Towards a new way of making: my talk at last night's SheSays

Yesterday Cath Richardson and I spoke at the SheSays conference on digital anthropology and user research. If you haven't been to SheSays before, go. Bright people, interesting ideas, friendly conversation and wine – what more does one need? (Men are welcome, by the way.)

Cath and I did a sort of tandem presentation: I spoke about new ways of making products and services, and Cath spoke about Skype in the classroom, a service we built using Lean and Agile principles. Cath is going to introduce Skype in the classroom in a separate post, so below is what I had to say about new ways of making, customer development, and a few tips we might take out of the anthropological handbook.

Makers in transition

I want to explore a new role for the people who make things. By this, I mean traditional makers like publishers and manufacturers of goods, and us: people who make communications, and products that communicate.

Our role is changing. It’s becoming more about listening, reporting, facilitating, experimenting and responding to the people we’re making for – our customers. The digital anthropology header fits nicely: I think it’s useful to look at this changing role through the lens of people and communities and how we relate to one another.

In a world getting more and more democratic, film directing is the last resort for dictators.

This is Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now in the late seventies. I think it's probably more true now than it was then: dictatorship is a luxury few makers – maybe even filmmakers – can afford. But to my mind, the change has less to do with the pervasiveness (or not) of democracy and more to do with a constant rush of technological progress.

An evolution of making

The old way of making certainly wasn’t democratic: whether you wanted to publish news, manufacture food, clothing or hardware, or generate buzz around a product, you needed up-front investment, overhead, cash, and networks to distribute. The relationship between the maker and the customer was simple: one-way. I make, you use. And if you don’t use, I don’t make.

The internet has facilitated new ways of making – ways that are still changing. It started with self-publishing... first blogs, then Twitter, then Instagram... and who knows what will come next. There’s a lower barrier to entry: the cost of production is massively reduced, the skill set required to make things – in the case of publishing, to make messages – is easier to achieve, and the internet facilitates greater ease of distribution.

We’re now seeing a second layer of making on top of this initial layer of self-publishing. Through services like Kickstarter and Kiva, practices like crowdfunding and social lending have enabled making to become social. Even manufactured goods – I used the example of Glif, an iPhone tripod that started out as a Kickstarter idea – are no longer the domain of the rich and well-connected.

Collaborative making: bringing feedback into the process

The socialisation of making has facilitated a new kind of feedback model, whereby the maker: user binary becomes a communication loop. Makers have moved a lot closer to their customers, too. Advertising and communications are areas where this is especially noticeable.

Companies really need to be looking at the social revolution for possibly one reason over everything else.  Insights into human behavior that can lead to future innovations or even product/service improvements.

This a quote from a 2008 blog post by David Armano, VP of Innovation for Edelman Digital, writer, speaker and generally bright and switched-on guy. The monitoring and communication tools available to makers now provide a constant, always-on buzz of feedback. We’re only seeing the beginning of these now, too. We should expect more, and more clever, feedback tools in the near future.

So what does digital anthropology have to do with it?

It’s important for us as makers to remember that we’re creating part of a culture. Often, though, it's not our culture that we're making things for, which means we need to do a bit of field work: observing behaviour, eavesdropping through blogs and Twitter, and generally skulking around to find out just what makes these people tick.

Cath and I were asked a couple of questions around this point:

How do you know who to listen to? We think you have to spend a lot of time listening to everyone, not just the loudest voices. Mapping out the relationships between people helps – this way you can be sure you're getting a broad sample of real needs and behaviours.

What do you do if these people are similar to you and you *really* don't like them? Well there's no easy answer to this one. In our experience, you have to consciously try to shed your own values and preferences – after all, it's not about you. Elvin Tuygan, another speaker who just finished a Master's in Digital Anthropology, pointed out that this is a pretty common challenge, and the reason most anthropologists prefer to study people very different to them: it's hard to be objective about people we identify with (positively or negatively).

The importance of cultural relativity 

This is a Smithsonian picture of anthropologists returning from the field with totems from another culture. Along with these long hair necklaces (I’m actually not 100% sure what they are – beards?), they’ve gathered information on values, belief systems and needs.

In a sense, we’re doing the same thing as we listen to our customers and try to take their needs, values and beliefs on board in order to make things for them.

At this point, it's critical that we take a page from the anthropological handbook – cultural relativity. This principle reminds us to understand a group or individual’s beliefs and activities in the context of their own culture, and its attendant needs and values.

For us, this means making things people need and want – not the things we want them to want. I mentioned, in response to a question, an example from my own life. For several years, I consistently bought my brothers books as Christmas presents. Not the kind of books they liked, but the kind of books I, as their infinitely wiser older sister, felt that they *should* like. Eventually they pulled me up on it: I knew them and knew their interests, so could I please stop it with the books and buy them presents they would like?

Looking back, I am mortified. They were so right – who was I to tell them what they should and shouldn't like? Just as a gift should celebrate and flatter the recipient, so too should the products, services and communications we make fit the audience we make them for. The thing is, we're unlikely to get it right the first time, so the challenge that emerges for makers is one of adaptation – specifically, adapting products and approaches to customer culture. This means listening, responding, shepherding, creating new products, and at its most extreme, pivoting:

• PayPal: designed for handheld digital devices -> succeeded as a web payment service
• YouTube: started as a video dating service -> succeeded as a video sharing site
• Flickr: first a multi-player online game -> succeeded as a photo sharing service

I closed my presentation with some tips – all to be taken with the caveat that you can’t take everyone’s advice on board. Some tribes are just headhunters, and maybe you want to steer clear of them.

• Make friends with the locals
• Observe, but don’t overthink
• Respond quickly and in little ways – don’t sit around theorising, just make something and test it
• Be thoughtful about what you're trying to do: consider carefully whether to maintain course, throw things out (including feedback), or shift the original idea
• Be ready to learn from your users 

Image credits: still from Apocalypse Now, American Zoetrope Pictures; anthropologist image from the Smithsonian