Comments on: Lies: a source of design inspiration

By: Qin Han

Qin Han — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:58:12 +0000

definitely, I mean especially in field like art and design, where thing are interpretive and you never have a ‘right’ answer for many things. The notion of ‘multiplicity of answers’ is an interesting one to understand performances. I mean a student test is not that far away from a user test, because the teacher is trying to figure out what they can do to support student develop the capacity they need. And teachers don’t know what to do till they have some test running – not to judge right or wrong, but to find out what’s missing.

By: Sam Ladner

Sam Ladner — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 13:23:50 +0000

Very interesting analogy, Qin. I hadn’t thought about it that way. You seem to be saying normativity affects all sorts of performances, even academic ones! Interesting.

By: Qin Han

Qin Han — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:37:49 +0000

Interesting observation Sam, actually I realised that we get a lot of that gray area between lie and truth in teaching (I on a teaching fellow on a post-graduate course for years) and it’s not the student would lie to pass exams, it is that they are trying to meet the expectation of their teacher or even their peers. It is interesting to see people trying to answer a question, in very interpretive terms, trying to hit the ‘jackpot’. Sometimes, people ‘lie’ to present the ‘truth’ in a way that they believe is proper to others.

Qin

By: Sam Ladner

Sam Ladner — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:19:58 +0000

Hi Dave, I guess I’m trying to say that worrying about “lies” is that that the word itself is pejorative. If someone is “lying,” then we are likely to infer a malicious motivation, or maybe a kind of weakness. But if we simply notice a difference between what actually is and what they perceive, we see something entirely different. We are seeing that the world is not a fixed place, that we are not always the correct judgers of a situation, that reality itself is unstable. When you say, “Reality is unstable,” the notion of “lying” is completely irrelevant.

And, if you assume that reality is unstable, you are never to be fooled again by assuming you have the “right” answer. There are only a multiplicity of answers.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:55:29 +0000

You are saying here that there is a truth, she doesn’t clean her stove. The truth is what let you identify the lie, “i clean it weekly”. “Hey, that’s not true. That is a dirty stove, she is lying right now” – and hence leads you to a very interesting piece of design inspiration.

I think you have taken a great point, “Everyone lies at times. Those lies can be fantastic sources of design inspiration” and went way off track with this odd “But if you assume that the truth is something we create, in tandem with our participants, authenticity or truthfulness become irrelevant concepts” statement that you destroy with your own examples. Not sure what saying that buys you, other than making sure we all know you aren’t judging people for lying or something…

By: Sam Ladner

Sam Ladner — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:25:02 +0000

You’re absolutely right, Hank. That is the whole reason for field work! One of these days, I’ll collect every lie I’ve been told in the field, and make a big lie canvas, just to show people what they could potentially miss.

By: Hank Delcore

Hank Delcore — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:12:05 +0000

Sam, thanks for the thoughts. Your observations about how we are sometimes very canny about what we are studying hit home. In the past, I’ve given more general explanations of the goals of a study but avoided specifics with participants, not out of epistemological naivete (I agree that we create truth with our participants), but because I don’t want the rote or the common sense to creep into the picture. Coming at it obliquely does help sometimes. But thinking about your call to look at lies – this reminds me of the old lesson, “what people say they do and what they do are often different.” This is one of the main reasons for fieldwork in the first place – to get away from reportage of behavior, which – if the goal is to understand behavior – is so notoriously flawed. Recently talking to a potential client, she said that in her own preliminary investigations, she had found that what the participants said and what they did were different, and my assistant, a former anthro student of mine, said, “That right there is the whole reason for anthropology” – meaning ethnography, I think, but this could be extended to any field-based methodology that requires close up engagement with people. Thanks for this and for kicking off that great thread of discussion on anthrodesign.

By: Sam Ladner

Sam Ladner — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:14:08 +0000

What happens, indeed! There are many choices for the researcher. I often choose to confront the participant with the lie, though this must be done quite carefully. Such as, “That’s interesting that you said the stove is cleaned once a week. Is this a week’s worth of grit?” Oftentimes they do not realize they are lying. They may say things like, “That’s interesting, I never thought about that.” I find this particularly fruitful because it opens a whole line of other kinds of questioning, such as, “Well if you couldn’t clean the stove last week, what got in the way? Would you say it is realistic, then, to clean a stove once a week?”

Sometimes you don’t have time to confront the lie, or maybe the situation is not right, or you simply can’t get the courage to do so. You can reflect on the lie and note the difference between real behaviour and “should” behaviour, and perhaps draw conclusions about that.

By: Leanne Labelle

Leanne Labelle — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:09:36 +0000

I’m very interested in this idea of digging beyond the lie to expose deeper meaning and am wondering how you propose exposing that deeper meaning. In your example of the stove – you need to know that the woman’s stove has actually not been cleaned. Deeper understanding required knowing the truth – being aware of the lie. What happens in an instance when you know a participant is responding based on “should behaviour” and not fact?

@leannelabelle