Challenge: Conduct a contextual research about the Local Culture of Footwear in Savannah, apply methods of ethnography to find problems and propose innovative solutions for them.
Skills: Research + observation, Interview + documentation methods, Collaboration methods, Concept development, Creative facilitation, Verbal + visual communication, Storytelling, Design thinking.
Research
The research was conducted over a span of 12 weeks which involved various research techniques and strategies to analyze insights.
We follow the following research methodology: we used secondary research and primary research to gather data and information.
Techniques Used: Buzz Reports, Offering-Activity-Culture Map, Intent Statement, Popular Media Search, Innovation Evolution Map and Interest Group Discussion.
Through our research, we were able to find out and focused on two topics of interest: men who wear heels and people who love to be barefoot, with a focal point on barefoot runners. We discovered that few people are talking about these controversial topics, so we decided to explore both areas. A key point for men who wear heels is that is hard to find heels in men's sizes, so often men have to buy heels for women in big sizes.
Offering Activity Culture Map
With Footwear as the central node, we started building the first set of subnodes based on activities that utilized footwear. From these subnodes, we built another round of subnodes based on the culture surrounding the activity. We used this map to analyze footwear in general, and later we did it for our two points of interest.
Techniques Used:
- An immersive experiment
- Cultural Probes
- Interviews
Immersive Experiment
One fine day, while trying to respond "what is footwear?" and "why people use footwear?", I convinced my team to do an immersive experiment to understand the essence of footwear.
The experiment involved being barefoot the entire day while going through daily activities. The diversity in the team offered significant knowledge with different activities like walking on the pavements, driving, grocery shopping, attending classes, traveling by bus and other daily activities. This experiment was an eye opener for most of us and it helped us understand why humans use footwear.
Interviews
As an integral part of our primary research, we interviewed 18 people. To find our information about men who wear heels we interviewed men who wear heels, drag queens, fashion experts and random people to acknowledge what they think about men who wear heels. We got to interview Andrew Snope, the runner who World Record of more miles ran barefoot in 24 hours, who gave us many insights about running barefoot and the human feet.
We noticed that a lot of interviewees having similar answers despite not knowing each other. With our Barefoot research, we were often recommended to read the book “Born to Run” by Christopher McDougall. Likewise with our Heels research, in all our interviews with men who wore heels acknowledged the fact that heels were originally invented for men.
Cultural Probes and Surveys
A cultural probe is developed with the intent of probing qualitative information from the respondents. We designed two probes and analyzed them across two different locations resulting in four datasets.
The next step was analyzing the data. In this method, we compile the data collected in more than 500 sticky notes and apply different techniques of analyzation to find emerging concepts.
Affinitization
Affinitization is the process of grouping similar concepts. We started by transferring all our secondary and primary data into phrases and words which then went onto yellow sticky notes. We did 4 rounds of clusters until we ended up with 25 categories.
The last step was to develop solutions for the challenges that we
discovered. For this part, we needed to create emerging concepts and
apply techniques of conceptualizing, prototyping and designing. We
brainstormed more than 200 concepts individually and as a team, then
we ranked concepts according to their relevance to our research and the
problems we found, and finally decided to propose the following
concepts, for both areas of focus.
Techniques Used: Conceptualizing, prototyping, and designing
Although at the analysis stage we had a basic concept for the solutions, the full idea was built at this stage. We conceptualized each idea and how they helped solve the problems identified through our data.
These designs were displayed in a final event which took place in Poetter Hall, SCAD, Savannah.
If you wanna take a look of the whole exhibition watch the following video:
If you are interested in reading more about this research follow this link to read the Process Book: https://indd.adobe.com/view/65d303a6-cadc-4615-906f-859cfd9aaf07
