IDEO research methods / Zidane

Last week Darren introduced us to a series of target audience research methods developed by design consultancy firm IDEO.

Techniques include Behavioural Mapping, Scenario Testing, Error Analysis, and Quick and Dirty Prototyping.

Here's a behavioural map showing the points at which visitors paused while moving through a room of Joseph Beuys sculptures at

Tate Modern. The crosses indicate all visitors, the dots represent visitors of the appropriate age-range of my target audience for the project.

Another of the techniques, Shadowing, simply involved choosing an innocent bystander to follow around the gallery for half an hour.

Applying this technique to extreme, Turner Prize winning artist

Douglas Gordon made Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a documentary

of a match between Real Madrid and Villareal, filmed in real time by 17 cameras, with the sole focus of the film being Zidane himself.

With no match commentary and very little dialogue picked up from the pitch itself, the film is a sensory, rather than narrative, experience.

Beautifully shot, and with an excellent soundtrack by Gordon's fellow Scots Mogwai, it's well 90 minutes of your time. Meat pie and Bovril

are optional. There's a low-res version of the entire film online here.

GDF project: Oxfam, the brand

I won't go into great detail here, but I've decided to side-step the dubious politics of smaller Pressure Groups such as the Countryside Alliance and Fathers 4 Justice (seriously, these guys are just plain wrong. Just have a look at their self-congratulatory FHM-tastic website) and select a larger organisation as the Client of my GDF project. This will allow me to explore a wider scope range of possible formats (larger budget = more choice), and provide a consistent brand to work with. I'd like to see how creative I can be while working within the confines of a set of existing brand guidelines, as a designer in a real world, or live project would. So - Hello Oxfam.

Oxfam's sprawling website contains details of their core Health and Education Campaign, as well as other issues such as Climate Change, Gender Equality, and Fair Trade. Also featured are profiles of Oxfam health workers from around globe, some quite nifty reshaped world maps created by Mapping Worlds, and most relevant form me, branding guidelines, which give details of the correct fonts, colour combinations, and use of the their logo:

Research - Street Level

Until the end of the month Kemistry Gallery in Shoreditch is exhibiting a show dedicated to pioneering design journal Typographica, which ran for almost 20 after its launch in 1949 by Herbert Spencer. Curated by Rick Poynor, founder of Eye magazine and author of Typographica (2001), an earlier book about the journal, the exhibition features original copies as well as excerpts from articles along with commentary by Poynor himself.

The article that really caught my eye was Robert Brownjohn's photo-essay Street Level, which features images of type from shop windows, roll-shutters, and hand-written notices, that has in each case been accidentally distorted by use or circumstance, with corresponding examples of deliberately manipulated type produced by designers.

The article reminded me of something I came across a few years ago - ENDCOMMERCIAL is an ongoing research project and photographic archive of images by Scheppe Böhm Associates, which uses a devised taxonomic system (see top image) to record re-occurrent phenomena within an urban environment (in most cases within New York City). The project has so far yielded over 6,000 thousand photographs, a book EndCommercial: Reading The City (2002), and several exhibitions across Europe and the US. The examples above show the giant letter A-shaped temporary barrier supports used by road-menders, the cryptic street markings left by surveyors of under-street pipe-work, and in a direct coincidence with Brownjohn's essay, degraded and misspelt commercial signage. The website actually isn't great for images, but does contain links to numerous essays and articles about the project.

*More images of the Typographica exhibition and the journal itself are available here

Gathering Research

These images are the product of Friday's Research session with Orlagh. Working with Anna-Maria, we gathered every piece of photo ID from the wallets of each student in the class. We arranged the ID cards in order, top left to bottom right, starting with student cards, then driving licenses, travel cards, government ID cards, then miscellaneous.

How did we get on?

+ : While one student had as many as 4 items, others had only one. Because we used all the ID cards rather than just one from each student, this distorted the results, and produced interesting comparisons where similar though not identical multiple portraits of the same person appeared. I keep my girlfriend's old student rail card in my wallet, so there was also in effect an impostor in the group.

- : The scope of our research was limited by the small number of students in the class.

i : A conclusion common to each group was that widening the scope would yield more interesting results.

I think in this case our engagement with the brief was fairly basic, and the results are visually unspectacular, but by the end of the session I felt I understood the point Orlagh was trying to get across: the difference between gathering data and presenting it, and how this process can contribute to the successful interpretation of a brief.

After the session I took a closer look at the examples Orlagh gave. In addition to Daniel Eatock's Vandalised Trees Reoriented, Car Batteries, and other many and varied collections, I enjoyed Wayne Daly's book The Names, an A-Z collection of the aliases from all the spam email he received over a five year period. Here is a man who needs a proper hobby.

But it was Orlagh's own MA project research site that provided the most comprehensive example. I think it's a great idea for students to have access to their tutors' own work, like: okay, I understand what you're saying, but how would you do it?