Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries. Steve Portigal
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chapter presents a group of stories organized around a theme. The chapter starts with an introduction to the theme, followed by a few stories, and concludes with a number of takeaways. Those take-aways come directly from the storytellers, or from my response to the specific stories, or my recommendations based on the chapter’s theme.
I expect that you’ll find these stories touching, amazing, hilarious, cringe-worthy, surprising, and even familiar. Let’s begin with one of my own experiences . . .
It’s All Going to Burn
It was the late 1990s. My colleague and I drove out to the exurbs of Silicon Valley to learn about our research participant’s smart home. The participant (I’ll call him Jon) told me they homeschooled their kids. I was young and naive enough that I didn’t have a clue what that typically signified in California in terms of religious affiliation and general orientation. When I asked about why they made that decision, Jon really snarled at me. He was far more interested in showing me his gear than talking about his family, but I explained that we wanted to learn about him as well. He told me that they didn’t support the local school system and its attitude toward “alternative lifestyles.” That’s when I realized I was in an environment where the values were really different than my own.
OK, no problem, that’s par for the course for the job. We spent a good long time after that checking out the details of a really incredible smart home system that he had built, cobbled, and coded together. Yet, there was a constant theme of monitoring and control, of using the technology to check up on the kids from other rooms. Still, all good information. As we were getting to the reflective part of the interview, wrapping up or nearly so, Jon abruptly changed gears mid-explanation.
Jon, “Of course, none of this really matters because it’s all going to burn.” My colleague and I were stunned and remained silent. Jon continued, “And now I have a question for you fellas: Have you accepted Christ as your savior?”
This is the sort of question I’m utterly unprepared for. In this interview, I knew it was coming, some part of my body was tense from the discussion of the rationale for home schooling, knowing that I was in a slightly vulnerable situation that was going to emerge at some point. So, while I was dreading it all along, perhaps it came as some kind of relief. Watching the video later, I saw the most deadpan version of myself I’d ever seen: “Well . . . perhaps that’s a question for another time.”
I was stuck. I couldn’t dishonor all the rapport-building and honest curiosity I’d been exhibiting for the past two hours, but now we were trapped. My colleague spluttered helplessly in an endless loop of reflecting back what Jon had said previously. I kept waiting for my opening for the “Well, time to go,” but Jon really wanted to talk to us about what we should be doing and thinking, with respect to Christ. It seems as if this went on for a very long time, but we finally made it to the doorway. Jon asked us to wait, and went off to get something. We should have made a break for it, but we were too ensnared by the requirements of politeness in our researcher role. He returned with some Bible-related literature and exhorted us intensely to follow up. Another eternity (if you will), and we were finally able to step away.
We made it to the car, drove a block, and erupted in hysterical, gasping laughter. It was the laughter of relief, the kind of manic giggling you’d get from 10-year-olds who just got away from the angry shopkeeper. We had some choice words about Jon, once we were safe.
The experience was terribly uncomfortable. I could not find a way to follow my own values as a researcher and still protect myself from a conversation that was personally risky. As a researcher, I was interested in and had respect for Jon’s views on his family, his home, education, and the afterlife. But I really didn’t want to have to reveal my own beliefs or defend them, especially in this setting.
Photo by Steve Portigal
CHAPTER 1
The Best Laid Plans
Julia Thompson: For Want of a Shoe
Alicia Dornadic: Don’t Hate on a Tinkler
Sean Ryan: Pockets Full of Cash
George Ressler: Skyfall (or a View to a Kill)
Tamara Christensen: What the Hell? Don’t You Knock?
Jenn Downs: Burns, Bandages, and BBQ
Semper Gumby is an unofficial motto for the United States Marine Corps (and other military services). Adopted at a grassroots level, it references the official motto Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful), while invoking the built-in flexibility of that green clay character. It declares that successful military personnel must adapt to changes.
Some user researchers try to manage the complexity of research by crafting detailed plans and developing artifacts to support the act of planning, such as checklists, observation worksheets,1 special notebooks for note-taking, and what’s-in-your-bag fieldwork kits.2 I put together my own set of re-purposable documents3 to supplement Interviewing Users.
Planning, of course, is essential to successful fieldwork. And these artifacts can facilitate planning. But they can also imply, by their existence, if not their design, that things are going to go a certain way. Does the plan set you up to adapt, or are you in trouble when there’s a snafu?4 Sometimes these plans imply a simplicity to research, which may be more about selling the idea of research than actually empowering people to deal with the realities. Researchers learn—typically after losing some data—to bring extra batteries, to remind themselves to start the recording gear, to double-check they’ve brought along incentives and releases and interview guides and prototypes, and so on. But as these stories remind us, there’s no complete set of circumstances that can be fully planned for. Should Dan Soltzberg (from his story in Chapter 9, “People Taking Care of People”) have brought an extra pair of pants with him? There is no plan that can fully allow for the range of circumstances that can (and will) arise in and around fieldwork.5 Semper Gumby, indeed.
So you have to plan. And yet planning can never be sufficient and even worse may lull you into a state of blithe overconfidence. Instead, think about the total experience of fieldwork as a system, or “a set of elements or parts that is coherently organized and interconnected in a pattern or structure that produces a characteristic set of behaviors.”6
Typically, you use systems thinking when you consider your research data and when you design solutions, but what about the actual experience of doing fieldwork? It’s a complex system. Thinking about the interconnectedness between different elements will help you anticipate some points of failure (bring more than enough batteries), but it should also help you accept that failures of some form or another