PRESENCE TEA PARTIES are informal and intimate in character - hence the name - but not inconsequential. They explore the relationship between the formality and language of research practices and the more playful and visual approaches of designers of products and services. The objective is to build effective bridges between designers and researchers, and to explore ways in which each culture can inform the other to mutual benefit. The focus is on working with users, and the particular context is the PRESENCE programme and its three test sites in Norway, Italy and The Netherlands - points at which research, design and the real world interface and interact. For more information on Tea Parties, past and present, and the broader debate around user research in design, visit the Presence Discussion Forum at:

The SPRING DAYS TEA PARTY continued this process by throwing it open to other i3 projects as a way of both broadening the discussion and of showcasing some of the PRESENCE partners and their specialist methods and approach. The emphasis was on designerly practice: on ways of projecting forward into the future and trying to understand users in what is for them unknown territory; on raising questions about how research can inform this process, and how design can bring it to life by filling a future landscape with people interacting with new products and services; and on how we can evaluate and validate such speculative proposals.

Chairman: Roger Coleman, director, Helen Hamlyn Research Centre

Alessandra Agostini, Campiello project, University of Milan

Andy McGrath, BT Systems

Anu Mäkelä, Maypole project, Helsinki University of Technology

Alan Munro, Persona project, Napier University

Elena Pacenti, Presence project, Domus Academy

Michael Smyth, Edinburgh University

Marco Susani, Presence project, Domus Academy

Danielle van Diemen, Presence project, Netherlands Design Institute

Lieselotte van Leeuwen, Kidslab

Angus Whyte, Napier University

Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Presence Forum site moderator

Esther de Charon de Saint Germain, Presence project editor

Others present confirmed that these matters were often at the heart of their own research. A round of introductions revealed a concern to develop dialogue between disciplines: between designers and engineers for Andy McGrath, between the research procedures used in academia and those used in industry for Michael Smyth, for example. One approach was to use images or artefacts to mediate between these groups. Marco Susani spoke of "maps" which might connect people with innovations, studies with artefacts, and the different but related tools used by academic researchers and by industry.

Another manifestation of the sense of unease between designers and researchers was a kind of existential crisis clearly felt by a number of researchers who had come to reject the supposedly rigorous methodology of their field. "Fieldwork is always engaged," said Alan Munro, a psychologist who has become interested in quiddity—the "thingness" of things. Smyth, from a human-computer interaction background, described his work as "tainted by sociologists". Now, he is working with interior designers, investigating the "early, creative phases" of their work, and how, when and why they use the various technological tools from pencils to CAD at their disposal. After researching the ethnically mixed community living in a notorious housing estate in Amsterdam, Danielle van Diemen had become disaffected with the somewhat superficial idea of developing technological "solutions" to address "problems" identified by earlier research. She was now interested in exploring the way in which these people reconstruct their traditional cultures in urban settings and in finding ways to enhance or support this process and to facilitate communication within and between groups.

Danielle van Diemen

Van Diemen described the Presence project's work in the Bijlmer estate in more detail. The research showed that all the older people as one community wanted a greater voice. They wanted to be heard, not by one another within the estate, or to have a national presence, but to connect with the external locality. Then came the design response in the form of a massage board able to display slogans and comments devised by Bijlmer residents. Visible from roads passing the estate, their messages could then be read by the wide community. Criticism, which had been invited at the beginning of the tea party, focused on the apparent confusion between medium and message. The design solution was the display, the medium. More thought needed to go into the design of the process by which the messages it displays are selected. The present set-up seemed to encourage polarisation of the messaging between ethnic groups. Alessandra Agostini thought the solution seemed too much guided by the users without much design innovation. Elena Pacenti responded by saying that the researchers on the project were overpowered by the research mechanisms of the designers themselves, in this case a set of "cultural probes" devised by Bill Gaver and Tony Dunne from the Royal College of Art (see the Presence web site).

Mäkelä asked why the researchers disliked the cultural probes. "The goal of research is to give insights to designers," she said. "But if the cultural probes gave insights then they are a good research method." This led to a broader discussion of the different approaches adopted by designers and researchers when addressing the same problem. McGrath advised researchers to talk to more designers. It might at least help them liven up their presentation. "Studies don't communicate exciting possibilities the way design concepts do." This was exactly what interested Susani in the way companies do things as opposed to academic researchers. "Companies have a healthy mechanism that forces openness to innovation," he said (even though the resulting innovation may be of dubious value). "They design an interpretation that is already a synthesis, that has an opinion. It's not purely analytical." Researchers stop with observation and refuse to go further and make an interpretation of what they have observed.

Alan Munro expressed the same thoughts from a different perspective. The ethnographer's worries are: have I enough information? Is it well represented? When do I finish the fieldwork? The answers are not as rigorously scientific as the ethnographer's ideal methodology would imply. When to stop is usually when the schedule dictates, when pressure of other work takes over. Upholding the view of Hume over that of Hobbes, Munro said "you can't get "ought" from "is". Ethnographers come up with lots of "is". Designers take our ethnography and place it in a framework of relevance to design; they give it moral order." The practical problem here for ethnographers, according to Angus Whyte, is that ethnographic speculations produced for designers cannot be published as ethnographic research. This raised issues about who research publications are directed at, and why they are produced in the form they are. Can a wider audience benefit from the re-presentation of research in forms and language more accessible to other disciplines, e.g. design? Should we be trying to develop a common language here to allow researchers and designers to communicate across cultural boundaries.

Susani observed that the dialogue between designers and researchers tends to deepens over matters of content. In the Bijlmer example, the research observed social structures, and the designers produced a response. But it is the content of that response -and its independent power- that is forcing both groups to think harder. Innovation in social issues was no part of this project at the outset, yet this was one thing to have emerged from it. "New media change the social structure, like it or not."

How should research be "translated" for designers, Coleman asked. In Mäkelä's project, the research data is analysed together with the designers, for example using cluster techniques. Did the researchers feel they had had sufficient impact when the designers came to create their concepts based on the research, van Diemen asked. Yes, said Mäkelä. Smyth and van Leeuwen agreed that words were not the right medium. Too many won't get read by designers, and bullet points under-represent the research. This was an important point, for such cross-cultural communication to be effective it needs a strong element of conversation to it. Storyboards and scenarios can involve text, but are more persuasive to designers and many others than text alone. "Sketches are a shared things," said Smyth. "They don't hide stuff as words do." Constructing a shared narrative is important to, a storyline that we can all buy into and work alongside.

from a Domus Academy storyboard

So how do you devise a scenario that matches a concept, asked Pacenti. Susani provided two answers: maps of social relations, and user profiles. User profiles are synthetic descriptions of users, in that they draw on a variety of data sources, but do not describe actual users in the way that case studies might. They may be created by researchers or by designers. As such, they are more flexible and potentially more usefully representative. In a sense, they are fictional, but based on "hints" from real user interviews. The profiles may be extended , for example by means of imagined interviews. Mapping social relations can at once reveal flaws in the model, but if valid can also serve as the basis for design. Mäkelä described the use of "maps" in her work on design for children. The maps direct the children's play, and allow new scenarios to unfold, but within reasonable limits.

Noting a general shift towards greater acceptance of more speculative methods, Coleman wanted to know how were such methods to be evaluated and validated. This would be essential in order to give industrial partners confidence in the techniques and the outcomes. Susani was looking for demonstrable excitement from product concepts. But, asked van Leeuwen, "what is excitement expressed in? What is the fun factor?" There must at least be a basis for comparison. Susani felt the answer lay in dialogue rather than measurable parameters. "It's not a scientific measure. It's an intellectual evaluation. The concept of the one best solution frightens me."

Ignoring our own advice about putting ideas into words, we concluded the tea party by asking those present to take ten minutes to describe a chosen user research method. Their descriptions follow, and will form a supplement to the Methods Lab, the online resource giving definitive descriptions of user research methods by world authorities.

This method couples participatory design with ethnographic studies. It requires strongly committed users and researchers as well as a strong empathy between them.

The researchers participate in crucial activities of the users. Moreover, they stimulate peculiar and meaningful new activities among the users and participate in these also. These activities must be chosen according to criteria defined by the researchers bearing in mind the goals of the project.

User profiles provide a synthetic, schematic description of users as the potential recipients of new design concepts. The "user profile" is based on raw data, but it is not a description of a real user. Instead it is the construction of an "ideal typical" profile that clusters meaningful characteristics of people as described by the raw data.

In order to inspire designers, the profiles must contain subtle information about people's behaviour and attitudes. More than a list of functional characteristics of a person (his or her abilities or disabilities), the profile should describe people's attitudes, their psychological profile, their domestic environment, their lifestyle, and so on.

The profile may also contain description of relations with others, such a family, colleagues and friends.

User forums are not simply discussions between users but regular meeting between designers and users. Their advantages are that the two groups get to know one another and become comfortable with one another over time. One disadvantage is that the users may develop some design awareness and so perhaps become less useful as research "subjects".

User forums work very well in the early stages of introducing designers to user issues—in particular introducing young students to older users and/or other groups from very different backgrounds to themselves. There is a lot going on that is useful to designers but does not deliver specific or quantified information. The former can be on specific issues, such as the operability of packaging, or of a general nature.

This method should be used in conjunction with other methods that can deliver more specific information relevant to the project in hand.

Storyboarding is a technique for articulating ideas and concepts which in turn act as a common currency during the design process. Sketching interface ideas has the advantage of being rapid and easy to produce. It enables a number of alternative ideas to be pursued, and can facilitate consideration of the problem in hand at a variety of depths.

The sketches can be shown to potential users and feedback obtained very rapidly. Such sketches can also act as a resource articulating the history of a project.

Maps of relations are synthetic, descriptive representations of social relations in space. They are used after observation of people's behaviour in existing spaces and engaged in existing practices as an inspiration for the design phase.

Maps indicate hierarchies between people in space, the connection between their "social power" and their position (or behaviour) in space. An additional element of these maps is their ability to provide a simple description of the "power of attraction" of space—for example the "power" of a church in a piazza to "attract" to it conversation and personal encounters, or the "power" of a desk in a classroom to draw one's eye.

Description may include tools (and media) inside the space. ("How powerful is a television set in a living room?")

The designer must decide what are the variants and invariants of autonomous behaviour .. The question is with what kind of agents a user wishes to interact. Answers will be very different for particular user communities such as children.

In projects with children, this method proceeds to introduce behavioural constraints in the form of rules of a game. For example, a castle guard may only open or close the castle drawbridge and not do anything else. Or, a princess may only converse with a bird.

Changing the constraints then allows a comparison of the "quality" of play according to those constraints. The gain for the designer is to learn what kind of behavioural constraints facilitate various activities, such as role-play.

Punk research aims to give research back to the non-professionals. It takes its name from the 1970s punk movement which was concerned to put energy back into activities such as music-making which were perceived as having become too staid.

This is a method of research where a group of people who are filled with energy get together to create research ideas. The fact that they are not so expert in their areas that what they have to say has become bland is important.

The group must be able to undertake the basics of the research themselves, but the main emphasis is on energy, attitude and self-promotion. Each group will naturally break up after a short time, thereby avoiding becoming research dinosaurs.

Ethnography is a method of close observation of a given environment. It is based on techniques from anthropology and sociology. The methods places great emphasis on behaviour viewed as contextual, as part of its environment, rather than taken from its environment, decontextualised, and codified.

An orientation to context can mean that the field worker "suspends" judgement on the activities observed, for example whether, in a work environment, they constitute good practice or not. Instead, the idea is to see the activities as part of the everyday realities of the workplace.

As ethnographers, we are not afraid of the ad hoc; we are not afraid of the messy; we do not count beans.

The purpose of this method is to investigate and counter forces of cultural dominance that may be in operation while researching user communities that include ethnic groups. Greater knowledge of the mechanism by which research data is subverted to the dominant culture in a test site or organisation is necessary in order to avoid this process and to give each group its own platform. In this way, better and more accurate results will become available from ethnically diverse research populations.

Photo diaries made by users are useful tools in allowing designers to enter the users' world with only a small expenditure of time and effort.

Users are asked to take pictures of their environment, tools, social network and so on, depending on the focus of the design process. Following this, they are asked to make an album of the photographs they have taken. They are then interviewed about the content and meaning to them of the pictures and the overall structure of the album.

Supported by the interviews, the albums give rich data on user values and preferences. Moreover, they elicit past stories from the life of the person who made the album.

Looking back on the morning, several interesting issues emerged, which have considerable relevance in the context of multi-national and inter-disciplinary projects. Most significant of these are to do with cross-cultural exchange, or the lack of it. The discussion revealed a genuine concern to move away from the prevailing tendency towards hermeticism – where researchers, technologists, designers and ‘hard' scientists see things from within their own cultural perspectives, are dismissive of other disciplines, and undervalue the potential of collaboration – and embrace the intellectual challenge of building bridges between the disciplines.

My experience bears this out, as DAN co-ordinator trying to build links and bridges between the PRESENCE project team and a wider community of designers and researchers. Such things are not easy to deliver, especially on a European scale, and constantly threatened by the tendency to hermeticism that reasserts itself all too readily. In this context, cultural diversity stems not simply from nationality and discipline, but also from the language used within specific disciplines that does not necessarily translate across nationalities – the word "design", as used by designers, has many different interpretations and meanings across Europe, factor in the different understandings of it held by other disciplines and the complexity of the problem begins to emerge. History has its own part to play in this too.

Developing the techniques and tools that facilitate the process of deepening communications will enhance the quality and the efficiency of interdisciplinary projects and, I trust and hope, make the end results more user-friendly and more sensitive to cultural diversity.