Rapid Prototyping for Social Science Research
Carey Jewitt, Kerstin Leder Mackley, Douglas J. Atkinson, Sara A. Price · 2020
Given social science researchers' increasing interest in materiality and embodied practices, there is considerable potential for productive methodological engagement with design-based research practices.In this chapter, we explore the potential of conducting social science research 'through design' (Lupton, 2018:2, emphasis added).We reflect on a series of workshops investigating the societal implications and impact of digital technologies on the mediation of touch communication.The workshops used the design-based research method of rapid prototyping as a quick and approximate way to engage with ideas of remote digital touch communication that draw the body, touch and materiality into focus.Our emphasis in this chapter is on illustrating the kinds of insights that can be gained through this method, rather than an exhaustive analysis of touch.The chapter first introduces our rationale for using prototyping and our methodology.The second section illustrates the potentials of rapid prototyping as a socially orientated methodological strategy that enabled us, as qualitative researchers, to attend to the body as a meaning making resource, and to materialize ideas, sensory knowing, and wider discourses of personal remote digital touch communication.Drawing on selected episodes from the workshops, we show how this method helped participants to describe, explore or discover aspects of touch communication or stimulate dialogue.This enabled us to ask methodology and content focused questions including: What could we learn about touch through touch during the process of making?How did participants use touch as a form of telling and imagining?What were the social meanings and tensions that emerged around touch and the digital?How were experiential categories employed and made meaningful by participants in the process of making?In the final section of the chapter we reflect on the strengths and limitations of rapid prototyping for social science research, and suggest future developments for its use within social sciences. BACKGROUND AND METHOD Researching remote digital touch communicationExploring the social implications of digital touch technologies is complex as it is an emergent, and to some extent imagined, communicative space.The complexity of researching digital futures raises methodological challenges.We cannot observe emergent technologies in everyday use, yet waiting for technologies to be commercialized and 'domesticated' misses critical opportunities for reflection.Exploring digital futures around touch requires methods that engage with bodies and sensorial experiences.Rapid prototyping explicitly draws the body into ways of knowing, exploring, thinking and being.It can both support and prompt touch and tactile experiences, through participants' bodily interaction with materials and one another, and helps to generate social insights and imaginations of personal remote digital touch communication. A brief introduction to prototypingPrototype, from the Greek Protos (first) and Typos (mold, pattern, impression), refers to a 'raw presentation of ideas' (Rudd et al., 1996: 76).Prototypes are practice and object-orientated, and can range from a sketch to a virtual or physical model at different stages of development from what a design object 'looks like', 'behaves like', to 'works like' (Buchenau and Suri, 2000:424): and in the case of our research, what it 'feels like'.As a method, prototyping has its origins in product development within Engineering, Design, Computer Science, and Human Computer Interaction.Typically, it has been concerned with developing 'an idea about a product, system, service or policy to meet human needs and devising a plan for executing that idea' (Binder et al., 2011).Rapid prototyping emerged, in the 1990s as an approximate way to engage with ideas using basic materials and tools, and became associated with Design Thinking, 'a human-centered design process to problem solving, change or ideageneration' (Lupton, 2018:3).It advocates for 'thinking with your hands' as a way of quickly and practically exploring an idea and the feasibility and development solutions to pre-empt wasting time and money on something that might not work or might not be 'user' centred (Dunne and Raby, 2013) in a quick, cost-effective and contextually aware way.The reorientation of prototyping to high level concepts and ideas, rather than design products and skills, has enabled it to travel across the boundaries of engineering and design into the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology (Salazar et al., 2017), and sociology (Lupton, 2018), although less so in the latter and with different emphasis and foci.As social researchers with an interest in the multimodal and multisensorial qualities of touch, the ways prototyping enables the body to play a central role in generating qualitative data are significant.We saw in rapid prototyping the opportunity to allow participants to externalize unrefined concepts in material ways and, in the process, identify and clarify key aspects of their ideas.As a method which affords 'a degree of ambiguity that fosters the design process instead of blocking it' (Innella and Rodgers, 2017: S1155), prototypes can be reflected on, assessed, and refined, and provide a prop for participants to enact the experience of using proposed artefacts.It also enables people with no prior design experience to share and explore concepts through the process of making, touching, and manipulating materials and objects together.As such, its processes are useful in promoting collaborative thinking and gaining new knowledge about relevant phenomena (Camburn et al., 2017). Rapid prototyping for social researchThe methodological migration of prototyping to social research has partly been fueled by a desire to research 'emerging and uncertain worlds' (Myers and Dumit, 2011; Salazar et al., 2017), notably imagined digital futures, 'configuring future imaginaries that may not be expected to come to pass' (Lupton, 2018:5).This aligns well with researching the unstable, uncertain, future-facing technological devices and environments associated with digital touch.Our use of rapid prototyping places this study within a wider move to innovative and creative social science methods (Jewitt, Xambo and Price, 2017).This movement has spawned a number of 'creative' 3D research methods that similarly take into account embodied meaning-making practices.Lego Serious Play has been developed as a creative process in which participants learn to build representations of their ideas or experiences in Lego.It is seen as a way to share ideas, collaborate, and reflect on their experiences or working practices, thinking and building metaphors in relation to individual identity and experiences.The method offers a quick and easy way for participants to 'assemble a range of meanings' (Gauntlett, 2015: 5).Creative methods are frequently used in focus groups; for example, participants may be asked to construct plasticine models of their identities to solidify the abstract issue of identity, and thus talk openly and in-depth about such issues (Abrahams and Ingram, 2013).Another example is 'Sandboxing', a projective technique that allows 'the expression of thoughts and feelings on a symbolic level' (Mannay, Staples and Edwards, 2017: 347).Adapted from the psychoanalytical approach of the 'world technique', it involves participants creating three-dimensional scenes in sand-trays, employing miniature figures and everyday objects as a form of qualitative social inquiry.The emphasis of these methods is actively 'constructing a 'world' that can provide visual and verbal metaphors that enhance individuals' selfunderstanding' (Mannay, Staples and Edwards, 2017: 348).The choice of materials is a key difference relevant for our study of touch.While rapid prototyping supports a wider range of materials, associations, and embodied experiencesincluding the making of cheap large-scale prototypes that can be sat in, worn and so on -Lego is a commercially manufactured construction toy consisting of interlocking plastic building blocks with strictly built-in, fixed affordances.Plasticine modelling and Sandboxing are similarly limited, particularly in relation to the embodied interactions they afford.In addition, these materials are associated with play and childhood which brings with it a set of limitations.Another key difference is that rapid prototyping is primarily a collaborative group design process to iterate ideas through making, while the focus in these other methods is on the individual -identity-narration and self-reflections, and mainly restricted to 'assembling'. Researching through the bodyConnecting rapid prototyping with a social science frame provides a route to otherwise difficult to articulate bodily experiences, imaginations, and knowledge (Tarr, Gonzalez-Polledo, and Cornish, 2017: 1).We argue for the need to work with and beyond the visual to account for the multimodal and multisensorial qualities, experiences and feedback of tactile and embodied processes of meaning-making.Chadwick (2016:54), however, has noted that, 'While social science interest in embodiment is old news and researchers have been attempting to 'bring the body back in' (Frank, 1990) for the last 30 years, there is still little work which has reflected on the methodological aspects of the 'turn to bodies'.Chadwick's concern is that most methodological strategies that attend to the body continue to be inadequate as they are 'fundamentally based upon talk about the body and bodily experience' (2016: 57).This chapter takes up the challenge of researching through the body.Within science and technology studies (STS).Myers and Dumit's study of lab researchers argues through the use of detailed ethnographic work, that attending to the 'affective sensibilities' acquired by researchers at work in their labs shows 'bodies as excitable tissues for gathering up the energ