A Time To Reflect

charukesi September 23rd, 2005

‘Why do mind maps work?‘ from George Johnson of Between Seeing
(link via one of my favorite blogs, the innovation weblog)

They work because the brain operates in circles. A simple way to think about this is to think of millions of bits of information in the brain flowing in circles. When two bits of information intersect an idea is formed. Mind maps facilitate the collection of those bits of information, where as creating linear lists forces the brain to work in a way that is not natural for it and consequently you don’t get all of the information available to you.

Makes perfect sense to me - that is indeed the way everything - processes and tools - we use for thought and communication work - the internet (in its right name the world wide web) is a series of loops of one thought or idea (in the form of a link leading to another). And that is what blog conversations are all about too - picking up one thread and building upon it elsewhere.

This is what I feel about mind maps (and have said so in a comment on this post) - we have been conditioned to think linearly - in lists - whereas the natural way that thought flows is in circles. We all make mind maps every day without realizing it… linear thinking makes ideas unidimensional and restricted whereas “circular thinking” (for want of a better term) opens up new ideas and possibilities.

Yet people hesitate to adopt - or even acknowledge - such thought processes as natural and effective. As Johnson has said in his post, most of us are trained to think ’straight’ and with our left brains. Anything veering dangerously towards the right brain is suppressed, and even suspect (until of course one is universally recognized as a creative - if eccentric - genius!)

• The World of Indsight , - Alternative methods
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charukesi August 10th, 2005

Going through my technorati search, I found my post Anthropology at Intel linked to on this usability site.

And they also had this really cool pic…

(Anthropologist inspecting locals and viceversa - Link via usernomics)

This is what I meant when I responded to a comment on this post yesterday saying that while many companies do this, what makes only some studies significant is their use of local anthropologists and reseaechers in place of Western experts. The overall context of my thesis at the LSE was cross-cultural research and the need for adapting research techniques to suit the immediate socio- cultural framework of the target audience. And I found that the area I had looked at - rural research in India strongly vindicated this need. And my professor - from London - mentioned how he always took a local guide along when he did any research north of Glasgow. Language is just one of the issues - an outsider would take ages to get through even the initial understanding of local customs and culture. You would be surprised how a city-bred researcher Indian researcher can find herself easily out of depth in a village in India - especially if travelling with “city notions”…

***

Another site had linked to this post as well - this is the second time it is happening to me in a week - getting linked to by a site in a well, not just foreign but completely alien language. The first was when my post on the Big B’s bathing - or non bathing habits was linked to by a bollywood site in Netherlands. Atleast here, I did not understand a word of any of the posts but I spotted many familiar names on the site - check it out.

• The World of Indsight , Qualitative Research Trends , - Alternative methods
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charukesi August 9th, 2005

Product design is no longer about scientists sitting in their offices (mostly in the West) to develop products (for the entire world, including the inscrutable East - atleast where technology is concerned) and launching beta versions for testing and refining. Anthropological methods (tweaked to suit commercial needs) being increasingly used by large technology companies are taking design to the end user - observing their everyday interactions with the product and taking out insights that can be quite startling.

Lorenz of antropologi points to this article on Intel’s eforts at user research.

In a bid to eventually sell more chips, Intel plans to announce Monday that it has set up four new offices around the world that are staffed with anthropologists and engineers to help design computers with features for emerging markets.

Traveling from dusty rural villages in India to busy Internet cafés in Brazil, these Intel employees will collect data from weather to the content needs of people in regions where computers are not yet popular.

This effort began with China where Intel sent ethnographers to study how people interact with technologies. And they have plans for India too - Intel is working on a project targeting farming communities in India, where heat and unreliable power supply present challenges for keeping and using a PC. The company expects to launch a PC for this market next year, said Mr. Agatstein.

Here is an interesting observation study on mobile phone usage : Mobile Phone Users: A Small-Scale Observational Study

HP calls this process contextual invention - here is the HP research conducted study by HP in partnership with IMRB and Human Factors International - Contextual Invention: A multi-disciplinary approach to develop business opportunities and design solutions. This approach can be seen as a development of Contextual Design in which social and cultural factors are considered in the deployment of an existing technology. We call this approach Contextual Invention because the aim of the social science research is to inspire and generate new technology inventions with high social and business value. After an initial phase of ethnographic fieldwork looking at media use in India, the project team worked up new business and design proposals in three high-value areas.

• Qualitative Research Trends , Technology , - Alternative methods
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charukesi August 2nd, 2005

I had initiated a small research on my blog a long time ago. On understanding my generation. It was then trigerred by my loss of faith in the “younger generation” after they voted for Smriti Malhotra (of kyunki keta kapoor pays my salary fame) as a potential youth icon on MTV.

Someone recently wrote to me after seeing this post - she is doing her research on the Doordarshan era - to understand how it influenced our social perceptions. Reading her mail, I decided to restart this research again on this blog to see if it gets anywhere.

Here is the idea - partly taken from my earlier post (for which I lost all comments which came in when I transferred my blog to this new url) and edited…

And yes, this is not limited to my generation alone - if you have any interesting thoughts about your growing up years, do share them here…

I have been wading through many Indian blogs…. And came across quite a few Indian bloggers born in the mid-70’s..… What I see as the post-flower, pre-mouse generation…..

I was born in the mid 1970s…. And I am interested in understanding my age cohorts. The concept of age cohorts was highlighted by Rama Bijapurkar a few years ago in discussing cultural changes in India post liberalization. I’ve attempted to loosely explain the concept of age cohort : a group of people (who may be born around the same time frame) who grow up sharing the same social, cultural, political, educational experiences…

The concept of age cohorts is significant because this shared set of experiences determine the values and beliefs they will carry all their life. For instance, the post-war baby boomers in the US.

Coming back to my age cohorts, I am very curious about what experiences we grew up sharing…. That has shaped they way we are today… This idea kept growing when I realized how much my husband and I (who were born in the same year, 1975) had in common even though we grew up in different parts of India. Me in metro, middle-class Madras. And he in small-town AP. There are so many shared experiences we keep exchanging that I wanted to see if others of that time also empathized with this.

So what are these shared experinces?

Internet ? Technology ? : No, I don’t think we grew up with technology. We approached it as grown ups. (I do not consider a job with an IT company and being able to send e-mail as being “tech”). I am talking about being born internet-savvy, the way kids are today……

Communication ? : We saw the STD booth boom in the country….. is that significant ?
Or is it mobile technology ? Are we the typical sms generation ?

Liberalization ?: Certainly, we witnessed the birth of McD and the re-birth of Coke in India…. Reebok and Ford….. Is this significant ?

The Y2K demand ?

Coalition Governments ? Our youth witnessed the end of single majority parties and the birth of coalition politics….. the shape of things to come and stay…..

Private TV channels ? MTV ? The Bold and the Beautiful ? Quick Gun Murugan ? Cyrus Broacha ? Or is it Giant Robot ?

And where does Doordarshan fit in all this?

The end of Angry Amitabh and the entry of sugary Shah Rukh ?

Or is it a combination of all these ?

I thought it might be fun to share ‘growing up’ with others who grew up elsewhere in the country at the same time……… I do not want to get into a stricter definition of age limits… is too traumatic for me

The idea being :

1. to understand the events, ideas, values that have shaped my generation (mid-70’s born, the over-20, 30 ish)

2. to experiment with the possibility of blogs as a tool for primary research….. blogs as a tool for expression, blogs as a tool for lobbying….. and now this?

Personally, I would consider this data more credible because participation is voluntary and not coerced or coaxed as in case of conventional research…

This is going to be a sticky post for some time. Do leave your thoughts and spread the word around - hoping to see something interesting come out of this…

• Indiawatch , - Alternative methods
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charukesi September 17th, 2004

Thinking more on netnography…. adapting ethnographic research techniques to the study of cultures and communities constructed through the Internet

A community like ryze is reaching saturation point India-wise….

- Why are Indians such avid ryzers?
- What kind of people do we network with? And why?

And some questions Edward of livinginindia (or elsewhere on the planet) always has…

- Why are there so many bloggers from Madras ?
- And what do they write about?

- And from this, can we say what Madras is like - about the kind of people who live there or are
from there - bloggers over the world with Madras ‘roots’
- Why not so many from Bangalore? (after all, Bangalore is geek city)
- What about Delhi bloggers?

- What about shopping behaviour on the net - how do different ethnic communities behave?
- And what implications does this have for the marketer? Advertiser? Both offline and online

- Ethnography on internal communication (intranet usage and behaviour) within an organisation
for more efective knowledge management and better work practices

Using ethnography to study online behaviour patterns of communities and using this to construct theories about offline culture. A step closer to understanding those we interact with only online… Visit cybersoc for some interesting studies….

I find the possibilities endless…..

And fascinating… (My mind googles at the possibilities. Did I say googles? I meant boggles)

• Qualitative Research Trends , - Alternative methods
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charukesi September 15th, 2004

Not a typo, this. Check out a netnographic investigation of online communities here.

(Link through antropologi.info)

“Netnography,” coined from ‘ethnography on the Internet,’ is an emerging qualitative research methodology adapting ethnographic research techniques to the study of cultures and communities constructed through the Internet.

There are links to Robert Kozinets’ site with netnography and much more .

• Qualitative Research Trends , - Alternative methods
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charukesi February 6th, 2004

About my post you want values?, I must say that people have missed the point entirely…….

The holler was not about observing (or not observing in this case) a holiday or remembering (or not) a specific date. Nor was my intention to compare Amitabh Bacchan with Mohandas Gandhi.

(Gandhi) He was as much of an icon as Anil Ambani or Amitabh Bachchan. Its only that, the youngsters do not relate to his principles anymore, says Divya…. and that is precisely my point…. That values are changing…. The kind of things people (I don’t not use the much abused word, youth here) relate to and want are drastically different…. And it reflects in everything they do…..

Geert Hofstede, a social psychologist / behavioural scientist in 1991 came up with this explanation of culture. In his view, ‘culture’ is like an onion: a system that can be peeled, layer by layer, in order to reveal the content. Imagine the whole onion as ‘culture’ and as you peel on, you see different levels which work on and influence culture (in any particular society).

At the core of his onion are ‘values’, in other words, how people believe things ‘ought to be’, what they hold dear to them. This level is invisible and is manifested through the three other layers : symbols, rituals and icons.

- symbols : words, artefacts, pictures that carry a special meaning
- rituals : such as festivals, ways of paying respect, ‘hanging out’ trends
- icons : persons admired by the society as a whole

And every generation, every society sees changes in the other three layers mentioned above. And students of social psychology (naively, according to some) believe that Hofstede was right and that values are indeed changing, going by the changes in outward manifestations…..

• - Armchair Analysis , - Alternative methods
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