (unintended or not) consequences of design for decision-making tools can be sweeping. If a reduced set of individuals can influence the course of action with possibly large repercussions for entire ecosystems and populations, studying up in design research become all the more trickier and challenging — and important!

The implications of bad design could be big, but so too are opportunities if we get the research right.