The Marketplace and the Theatre of the World
Written by Jose Guevara : Social-Experience design as a new approach for consumer research
Our interaction in places of consumption can be seen as scenes of a unscripted play in which businesses and consumers play different roles. This article explores the benefits of bringing core parts of social sciences to research work in the commercial world in order to add more precise interpretations of these roles.
Heads of the Department of Communication Studies at the university I used to work as a professor called us one day, almost a decade ago. They were thinking of getting rid of undergraduate research training as a requirement for earning a degree in social communication studies. According to some arguments, research was no longer a skill necessary for the commercial world in communication type roles, such as journalist, publisher or advertisers.
A decade has passed and more fields in the commercial world are demanding researchers in social sciences, such as sociologists and anthropologists, for contributing to finding out consumer’s interests. The idea that intellectual and social research has no benefit for businesses does not apply to the current context defined by global challenges and increasing frustration with the economic system. Nowadays more communities are making their voices heard claiming for improving conditions for equality, more responsible use of natural resources and serious compromises by governments and corporations to fight social injustices. Cases that illustrate these claims are Burberry burning stock, Byron Burgers and the immigration entrapment, Dolce & Gabbana and racism in China, and Zara and unpaid workers in Turkey.
In response, many people are putting their statements out through their role as consumers. For a long time avoiding consuming certain products or consuming less has been a tool for conveying disagreement with decisions or postures of businesses and governments in sensitive matters. In this way consumers also make corporations remember that they must not be taken for granted and that the act of purchase products is a lot more complicated than some times we are willing to understand.
Consumption is not an isolated role we play outside of our political views, sexual preferences, physical/mental abilities, gender identities, race backgrounds or class origins. In the practice of walking the malls, navigating e-commerce websites, or deciphering restaurant menus, different parts of our identity come into play making sense of our taste for things. This really makes it extraordinarily hard for businesses to understand purchase decisions and design products that respond to what people need. Additionally, even though many businesses use a methodology that gets them pretty close to designing what people need, it lacks of the resources to create innovative and disruptive products. Often the products imagined are a simple augmentation of existing products (ie more sophisticated eCom websites), or of physical space (ie intelligent stores).
Since the beginning, consumer research methodologies have reduced social sciences methodologies to find people’s interests. In the article Consumer and consumption, published in the early 2000s, Sharon Zukin and Jennifer Smith Maguire, researchers in the sociology of consumption, affirmed that the synthesis made by marketers and designers of anthropologic and sociologic methodologies ended up reducing consumption to the act of purchase. New approaches such as the human-centered and consumer centric methodologies continue this line of seeing consumption as an independent dimension from the rest of people’s lives.
In order to pursue a new model, it is necessary to transit from purchase-based research to social experience research. This means that we should consider putting together businesses and consumers in the same stage, looking at them as actors that interact constantly in an unscripted play. These two actors not only feed each other’s performance but also interact in several scenarios where identities come into play.
Identity is perhaps one of the most complex ideas in social sciences. Although it would be impossible to provide a thorough explanation about this concept in this article, I can point out that identity has been examined from categories such as gender, class, race, also in relation with the capacity to possess and exchange objects, or from people’s taste and lifestyle. Identity also changes depending on the situation and people make use of their affiliations and negotiations in order to find their way through their everyday life obstacles.
In my work looking into people’s identities, I have found that it opens a window to the most meaningful areas of people’s lives. It amuses me how our social life is so strongly and constantly driven by our needs for recognition, status, and gender, national and class values, among others. Looking through the glasses of our identities is definitely a path to the profound depths of ourselves and emotions.
Identities are not individual or completely subjective, they are a set of shared values, interests, and preferences. It can be said that identities function as a connecting force that brings together social groups. This can be visible in global collectives and social movements promoted and created whether it is on social media or in websites designed to connect people around one cause such as Giving Thursday, or Causes.
The integration of social sciences methodologies to the current approaches in user or consumer research follows trends opened by Design Activism and Design for Social Innovation. These initiatives address current social, environmental and economic issues departing from design’s capacities to modify and arrange our world and the way we see it. However, a social-experience design must take further steps into articulating different sources of knowledge and crafts into a methodology suitable for business interests and in benefit of consumers and communities.
A social-experience design could be an opportunity to rethink many of the barriers that cloud creative working roles. It could be a space to propose a union between crafts and thinking, a more interactive environment for co-creation across different media and using different technologies of communication, and the development of social sciences methodologies that break gather knowledge from history, anthropology and sociology, among others. The following posts on social sciences and design will explore more closely these ideas. We are at times in which designing for the future means to shape and recreate the world we live right now. It is the moment to imagine a place in which everyone can benefit from opportunities, taking into account a better understanding of the relationship between nature and society.
