Gather Ethnographic Research The first phase of this

By admin on November 11th, 2007

Gather Ethnographic Research

The first phase of this project consisted of gathering ethnographic research from 3 families
in the greater Chicago area. The families were middle and upper-middle class with 3 or more
members in their family. Each family were in different phases in the kitchen redesign from
planning, executing, finishing, to finished. Each family was given 3 disposable cameras to
take at home and outside whenever they were making a kitchen redesign decision. They were
also given instruction sheets to help guide them in their picture taking. (See Appendix Fig. 1)
After they had finished taking the pictures, a team was sent to the family s home to interview
them using the photographs as prompts. Three experts, an architect, a designer, and new
construction manager were also interviewed to gather an expert perspective. All data was
entered into the field books. (See Appendix Fig. 3) All interviews were also videotaped for
later perusal.
Analyze Through User Insights Tool
After careful gathering of the data from the interviews and video tapes, the data was entered
into the User Insight Tool (UITool). (See Appendix Fig. 2) The UITool was structured in excel
around frameworks that corresponded to the field books. Using the UITool each entry in
the field book has a comprehensive set of data. This is useful when later looking at the tool at
different levels of granularity. Patterns unnoticeable at an entry level are seen when looking at
several entries together.
Synthesize Through Insight Matrix
Several passes through the UITool output a comprehensive list of insights for a total of 68
user insights and 87 expert insights which were scored separately. A range of 0-2 was used to
score the data in the insight matrix. Several clusters were found for both groups which led to
design criteria and framing solutions.

Family Selection Requirements
A rich set of data was gathered from the three families since they were all in different phases
of their kitchen redesign process. After recruiting and selecting the families on this criteria,
we found one family in the pre-redesign process. Another family had already done one
redesign on a previous home and was in the middle of a second redesign. The last family was
almost complete with their redesign.