Linking Ethnography to Design. Role Playing as a
Design Method
German Leon
Umeå Institute of Design
Umeå University
SE-901 87 Umeå Sweden
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
Using role play at a certain stage of the design process has been
a vital tool for design companies when working with clients and
users. With the dual properties of bringing participants into the
moment and making shared activities physical rather than just
mental, role playing techniques make the process more
experiential and creatively generative. Role playing is
complimentary to traditional design process providing
additional team dynamics and insights that bring the process
and design to another level. This paper describes how we have
used role-playing as a tool to link the ethnographic research
into a more realistic as well as a creative design process and
how it can be integrated with other design methods.
Keywords
Bodystorming, participatory design, improvisation, role
playing, rapid prototyping, scenarios, collaborative design
methods, team work, creative process, interactions.
1. INTRODUCTION
In today’s design projects, companies with a culture of
innovation have developed experiential role-playing techniques
that bring insights and communication to a new level. The
purpose of this paper is to propose alternatives to develop skills
to communicate better when working in design teams. Using
methods like participatory design help the collaboration
between designers and other professions, but in this process the
user’s experiences are sometimes left behind because the focus
is on the problems rather than the feelings, emotions or
experiences. The role playing technique helps to develop skills
that include assuming roles and integrating schemes from the
user’s everyday life and letting designers gain from the
experience of interacting.
Every year Microsoft Research organizes a project with schools
called the “Microsoft Design Expo”. The program is for
Interaction design students from 6 design schools around the
world and the goal of the project is to encourage collaboration
between design disciplines, computing science and Microsoft
Research in Redmond. This year, the spring 2005, the expo
topic was “Time: Organizing, Sharing and Remembering.”
Invited schools held a semester long course which focused on a
user centred design/rapid prototyping design process.
During the project we decided that in order to understand our
users in a more personal way we had to develop a strategy to
integrate the ethnographic studies and the field observations
into the design process, that would allow us to physically
experiment with the same elements from the observations and
to connect in a personal level with the situations and findings.
Building on work by other companies like experiential methods
[2], participatory design work with children [1] and
Bodystorming [3], the role playing techniques described in this
paper helped focus on the experience of the users, and integrate
elements from the process into the final design.
2. ROLE PLAYING
What is role playing? It is the practice of a group of individuals
that assume a character role in a constructed scene from
previews ethnographic studies focusing on the experiences of
users, emotions and other human aspects. The key
differentiating aspects of role playing are: 1) Being 'in the
moment' - an individual and group state that enables vivid and
focused exploration of the situations and 2) Physicalization using the entire body to explore generation of ideas that takes
"brainstorming" to "bodystorming." This sort of role playing is
similar to the practice of improvisations theatre [4]. It is not
necessary to focus on the actual acting instead the focus should
rather be on exploring and investigating the free expression,
emotions and feelings of the users around the solution.
2.1 Using the Role Playing Method
Using role playing is good help the teams to establish and
understand several elements that are not verbal, more emotional
and circumstantial. This method can contribute to an
understanding of the service, or the product, in another
emotional level. The benefits of using role playing in a design
process are several and will be explained in the next sections.
2.1.1 Maintaining the design group focused on the
activities at hand.
Design meetings are complicated, because using visual or
verbal communication is limiting to only those two senses.
Physical tactile experiences are very easy to forget because they
belong to another level of communication. By asking for
example “Do you remember how hard was to use with
gloves?” you are using the tangible memory triggers, a
sensation that everyone that felt it understands. The purpose of
role playing helps bring the team onto the "same page" through
a shared vivid experience that involves the participant’s
tangible memory.
2.1.2 Focusing on one single vision, while building on
other’s ideas.
One of the most typical mistakes is to believe that one’s vision
is exactly the same as the others, by using this technique
designers can rapidly sketch the ideas and move on with the
design vision, allowing the process to be more fluid and
coherent. As the scenes of the play are being built to be able to
play them, the team can sketch the GUI’s of the system and
visualize preliminary interfaces that are not completely design
and before falling into the trap of discussing these ideas, they
can be quickly tested in the role play.
2.1.3 Building common understanding grounded in facts
When designing services or products based on ethnographic
research it is possible to misinterpret the observations of the
users. Videos help to visualise the problem but that doesn’t
mean that the designers really feel it and get a first hand
experience. By acting out the scenario designers and
researchers can feel and visualize the same ideas and narrow
hours of observation and research into specific situations. One
interesting example of this was experienced in the design of an
interface that was supposed to be used for both a maid and a
guest, usually the maids wears gloves, imagine how different
could be to have a touch screen that has to be used with gloves.
2.1.4 Giving the team the ability to explore possibilities
based on experiences emotions, feelings and situations.
When all the small pieces of the big puzzle start to make sense
designers can more easily brainstorm on the go and come out
with quick solutions and sketches based on the problem,
making the process of ideation faster, and using richer
elements considering emotions, feelings and experiences.
work. So the focus of this paper is in both aspects negative and
positive.
The steps to do role playing are simple, first is necessary to
gather all the data pictures and film from the ethnographic
studies, also is important to map all the areas that users actually
have some interaction with a system, and it is important to
construct a scheme so the role play can be built.
Once all the material is stored it is time to make the story, as
any story it needs a storyboard and some general sketches of the
scenes to be played, in this technique it doesn’t matter specially
how things are going to look what matters is to have all the
information together.
Finally once those schemes are ready the team needs to gather
as much paper as possible and starts to draw each interface as
the script says to, sketching and discussing as things happened.
Allowing the team to perform walk-trough’s to uncover issues
and a subtle difference in meaning or opinion or attitude,
identifying specific elements, emotions, sensations, things
related to common sense, allowing the team to list the questions
to ask.
This work is often informed by the opportunity themes that
emerge from observation. (Using your body to brainstorm)
taking in consideration things like gestures or movements.
Finally as the play is finished documenting all the material with
video and keeping the papers sketches and other elements help
designers to recreate and design a solution for future user
testing.
3. “UPDATE” A CASE STUDY USING
ROLE PLAY AS A METHOD.
“Update” was an interactive information service for hotels and
guests designed for Microsoft Design Expo a project previously
mention in this paper from Microsoft Research. This service
was designed based on ethnographic research about hotel’s
staff, guests and management. The situation for this project was
that the team members did not have the same information about
the ethnographic research, making some members of the team
to assume things and not to have a clear vision of the solution.
Figure.1 Video shot of actual role playing for “Update”
an interactive system for hotels.
2.2 Phases of Role Playing
Different types of role play are relevant to the different phases
of the design process. The phases occur in the sequence of:
understand, observe, visualize, evaluate, refine and implement.
Throughout other techniques such as: observation,
storyboarding, user studies, prototyping, and workshops.
While many design techniques are powerful, few focus on intergroup communication and rapid group understanding. Role play
can be used in all phases of the design process from
understanding the problem to final concept implementation and
transfer to the client and customer, but its biggest value is in the
process of linking research into the design phase because it uses
good elements of communication. It also has some bad aspects
teams need to be a bit outgoing and it also represents more
The process was very confusing because it was necessary to
narrow a very large research and transfer all the information and
vivid experiences from the researcher to the designers. To be
able for all the members to be in the same page we had to
reconstruct a day inside of the hotel including characters such
as guests and staffs.
The first step to prepare the play was to review the video
information from the ethnographic research done in a series of
hotels material based on staff management and guests. We use
the researcher experiences to reconstruct the key elements to
brainstorm and analyze. As any theatrical play it is necessary to
build a storyboard, so we did we took allot of sketching papers
and divided our characters into specific users also we study this
users not as detailed as a Hollywood movie but with enough
material to live a real vivid experience.
The second stages was to build scenarios so for this to happen
we went to a friend’s apartment and recreate an area as similar
as possible to the hotels rooms. In this case the focus was the
information that was given to the guests and to the staff’s using
the same interface. Hotels are using today a TV control and
telephone services to provide with accurate information both to
guests and staff; our intention was to integrate a system to the
infrastructure of the hotel and also to enable communications
with other elements that guests carry today such as laptops and
PDA’s.
The interfaces have a basic layout and as the role playing
happens new details are sketched on the go drawing every
element that might seam logical and consistent with the actual
situation. As shown in Figure.2 the designer improvises a
written text in a theoretical interface that did not had that
functionality until the role play demanded it.
Acting out the interactions allows a process of understanding
between designers and helped developed the next step. Once all
the scenarios where played all the material were collected to be
analyzed and drawn later.
3.1 Using the role play material
Finally after the acting had been recorded, it was very important
to have developed an analysis session of the film, which would
allow a more elaborate system. It is important to use the
anecdotes and experiences of all the designers to transform
those experiences into interfaces and services.
The result will be a preliminary system that could be more
elaborated with positive and negative responses and also would
help recreate faster a user test scenario. The most rich element
that happened after the role playing was that the user tests
where more complicated and more detail because the obvious
aspects of the design where filtered in the previous sessions.
As shown in the Figure. 4 users acted out using the same scripts
of the role play. And designers transferred better elements to
enhance the experience of the user in a low fidelity prototype.
Figure.2 Video shot of user pressing a button to send a
written message to a staff member named Phil
These different aspects of role play can be used throughout the
design process and become part of the way that the team works.
Two techniques are particularly well suited for use together:
Body storming and sketching the changing interfaces, for the
second one its important to gather as many white papers and
material to design “on the go”, as situations happen new
interfaces show up. As shown in Figure.3 the designer adds up
a response message from a previews interaction from other user
somewhere else outside the room.
Laying out a basic structure for the system is important, but the
role playing is the actual design key element because it allows
the designer to construct a logical sequence on video and use a
very dynamic environment to create fast solutions. The output
is a rich experience and a set of performed scenarios on video,
which can become user interfaces later on the process.
Figure.4 Video shot of a low fidelity prototype of a user
pressing a button to find specific information
If the low fidelity user testing methods are more structured,
different users can act out as part of the design process adding
better input into the design. As shown in figure 5 the user was
detailing his wants from that specific interface adding more
elements to the low fidelity design. Lie experiences are very
different that the ones tested on paper, we had a nice
opportunity to see how different is actually to be a maid and to
use a glove to interact with a touch screen. This helped us in the
definition of the size of the icons and the layout of the users
interface.
With out acting the outcome would have been different because
it is hard to determine that level of experience in just paper.
Examples like this one also allow us as designers to reflect how
limited is the amount of methods when it comes to find
experiences and emotions.
Figure.3 Video shot of user pasting a message paper for the
guest in the room.
playing can become a very interesting tool that should be
explored into other design levels. It is a tool to link
ethnographic research with the design.
Many design firms and companies are using ethnographic
studies but it is very often that findings are misunderstood by
the designers because they can’t be part of long research
processes. By introducing the role playing method into the
design process designers can learn more about the users by
studying their characters and in a fun way keeping the
explorations and observations, and being able to feel and
express based on tangible experiences.
5. FUTURE WORK
Figure.5 Video shot of user suggesting “wants” for the
interface
The final element in this case was finishing the design, and
integrating the findings of the experiences, emotions and
sensations into the user interfaces. It also helped the
development of the interfaces in the high fidelity prototypes.
3.2 Role Playing Tips
We found that videotaping not only provided documentation,
but also sharpened the performances. Roles can be anything,
persons, emotions, things; it can help to instruct that “each
scenario will have at least one new role and one non-human
role.”
Ethnography is a field that gives a sense of reality to the new
designs and allows companies to understand the big picture of
people’s real lives and the role of products. Maybe it’s time to
reflect over the persona method and use more of the
ethnographic approach to develop real designs for real people.
Not too many companies have worked with this method, but it
seams that it is important to experiment on new areas that will
allow designers to experience more rather than only focusing on
the functionality.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the great design team mates that developed this
project Lisa Hultgren, and Jessica Chang, who devoted time
and effort in making a great design process, also to the tutoring
of Diana Africano and Brandon Clark.
Standard brainstorming rules are equally relevant to role
playing: defer judgment, encourage wild ideas, build on the
ideas of others, stay focused on the topic, and having one
conversation at a time. It is not necessary to have an acting
career or background to develop this method, but it is important
to use as much as possible the ethnographic information to
build up very similar characters and to act out accurately to the
real users.
7. REFERENCES
4. CONCLUSIONS
[3] Burns, C. et al, Actors, Hairdos & Videotape. Informance
Design, in Proceedings of CHI’94, (Boston, MA 1994),
ACM Press, 119-120.
Ethnographic studies can be very confusing and long,
observations give a lot of different material that sometimes does
not allow designer to act in a creative way.
Using existing methods that combine the previous studies and
analysis, and building characters based on real people instead of
personas, create a sense of reality that often is missing in the
design process, and allow designers to explore based on reality
not fantastic characters (Non fictional “made up” people). Role
[1] Benford, S. et al, Designing Storytelling Technologies to
Encourage Collaboration Between Young Children,
Proceedings of CHI'00, (The Hague, 2000), ACM Press,
556-563.
[2] Buchenau, M. and Fulton Suri, J., Experience Prototyping
in Proceedings on Designing interactive systems (NY, NY
2000), ACM Press, 424-433.
[4] Take it to the Next Stage: The Roles of Role Playing in the
Design Process, Kristian T. Simsarian, IDEO – San
Francisco, CHI 2003: NEW HORIZONS
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