Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

This practice-research aims to develop tools to analyze the service situation with multi-stakeholders. For the development or improvement of services, reflecting on the appeal of the design, what serves the user well or not, how the user is using the service is necessary. Typically, this process adopts the experts-oriented methods such as doing by ethnographers. However, thanks to the variety of technological tools (360-degree camera, action camera), which have been increasingly becoming more readily available and affordable, the observation method, especially in terms of gathering and generating visual data, has seen very innovative changes. Visual data can involve many stakeholders, to get their point of view. For this research, we aim to build tools for best suitable for utilizing this new technology in ethnographic research for service design. The investigation subject of this project is the beer-shop where located Iwate, Japan. The shop serves only beers but causing complex customer journey by the environment, it is hard to capture their motion by a single researcher’s eye. Specifically, in the phase of generation of visual data, we use the 360-degree camera in particular. Moreover, during the phase of examining the analysis method, we open dialogue with designers, users, and non-designers of various backgrounds who didn’t visit Iwate through “annotation tools”. In other words, developing a tool for the “team ethnography”. Finally, we compare with it the points of view generated from each participant. Discussing the semantic generation from visual data created by participatory tools.