Hi, I’m Noura Howell, and today I’d like to talk with you about Cracks in the Success Narrative: Rethinking Failure in Design Research through a Retrospective Trioethnography.
This is a collaboration with Audrey Desjardins and Sarah Fox.
This work has been published in the journal TOCHI, and we are grateful for the opportunity to present it here at CHI.
What can design researchers learn from our own and each other’s failures?
We explore “failure” expansively
— turning away from tidy success narratives toward messy unfoldings and reflexive discomfort—
through the method retrospective trioethnography.
Our findings reflect on failures we identified in six past design research projects:
issues of relational labor of deployment, mismatched designer/participant imaginaries, burden of participation, and invisibility of researcher labor.
Our discussion contributes to broader reflections on shifting design research practice:
methodological considerations inviting others to engage failures through retrospective trioethnography,
letting go as a mode of research care,
possibilities for more candid research reporting, and
how centering failure may contribute to design justice by providing a technique for attending to harm and healing in design research practices.
Throughout, we call for challenging success narratives in design research, and underscore the need for systemic changes in design research practice.
We conducted a retrospective trioethnography to investigate failures in design research, using our own design research projects as sites for critical reflection.
Trioethnography, like other first-person research methods such as autoethnography and autobiographical design, positions the researchers as research participants, allowing their first-hand experiences to become the starting point for new learnings.
In these methods, the emphasis is on the dialogical relationship between the lived experiences of the researchers.
By juxtaposing multiple voices, the researchers can reflect on the similarities and differences between their experiences.
The process allowed us to share and learn from these vulnerable, uncomfortable experiences that were glossed over in publications or other project documentation.
Typical of retrospective trioethnography, we juxtaposed our experiences highlighting difference and polyvocality rather than seeking thematic unity.
Our reflections drew from a range of prior projects, which had already yield “successful” publications.
Our reflections on our own difficulties and failings in no way implicate our co-authors on prior publications, nor do they detract from the success stories of these prior projects.
Rather, we are interested in telling richer stories about design research, including learning from failure in its many forms.
Our findings expand considerations of failure beyond the design artifact itself,
and beyond typical notions of iterative improvement on the artifact or interaction,
to include broader considerations of surrounding lifeworlds.
For the sake of time, in this talk we focus on mismatched designer/participant imaginaries in design research, and the burden of participation.
Deploying design research artifacts, we encountered difficulties navigating mismatches in imaginaries
between researchers’ intentions and participants’ ideas of technology or design.
Researcher and participant understandings were sometimes mismatched.
For instance, Howell designed Ripple to challenge the authority of data,
but participants brought an expectation that this data display would yield “truthful” insight.
In another example, while Desjardins sought to explore beyond utilitarian home IoT in co-speculating with participants, participants frequently offered utilitarian design ideas.
As design researchers, we are often pushing against common narratives of technology, such as data as clear, clean and perfect, IoT serving functional goals, or design as human-centered design.
We are often exploring alternatives, and this intention can be mismatched with the normalized imaginaries often presented to the public.
This mismatch between common narratives around technology and design in the popular imagination
and a desire to critique these narratives creates a challenging space within which to work,
with a high potential for failure.
When recruiting participants for a study with new technologies, the common assumption
is one where research is positioned at the forefront of innovation and technological prowess.
Participants may come in with the mindset of pushing technology forward (whatever “forward” means),
while our goal as design researchers is so often to stop, reflect, critique, and explore alternatives
that do not go “forward” (and may, in fact, mean moving sideways, backwards, or not at all).
We also found varied instances of the burden of participation in design research.
For example, Howell encountered moments when participants wrestled with insecurities in response to her design.
In another example, a participant did not want to break her “promise” to “help” Desjardins with a project even though this participant felt stressed through participating.
This often felt like a failure on our end in seeking ongoing, active consent, explaining how research works,
and conveying the broader goals for research.
These examples raise different issues of unexpected worries triggered by a design,
proactive consent or opting out, and participant altruism.
The vignettes in our paper reflect on how participation, as commonly done in HCI research, is in some sense broken.
Moving right along for this talk
Our discussion contributes to broader reflections on shifting design research practice.
and here we'll focus on possibilities for more candid research reporting.
We began this project motivated to challenge success narratives and tell richer stories of design research.
We found that tidy success narratives of prior publications had glossed over important issues in our own work,
pointing to opportunities for more honest reporting in design research.
Our project surfaced issues of labor, attribution, and credit,
underscoring calls within the design research community to move away from the narrative of the “heroic designer” toward more modest and relational accounts.
All projects have shortcomings.
Normalizing this and more openly reporting on the ways we respond to and move forward from misalignments or missteps
is offered here as one partial way forward in formulating more responsive and responsible design research methods and reporting.
Retrospective trioethnography gave us the space to confront ways in which we contribute to systems of power within and through our work.
In grappling with our own feelings of disquiet and frustration collectively,
we also began to envision research done differently or how we might take forward the lessons learned.
In a project challenging success narratives, we would be remiss not to explicitly acknowledge limitations and failures of this work itself.
We have largely imagined alternative tactics that may be taken up by an individual researcher or research group.
This is problematic because such individual tactics, and even the ability to reflect on failures as we have done,
may not be practicable for many. Learning from failure requires time, effort, emotional capacity,
and the privilege to survive potential stigma surrounding failure.
Early career scholars needing to progress to degree completion or tenure on a fixed timeline
or scholars facing extra career pressure due to axes of social marginalization
may legitimately feel a need to hold to success narratives as they navigate an already challenging and discriminatory academic culture.
Furthermore, individual tactics, even if adopted by many, are still insufficient to challenge systemic issues in design research practice.
Greater attention and willingness to make structural shifts to address systemic issues is needed among the design research community writ large.
For more information, we invite you to read the paper.
Thank you.