We consider the case of civic engagement: City of San Jose uses Budget Games to get residents to give feedback on annual budget proposals. Negotiations with play money about real proposals gets genuine feedback from 150 people during a single Saturday morning. Budget Games, organized by Every Voice Engaged and Innovation Games®, in conjunction with the City of San Jose’s staff, aided by volunteer facilitators and observers, have been the successful alternative for 3 years to traditional methods for getting public feedback about municipal budget proposals.

The same general technique that we show here can be used to help make decisions about new product features in a corporate setting, and equally well for other decisions where there are too many choices, not all of which require the same amount of resources or effort. And, other related playful techniques are useful for getting authentic feedback from a small group.

As mentioned in the previous post, the role of the moderator of a focus group changes when we make the group about interacting with other players, and not with the moderator. For Budget Games, a moderator at each table tracks which citizen, representing which neighborhood, led the effort to fund the library proposal or the additional police officers. The observer at each table took notes on arguments put forward for or against each proposal, and who supported those arguments. This way the organizers (other trained facilitators) can analyze the outcomes (which proposals were funded by which tables – the “WHAT”), as well as the rationale for those outcomes (the WHY). Moderators for this event come from user experience research, agile software development, project management and design backgrounds.

Facilitators & Observers for San Jose Budget Games 2013

For more about the Budget Games in San Jose, see the articles in Business Week  from August 2012 and Financial Times from November 2012. For reflections on being a facilitator at this event from others, see posts by Steve Rogalsky  and Wil.

"Prototyping with Junk" at UC Berkeley

Award for Junk

Did you catch the New York Times word of the year (WOTY) for 2010? It’s junk! The editors of the “On Language” column chose this word as representative of the zeitgeist of the past year. The honor acknowledges the basic meaning of rubbish or trash, debris or detritus, as well as extended meanings: From junk bonds (devalued securities) to junk food (nutritionally empty), to junk shot (stuffing debris and mud into BP’s leaking gusher in the Gulf). Their award called out one euphemistic sense, the male genitalia. The TSA started full body pat-downs in 2010, as an alternative to scanning, and air travelers gave warning, “Don’t touch my junk.”

Next month I’ll be hosting the activity “Prototyping with Junk” at Interaction Design 2011 (IxD11) in Boulder, Colorado. As I’ve previously written, I occasionally get pushback from people who feel junk is not appropriate language for professional settings. Or, perhaps their reaction is that junk — the actual stuff — is not for the workplace. Now I can respond to those objections with the citation of WOTY2010. I’m hip!

JunkFest (2007)

And I’m in good company: Bernie DeKoven, author of Junkyard Games, and funsmith extraordinaire, recently shared a video from 2007 celebrating Junkyard Sports. Here’s an news report from JunkFest in Redondo Beach [warning: narration lacks captions]

Kinetic sculpture with junk

Another wonderful example of how using apparent junk (PVC pipes plus a bunch empty plastic bottles, and other stuff) can turn into something magical: see how kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen simulates animals walking, powered by the wind near the sea.
[warning: narration lacks captions]

Read more at Talking Science: Dance of the Strandbeests, the BBC article about this project.

Jansen’s example shows how prototypes evolve into working “products” or art, depending on your perspective. His process of successive refinements suggest agility: at each juncture, he stops and tests his creatures, from human-propulsion of walking machines to wind-propulsion (which simulates self-propulsion), and all from vernacular materials with clever engineering.

Learning with junk

We used Prototyping with Junk at ACM CHI2004 (in Vienna, Austria), when we challenged the participants in the pre-conference design collaboration to create a product for elders. As I’ve written for interactions magazine special issue on prototyping, this is an opportunity for creativity and fun in a social context. And, it’s yet-another communication tool for your collaborative design kit.

More recently, students at UC Berkeley’s iSchool engaged in Prototyping with Junk as one among many prototyping techniques they experimented with this past fall. You can see still images and a few short movies. Notice all those smiles!

Eager to meet the group in Boulder. I’ll bring one of the several design challenges I’m currently mulling over, …and plenty of junk.

Poster announcing Course 27 at CHI2010

What can you do in 90 minutes to introduce a professional audience to the set of practices which are Innovation Games®? Quite a bit!  But not all of what we had planned.

The course announcement

Here’s what people saw on the web when they considered whether to enroll in this course “Innovation Games® for User Research in an Agile Environment”, which competed against about 10 other sessions in the same time slot.

This course describes a set of qualitative research methods that will be attractive to user researchers, customer satisfaction specialists, Chief Happiness Officers, marketing professionals, among others. People who participate on Agile teams and those who are considering making a change to Agile practices will enjoy learning new techniques that fit into an Agile framework. Designers, engineers, and others with limited research background are welcome to join in the fun.

Courses are the update for tutorials at CHI. For the past 4 years or more, the conference has made a change from half day or full day training courses (offered at a significant increment to the already pricey conference) to modestly priced, smaller modules of 90 minutes each. This course was scheduled for the last session before the closing plenary session, which I used to our advantage.

On site on Thursday afternoon, April 15

Thirty-four (34) people enrolled in the 90-minute course about “Innovation Games®” at CHI2010. Twenty-three (23) people arrived in the hard-to-find room. Indeed, the printed program showed 2 courses simultaneously in the same room.  Luckily we caught the room conflict the day before, and coordinated with the conference management to handle.

Logistics

We waited a bit longer than we might have for people to find this room.  I’m aware that several of those who enrolled were dealing with airplane issues:  It was Thursday afternoon, April 15, the day after the Icelandic volcano started erupting, the day air traffic in Northern Europe started being disrupted.

While I have done an introductory demonstration version of the Games in 60-90 minutes, most frequently it’s been with groups for whom responses to the question we posed (e.g., “Finding your next or ideal job”) were more prominent than the techniques we used (e.g., “Product Box”).  User experience people attending CHI are probably more interested in scrutinizing the techniques, than they are in the answer to the prompt.

I believe we met our goal of having fun, at the expense of a clean closure to the course. That’s what a follow-up blog post is about.

Big Picture Comments

My general attitude is that experiencing one or two games tells more than I can possibly describe in the same amount of time. I actively prefer spending our time together playing a game or two instead of me lecturing, as the key discussion points come out in the experience, and in the players’ reflections on their experience.

Let me repeat here what I said onsite:  you can learn much of what you need to know about using Innovation Games from the book Luke Hohmann wrote. I invite you to buy the book. Luke wrote it for an audience of Product Managers or marketing folks. If you’re in a different job category, you may have to do some translating to your setting and skill set. He wrote it for corporate clients, but the techniques work just as well for non-profits, government entities and community groups. He wrote it thinking about software or hardware as the product category, but it works well for services and non-digital stuff, in short all manner of things that you might consider “products.”

The book doesn’t make a strong distinction among “market research,” “customer research,” and “user research.” If you have a good handle on those differences and how people customarily conduct and analyze research from those 3 perspectives, you’re ready to go. If you feel uncertain, let me help you and your team to get clear about interacting with audience segments. I’ll coach your team for the first few engagements with customers until you’re smarter than me about how to make it work in your organization and with your customers (and users and markets).

Lessons Learned

In a typical Innovation Games event, the time is divided into at least 3 not-necessarily-equal parts:  (i) an ice-breaker, where players and observers meet each other; (ii) the game with its creation and discussion phases; and (iii) any further debriefing discussion with the players.  As long as you’ve gone to the trouble of recruiting players, it’s often worth spending a bit more time with them and playing a second game (giving you 5 parts).

The actual time for preparation is of course greater, stretching over the recruiting days, collaboration with the team about what questions to focus on and which activities to use. After the session, the team may have an additional debrief to capture what they heard and noted while the ideas are still “hot.”  Then the organizers spend a day or several days (depending on how many players were present, how many games were played and how much data was collected) analyzing the results and putting recommendations together for the team.

Lesson 1: Why an ice-breaker?

The goal of an opening (ice-breaker) exercise is to get acquainted. In user or customer research sessions where we are physically together, another goal often is to build a collaborative spirit. In this case I gave the same prompt for both games, but the players were segmented by their prior CHI experience. An additional goal in the post-lunch spot is to get everyone moving about to prevent dozing.

At CHI2010 our ice-breaker exercise asked people to sort themselves by moving around the room, to labeled stations, and when arriving to introduce themselves. We repeated this task 4 times with different identifying categories. There are probably several other relevant dimensions, but these were enough to get us started.

SECTOR

• Industry
• University
• Research Lab
• Government
• Consultancy

CHI EXPERIENCE

• First time
• 2-3-4th time
• 5th-Nth CHI

PRESENTATIONS?

• Just here to attend
• Submitted but did not present
• Paper or Note author
• Other venue presenter
• Student Volunteer

CHI COMMUNITY or DISCIPLINE

• User Experience
• Engineering
• Management
• Hybrid
• Other

Lesson 2:  Consider the timeslot when choosing the prompt

Just as important as recruiting the right participants and segmenting them appropriately in game play is choosing the right question for the context. For the event, I asked people to respond to this prompt:

Now that you’re here on the final day of CHI2010, in the last session before the closing plenary, what can you tell the committee for CHI2011 about how it can make an even more awesome conference next year?

I’ve played this game at other conferences with a similar prompt, but being assigned this particular timeslot (last before the closing session) made the prompt ideal:  everyone had been through nearly all the conference. If a course or tutorial is scheduled early in a conference, using a prompt like this one falls flat among newcomers. They’ll talk about pricing and heat in the room, but you won’t get the detailed ideas you can get from people who may have already sat through 3 days of 4 or more sessions per day, been frustrated by the signage, enjoyed the entertainment, and packed to go home.

Lesson 3: Two Games at once, a stretch goal

Rather than have everyone respond in the same way, we divided the group into i) more experienced CHI folks playing Prune the Product Tree, and ii) new conference participants playing Product Box. (People with 2, 3, or 4 years of conference experience at CHI could self-select into either game.)

My goal was to give everyone a sense of what kinds of interactions and results you can get with different games. The two games we chose contrast on several dimensions.

Prune the Product Tree is a group game:  you want at least 4 and as many as 8 people contributing to each Tree.  The players’ conversations are as important as their individual contributions. You can seed the Tree with the organizers’ product attributes or just let the assembled group create attributes on site. (We chose the latter option.)

People who had more than 5 years experience at CHI conferences were assigned to the Prune the Product Tree exercise. We briefly talked about representing parts of the conference as leaves or fruit and then placing them in 4 places on the large tree schematic:  the trunk, representing primary, central features or functions; the outer branches, as secondary features and functions; “spoiled fruit” lying on the ground surface (showing undesirable aspects or no longer relevant activities), plus the roots, showing those all important items below the ground, representing infrastructure or basic values.

In keeping with best practices, we divided them into two groups. One group had 4 players, the other 7 or 8.

People who were newer to the CHI conference were invited to create a Product Box about next year’s conference.  The verbal instructions invited them to the pre-conference experience, what happened during the conference, and their expectations post-conference or all of it.

A key part of Product Box is telling the story (“selling the box”). One participant understood immediately that this exercise is all about metaphor. A symbol on the box or inside it stands for an idea in the world. A conference is about physical space (too hot, too cold) and amenities (WiFi), as well as content – new as well as familiar ideas – and the people you meet.  It’s about the artifacts of the conference (the program on paper, the iPhone app for schedule, the slides in the room) and the schedule, the costs and benefits.

You can encourage players in Product Box to work on individual or team efforts.  On this occasion we had one team and a lot of individuals.

And, we did have some quite distinct, segmented responses.  Check out the flickr.com set from this course to see some of those amazing responses.  And remember:  we shortened the recommended time from 1 hour to less than 20 minutes.  Amazing.

Lesson 4:  Take all your photos and notes before cleaning up.

While I’ve argued above that this was the ideal timeslot for this prompt, it’s also a tight spot for doing all the documentation we might have wanted. We all wanted to attend the closing plenary. The student volunteers quickly helped me pack up.  Thanks to them, for sure! We transported some of those fragile boxes, but several didn’t remain intact while sitting waiting for my return. I’ve invited the participants to help annotate the flickr set, so stay tuned to track any further insights!

Next steps

Lesson 5:  Capture Expectations and Respond

All who attended the course in person wrote their key questions and expectations. While they worked on creating artifacts in response to the prompt, I read and categorized those questions and expectations. Our time together was brief, and didn’t allow me to respond to the questions on site. A few expectations go beyond ones I’m able to address.

So here’s my plan:  I’m taking the 40 questions/8 categories posed by participants and I’ll continue to respond to those over the next few weeks. Folks who are available to attend my next session, a full-day at Usability Professionals in Munich at the end of May, will have a head start on understanding what’s going on. And they can ask new, great questions! Plus in a full-day session, expect fuller answers and an even better overall picture of what’s you can do with Innovation Games in a user research setting.

“Bob’s House” marked a milestone for PepsiCo, for sign language and Deaf folks, and for the SuperBowl. This commercial aired as part of the pre-game activities in 2008. If you haven’t seen it, check it out by clicking on the image above.

Summary of the key points of the narrative

Two men are driving through a residential neighborhood at night, blaming one another for not knowing which house is Bob’s. The driver leans on the car’s horn, arousing the occupants of the darkened houses who turn on the interior lights, peek outside and even step onto a now lighted porch. The one house that remains dark must be the one belonging to their deaf friend. They park, ring the doorbell, and enter as their host Bob signs and mouths “sorry” to his neighbors. The passenger’s “We’ll miss the kick-off” cues the viewer that it’s Superbowl time; the driver drinking from a Pepsi bottle suffices to identify the sponsor.

Deaf culture

This commercial captures a traditional bit of Deaf folklore, in which creating noise annoys hearing people and simultaneously allows identification of the Deaf target of interest. Deaf (written with a capital D) carries the implication of cultural identification with the community that shares values, behaviors, and sign language. The usage follows the civil rights movement’s embrace of term “Black” from an ethnic slur to an identity of pride. (Little “d” deaf refers to the audiological condition of hearing impairment, where a deaf person cannot perceive the unaided auditory signal to understand speech. The term “hard of hearing” may refer to a person whose hearing impairment is less severe, as measured by a hearing test, but also has a sociological meaning, referring to the person with an audiological impairment who functions within a speech environment more easily, through hearing aids and speechreading.)

Beyond the narrative structure of the commercial, which reproduces a familiar sign language joke in a film treatment, there are additional messages in the commercial that indicate its genuine portrayal of Deaf culture.

• Deaf (and deaf) people can drive
  The National Fraternal Society of the Deaf (founded 1901, closed in 2004) provided life insurance to deaf people who couldn’t qualify with other companies. The Frat functioned as a social service and advocacy group as well.  It meets for the last time in early March 2010 to close the books. As with many charitable institutions which hope their mission will be accomplished, the Frat is closing in part because deaf people no longer suffer discrimination in insurance coverage, but also because there are other mechanisms and organizations which handle the advocacy portions of its mission.
• Turning on the dome light helps visual communication in the dark
  The driver turns on the light in the car to have the argument with the passenger about who was supposed to bring the street address.
• Doorbells become flashing lights
  Perhaps you caught the fact that the guests’ doorbell press triggered flashing lights inside Bob’s house, a visual signal of a typically auditory message. Harris Communications is one of several companies that supplies specialty products, including vibrating alarm clocks and flashing lights hooked to audio signals, for the specialized audience, “Deaf and Hard of Hearing people, people interested in sign language, Deaf Culture, hearing loss and more.” Hmmm, sounds like everyone, doesn’t it?

The companion video presents the employees who perform in the commercial, capturing their genuine surprise and delight about sharing the Deaf world with the Superbowl audience.

Congratulations to PepsiCo for responding to a Deaf employee’s suggestion, and for involving the National Association of the Deaf in turning the suggestion into reality. The performers in this video are not necessarily trained as actors, but the authenticity of their signing is obvious to Deaf and signing audiences.

Here’s the big question:  What products shall we make so that we don’t have to retrofit the environment?

Additional resources:

Carol Padden & Tom Humphries, “Deaf in America: Voices from a culture” explicates of the foundations of Deaf culture through stories, jokes, poetry and the perspective of a Deaf-centered world.

Photograph detail UPI © 1980

I met Ted Kennedy only once.

In an earlier part of my professional life, I worked as a sign language researcher and interpreter based in New York City.  Well aware that the Democratic National Convention was scheduled for New York’s Madison Square Garden in August, 1980, I started attending planning meetings as a volunteer about 8 months beforehand. My reminiscences about sitting on that committee will wait for another post.

Suffice it to say that when Convention week arrived, we had a sign language interpreting team ready to work on the podium and in the gallery portions of the hall, with appropriate security credentials for each area.

On Tuesday evening, August 12, we realized that Senator Kennedy would address the delegates. I knew this would be an important speech:  He had just withdrawn his name from nomination, and he still had a strong following among a large number of delegates. Working in close proximity with Ted Kennedy meant that once I committed to interpreting his address, I was under Secret Service scrutiny, for roughly 40 minutes before we took the stage on Tuesday night until I left the stage.

Rehearsal?

I asked to read through the prepared speech. Under other circumstances the interpreter’s request would be anticipated and even welcomed by a veteran international speaker or his staff:  The interpreter ought to be commended for preparing. In this situation, other concerns arose:  Would this breach of confidentiality result in a leak to the press before the senator had delivered the address? The staff allowed access, but under highly controlled conditions. I was sitting in a hallway in which his support staff and others managing the stage for the DNC were chattering and moving about. In my recollection, it was noisy, poorly lit for reading, and with every possible distraction. I know I didn’t spend enough time on the final few pages of the speech, which turn out to have been the most memorable. (And if I had spent a moment thinking about it, I would have realized that the ending had to be inspiring, as Kennedy was conceding his candidacy in public with a goal of unifying the party under a single candidate.)

A note about the technology

I recall that the pages of Kennedy’s speech were given to him in a ring binder. Each page was printed at least double-spaced in large type (probably 24 point or greater). Each page was contained in a sheet protector, making it easy to turn a single page at a time. Not only did he have the speech on the teleprompter (which is visible in the photo), but it was also at hand, in physical means, in case of a technology glitch.

The television cameras were placed in several spots around the hall. This was my first experience of the “pool feed,” where all the networks relied on the same original video and audio signal, which they could edit as they wished for broadcast.

Physical proximity, audio quality

When the senator was called to the stage, I followed him, ascending a narrow staircase. While it appears in the photo that I’m standing within an arm’s reach behind him, in fact I was standing more than 10 feet behind him. (The wonders of the telephoto lens.) Of course the text had been taken from me, which barely mattered because I had no place to rest a script within viewing range. The audio quality was less than ideal; I don’t recall now whether I had a monitor to listen to the sound or had to depend on the sound coming to the others on the dais.

(For the subsequent evenings, the organizers moved the interpreters off the speaker’s platform to the far end of the honored guests’ seating, perhaps 100 feet or more from the speaker. I definitely recall the difficult listening situation for Lou Ann Walker, who interpreted Jimmy Carter’s acceptance speech, and me, as I took on Walter Mondale’s acceptance speech, both on Thursday evening, August 14. I suspect the pool didn’t care for the position of the interpreter in the line of sight of several of the cameras. Most of the video recordings show Kennedy from the side, rather than straight on. Keep in mind that this occasion was early in the history of closed captioning, only available for scripted, not live, broadcast events, a decade before the ADA became law.)

And that photo?

Friends and family around the country send me copies of the newspaper photo in their local papers on Wednesday. I went to UPI’s offices on 42nd Street some weeks later and got my own copy of the original photograph.

Photograph UPI © 1980

The framed photo hangs on the wall at my home. I missed my chance to have Senator Kennedy autograph the image, but I’m okay with that; it wouldn’t change my memories of the experience. In recalling the events, I realize how primitive the paper credentials were, how limited the Secret Service scrutiny, and how fortunate I was to have been part of this historic occasion.

An exercise for the reader…

Here’s a link to the audio recording of the speech (and text transcribed from the audio) , which I offer as a training exercise to all interpreting students and working interpreters. Keep in mind that as the interpreter, your goal is to convince the audience that you are delivering the speech as Ted Kennedy would have done if he had been fluent in American Sign Language (or into whatever language is your specialty). It’s a great chance to spend time with a text that has layers of meaning and historical significance, and to practice a rhetorical style which few of us get to interpret live. The challenge is equal whether you agree with his point of view or disagree, whether you admire his life and career or not.

For extra credit, try it with less than 30 minutes of distracted rehearsal time, in a stadium of approximately 10,000 people who speak Kennedy’s language, where there is no obvious audience for your live translation, with an uncertain audio signal, and during live broadcast to a few million home viewers.

www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/tedkennedy1980dnc.htm