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Only one of us went through graduate training with a non-academic career in mind. And for most of the senior researchers we know in industry, that accidental non-path seems reasonably common. A half a generation ago, there were few mentors, organizations, or communities that could have served as an inspiration to look outside of the academic track (leaving public and museum work aside). For our purposes, the careers we have each led are nicely emblematic, if not entirely representative, of the experience of many researchers involved in the emergence of this work.

While Robinson was in the midst of a post-doctoral fellowship, a major advisor (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, himself an immigrant from Hungary in the 1950s) introduced Robinson to Jay Doblin, the former head of the Institute of Design in Chicago who, with strategist Larry Keeley, ran a small design planning consultancy known at the time as Jay Doblin Associates. The expertise which Doblin was looking for was explicitly methodological; what we later came to call

‘figuring out how to figure things out’. Beyond the fundamental intrigue of methodology, the aspect of the work that was the most surprising, most engaging, was the practical aspect of it. The developmental disciplines (design, engineering, strategy) at Doblin were able to open up their work practices to engage with the research work, and this became an opportunity for a related, almost mirrored, need on the part of a researcher to pull apart the reasoning, the assumptions, and the processes, which had become second nature in order to make research and theory a practical and useful thing in a setting where that value was not assumed.

The point was to foster a dialogue between the researcher and the designer, and

the goal in that interaction was to make research useful to design and to create for design a place from which it could reflect on its work. At that time, being a researcher in that context meant demonstrating a real difference to both process and outcome – to make the work of other professionals go better and to influence, through design and engineering colleagues, the making of very real things.

Robinson’s first major project at Doblin provided an opportunity to work with anthropologists Lucy Suchman and Jeannette Blomberg and their colleagues in the Work Practices & Technology group at Xerox PARC. The idea that the folks at PARC were prodigiously credentialed in their various academic domains, active in professional societies, and yet worked for a copier company was something more than simply eye-opening. That they existed and that the group was well-known and respected was a kind of validation, like finding other immigrants from home thriving in the new country. But more important was that their work, the breadth and catholicity of their methodologies, the intense collegiality of their practice, made a developmental space available, opened up the idea that new collaborations, different practices, and new applications were possible: a much different way of looking at an alternative career than simply seeing it as a slot in an organization that you perhaps didn’t know existed. This was something that could be built, and a trajectory opened up beyond one project, one problem.

With the PARC group very much in mind, Robinson, John Cain, and Mary Beth McCarthy left Doblin to form E-Lab, a multidisciplinary group with the explicit goal of delivering research that could be a basis for design. The emphasis was on developing the forms of research that could be relevant to many client audiences. E-Lab didn’t have the kind of productization that market research had, didn’t go as far toward realization as the product development con-sultancies, and didn’t have an MBA credentialed ‘strategy’ practice. Indeed, it was a struggle to find the language to describe what it was we were doing to prospective clients. Design effectively became the means to making the research useful. It was nice (and necessary) to have clients who ‘got it’, but without providing those clients ways to talk with their own colleagues, superiors, and funders, expanding the range of opportunities we had to work with was akin to making converts, one at a time.

With its concurrent emergence of important technologies and it’s intense, post-recession entrepreneurialism, the early 1990s offered a unique opportu-nity for the design field to enhance its role and expand its offer. Firms such as IDEO, Fitch, and Design Continuum had, earlier in the decade, merged multiple disciplines, particularly engineering and industrial design, and begun to change the way that business thought about the place and value of design. Around the same time, in major research labs like Xerox PARC, Microsoft Research, and Bell Labs, technologists had been working with communications designers, usability

and human factors engineers, and, especially at PARC, social scientists had started to use the tools of anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and psychology to describe how people thought machines worked, to understand the interactions between people and technology, and the reciprocal impact of organizations, practices, and technologies on one another. In the business world at large, there was something of a buzz about this kind of hybrid (the ‘newness’ of it, though, is debatable: Suchman 2000), and there were new channels for that buzz – publications like Fast Company, Wired, Business 2.0.

Outside of the corporate labs, doing research for hire meant finding a way to describe what kinds of benefits a company might garner from what was then an unfamiliar approach and then to put a price tag on it, which often meant to argue for relative worth in a zero-sum budgeting process. Much of the writing and speaking we did in design and management venues (see Robinson 1994a, 1994b, 1997, 2000; Robinson and Nims 1996; Cain 1998) was in part a kind of marketing. The talks and papers were attempts to find common cause between market researchers, product managers, designers, engineers, and the small outposts of social and human scientists working (together) in industry. The language we were trying to find mattered inside E-Lab as well. Descriptions of the work had to make sense to all of the disciplines. It was important that both researchers and designers feel that the ‘we’ of the company was an inclusive ‘we’

rather than a one-sided one. The language of ‘valuable’ work, defined largely by distinctive methodologies and successful product outcomes, started when the field (and the company) was very young.

Shortly after Bezaitis joined, E-Lab came to focus on a synthetic moment – the development of ‘a framework’ – as the target for the fieldwork and the cen-tral output of projects. It was the explicit move to focus our discussions and value claims on the idea of frameworks – which we characterized as ‘useful representa-tions of how experience is framed for the user’ – which differentiated E-Lab’s value in the market and the space in which the practice grew. The term ‘frame-works’ was a placeholder for the notion of distinct and specific analytic organiza-tions (‘frameworks’ evolved to become ‘experience models’ in the course of E-lab’s acquisition by Sapient in 1999) that linked data to questions. How those analytic organizations took their various and particular shapes was a function of the collaborations and multidisciplinary perspectives that sustained the work right across the range of projects.

Hallmark as a case-in-point

In one of Robinson’s notebooks, dated 11/94 – 1/95, are notes on the first project that E-Lab did for Hallmark Cards. We had spent hundreds of hours in Hallmark stores – pilots of a new format – during one of their busiest seasons, and were now spending more hundreds of hours watching those tapes again, trying to

figure out what was valuable to know, what was germane to the questions our cli-ents were asking. They aren’t field notes (which were kept in logged notebooks linked to the raw data), but rather a sort of laundry list of issues that might or might not have been important: “lighting”, it says, and “vis. noise, blockage, interest, orient/nav.” And in the midst of the list, “a theory of navigation and vis. orient is here somewhere.” The note would have been more accurate if it had said, “Is out there already.” We were working on overlaying behaviors on to floor plans, trying to winnow the general from the specific, and the flat maps were stubbornly remaining two dimensional no matter how many arrows or colors we arranged over them. At the same time, co-founder John Cain was teaching a course in ‘inter-active media’ at the Institute of Design, and using – as an approach to the issue of

‘navigation’ – architect Kevin Lynch’s classic The Image of the City (1970). Sitting in our crowded technology/work room, John suggested that how Lynch’s book framed orientation in the city might work for how shoppers saw the Hallmark stores, too. Lynch had looked at how people find their way around cities, both familiar and not, and had reclassed features of the urban landscape into a short set based on how people used them: paths, edges, nodes, districts, and land-marks (imagine the role of the lake in Chicago or of Central Park in New York City). 

Many in this field like to speak of ‘insights’, a term we find both empty and imprecise (Robinson 2009). Psychologist Howard Gardner and his colleague Joseph Walters, in their developmental studies of genius, creativity, and forms of giftedness, speak more specifically and usefully of ‘crystallizing’ moments:

observations, ideas, connections, which are not complete in themselves, but which catalyze a well and richly prepared ground into a completely different way of seeing the world (Walters and Gardner 1988). The Lynch analogy was one of those – the final form of the idea didn’t flash, complete and pure, into the room. Rather, the concept needed to be worked against the data. We had to figure out a way to represent it, and we had to reframe the angle from which we saw the data – not shifting it in our heads onto two dimensional maps, but seeing the three dimensional topography as a visitor might have seen it. It worked brilliantly, but it was work, not a flash of insight. That merging of disciplines, the value of that move from rich, high-quality data to a simpler but more useful representation of how experience is organized for the user became one of the central tenets of E-Lab’s work and practice. 

In the growing field of design research, that particular philosopher’s stone eventually converted ‘ethnography’ and ‘design research’ to shorthand terms for a larger process. In much of the business discourse, the assumption driven by this terminology, and by many of the claims of design and research consultancies, was that field methodology defined the practice and value of ethnography. Even within our group, there were heated disagreements about the priority of tech-nique versus theory or analysis or synthesis. And in retrospect, we see that our communications in every press contact, every pitch, conceded this ground.

As the use of terminology like ‘user-centered research’ became widespread, so the meaning of ‘ethnography’ became both broader and looser. The market- facing vocabulary of product development and marketing linked the growth of many different practices and intentions to a single measure: the success of the product at the end of the process, linking research with design in the case study format. The case study is perhaps the staple format of business education and development, the lingua franca for communicating the general or the applicable from the specific and the protected. The case study tied work to a narrative of how the thing made became better or more valuable after the application of a research or design or innovation process. It demystified the role of research in development, providing a way to connect the before to the after. It implicitly made the product the thing which was moving ahead, changing, getting better.

But in doing that, the arcs of research came to tiny ends with each project finish rather than building and accumulating across instances, clients, and careers.

In much applied ethnographic work of the past decade or so, that difference has ossified somewhat; it has become embedded in the general discourse of the field, allowing the term ‘methodology’ to be widely used as a shorthand description for an enterprise’s larger research approach, and much more insidiously, allowing discussion to skate over the surface of an organization’s intentions, politics, and values. What conversation there is about the value of work like this came to be couched in production-like terminology; outcomes, findings, ‘insights’ as products, winding their way through a complex process, to which particular disciplines ‘add value’ through understanding, innovation, or skill. As hybrid work moved out of research labs and ‘advanced concepts’ groups and into product development organizations, the direct dialogues between researcher and designer became process interactions between research and design functions, with all of the politics, tradeoffs, and – to be fair – advantages which that entailed. The ideal that motivated the relationship between researcher and designer in the Doblin context, at PARC, and many others gave way to a different set of organizational and corporate values, processes and mandates, which complicated the initial motivation to create a basis for reflection and to make better products for people. Not necessarily a bad thing, but one which requires more attention than we, as a field, have given it.