In anticipation for our November event UX Research Method - Sopheclean Prototyping @ BrainStation Vancouver, we had a short chat with Emergin Scholar, Thomas Girard, about his view on qualitative research, channeling empahty, and the possibility of imagination.
In your professional practice, what does it mean to do research?
So unique ways of prototyping is a process or a method, and within the method to describe it, I have five pillars, and one of the pillars is research. Whenever I give a talk or workshop about this, I get to the research one, and I don’t know what to say. And I’m actually very upfront about it, I say, “I don’t know what research is, I’ve got this research slide in here, I don’t know what it is.”
However, for the last three years, I’ve been doing a master’s at SFU, which just wrapped up. During masters studies, you learn about qualitative research and interviews. Brene Brown describes research as to control and predict, and I like that description a lot. But I think if you do 1000 interviews, and you’re asking similar questions, then you get to some pretty reliable answers, your chances of anomalies go way down when you do that many. So I really like what Brene Brown says, to control and predict.
At the undergraduate level, learning about research is pretty basic; all I knew is that it was an important piece to have in there. Through my teaching and entering the master’s program, I came to realize that research, even in the design world, is really important. And it does exist, it’s always been in my subconscious in a way that the research is going to be an important element. In UX, we talk about surveys and interviews as qualitative, and we talk about quantitative as well. Because I did a Master of Arts, I was very much on the qualitative side. And that’s always what I focused on, especially in my teaching.
What’s a piece of research that fundamentally shifted your view(s)?
I think every time I do an interview, I have a huge shift, a paradigm shift, a fundamental shift. I’m trained as a classical designer, and when you’re learning about design, in your teens, in those formative years, you’re learning about empathy, and how to have a lot of empathy. So I think throughout my life, I’ve always had a lot of empathy, particularly in interviews. When you do an interview, and you have a lot of empathy, you start to feel what the other person’s feeling and experience what they’re experiencing. That can be hard. Sometimes it lasts for a day, sometimes it lasts for a week, or week and a half. But you really start to get in the other person’s shoes for a while, and that’s just the way that I function. So I think every interview that I do with any sort of depth is a huge shift for me.
That’s good in a way that you can understand that interview very thoroughly, and you can really understand where a person is coming from, why they might be drawing the conclusions that they’re drawing. And each one is quite hard, but if you do it enough times, you start to see some consistent patterns, and you start to be able to draw some conclusions. Right?
(was there any instance where when you felt empathy for the user, it altered your mental health or mental state?)
That’s a hard one to answer, I think. If you’re a classically trained designer, in the realms of communications design or industrial design, your use of empathy is not so strict. Interaction design didn’t become a discipline that people studied until later, but it was what I taught for many years. So I think I do answer your question.
I think interaction design is really focused on empathy and using that as a tool. In that situation, you’re really focused on the users, and empathy for the users, and what they’re experiencing as they go through a user flow or task flow or something like that. But I think it wasn’t until later when interaction design and UX really started to get to the forefront of what I was doing, that I started to use empathy. In a way there’s a word called Tactical Empathy, which that might be related to. If I could do a good job of explaining what Tactical Empathy is, it’s not just a feeling or emotion or state, but it’s something that you’re using for a particular outcome. It would be to use empathy as a tool, basically. That’s how I would perceive it.
Where do you think the field of research is headed?
Regardless of what you think of people like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, they do have some visions of the future. They are people with power, but those are only a couple of views of the future, right? I’m always interested in how the academy is so focused on understanding everything, and knowing everything, and I wonder about these unknowable things. These things that we haven’t encountered yet. Maybe we didn’t imagine them yet, that could very well occur. To me, it seems like there’s so much possibility of these kinds of unimaginable things happening in the world, and why don’t we focus more on those in design? We might call that design futures these days, trying to understand how to react when something happens that we don’t know anything about. But to me, yeah, I think that’s a really important area to look at.
If you use the Brene Brown definition that research is “to control and predict”, then if you can’t imagine it, how can you control and predict it? I think that’s going to be a necessary piece for research to do, and I think it’s going to be more and more important. I imagine a future where more and more unpredictable things are gonna happen, and we’re gonna have to get used to that and we’re gonna have to get used to managing that.
What is a burning question on your mind right now?
So the burning question on my mind is not climate change, because I think climate change must be figured out by now. I don’t have the answer to it, and I don’t know who figured it out, and I don’t know how it’s figured out. But I think you must be figured out or else we’re in deep trouble. So, to me, yeah, it is about the unknowable things, and how do we deal with them when they come?
(As an aside, I recently purchased this book called The Ministry for the Future. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. Barack Obama and Ezra Klein from Vox both recommended it and it’s quite thick, but it’s about the future. So your answer reminded me of this book I have yet to read.)
it’s always been: “We think this is going to happen. Here’s how it’s gonna unfold.”, and it’s never like: “We don’t know what’s going to happen”. I think that’s kind of too scary a question for a lot of people.
About our speaker:
Thomas Girard (born 30 December, 1980 in Vancouver, Canada) is a Canadian scholar. Girard was accepted to attend University of Oxford in lectures equivalent to graduate coursework. Girard has received several Emerging Scholar awards, first at the Design Principles and Practices conference in Barcelona, Spain at the prestigious ELISAVA. At Emily Carr University of Art and Design he received his second Emerging Scholar award. Other awards include RBC Emerging Scholar, Royal Bank of Canada Foundation. For 2021, he has been awarded an Emerging Scholar award from the New Directions in the Humanities conference in Madrid, Spain.