People-centred mindset

The following section presents key concepts that were developed and proposed in the PEOPLE project and relate to nurturing the people-centred mindset affecting all key actors, i.e. students, university teachers & researchers together with industry professionals and other relevant external stakeholders.

Discovering the "unknown unknowns"

People-centred development differs from linear problem-solving techniques. In contrast to being stable, defined, and methodologically well framed it can feel more like an adventure into unknown territories – discovering the “unknown unknowns” – and each project has its own contours and character. Very frequently it is about uncertainty, anxiety, contingency; involving even improvisation and relying on intuition. It is about being confident and trusting the process and methodology together with its leaps and iterations, even if it feels uncomfortable and hectic.

Image 1: Discovering the unknown unknowns

As demonstrated in Image 1, the people-centred development approach aims to dig into the unknown areas which are hidden and not illuminated through conventional problem-solving approaches. It is often about researching, discovering and chasing possibilities, imagining and sensing the unknown – discovering the possibilities and potential solutions that have not yet been totally figured out together with the people we serve. The confidence drives the people-centred developers to prototype and make things, testing them out, getting them wrong, and to keep on working and innovating along the way. Not using and implementing people-centred development produces costs of missing something which is still hiding beyond the surface.

Creating with the people – and not for the people – we serve

The people-centred approach is designed to encourage direct involvement of people as co-creators of possibilities and solutions. It allows people-centred developers to engage, learn from and co-create directly with people (as potential end-users). Not only that they spend a great deal of time not knowing the answer to the problem or challenge at hand; they also spend a great deal of time researching the actual problem – discovering the unmet needs and trying to open up a breadth of creative possibilities and opportunities together with the people.

People-centred developers are experimenters and learners, they empathize and iterate, and they look for inspiration in unexpected places. They believe that a variety of solutions is out there and can be reached focusing on the people they are serving for. People-centred developers iterate because this allows them to keep learning. Instead of hiding out in design workshops, betting that an idea, product, or service will be a hit, they quickly get out in the field and let the people they are developing for be their guides. 

Emic perspective

People-centred development differs from conventional problem-solving techniques in which subject matter experts try to predict the future (often based on their false assumptions) and furthermore aim to solve the imaginary problems from their expert perspectives – wearing their “expert hats”.  The key difference compared to conventional problem-solving techniques is that people-centred development firstly tries to understand challenges from the perspective of subjects (i.e. humans) – from the emic perspective.

Etic: from the perspective of observer. An 'etic' account is a description of a behaviour or belief by an analyst or expert observer.

Emic: from the perspective of subject. An 'emic' account is a description of behaviour or a belief in terms meaningful (consciously or unconsciously) to the actor; that is, an emic account comes from a person within the culture.

People-centred developers try to see and experience things through the eyes of people; they aim to acquire deep insights and unique perspectives through stepping into the shoes of people they serve. Emphatic capacity drives the people-centred development considering people as its roadmap to innovative solutions. Immersing in another world not only opens up new creative possibilities, but it allows to leave behind the assumptions, preconceived ideas and outmoded ways of thinking. Empathizing with the people is the best route to truly grasp the context and complexities of their lives – and it keeps people in the centre of the development process.

Ethnography

Ethnography is perceived as a “trademark” methodology of anthropology, used in multiple field-sites and responding to diverse questions and challenges. Ethnography could be defined as minimally: ‘iterative-inductive research (that evolves in design through the study), drawing on a family of methods (such as semi-structured interviews, participant observation, focus groups, fieldwork, shadowing), involving direct and sustained contact with human agents, within the context of their daily lives, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions, and producing a richly written account that respects the irreducibility of human experience, that acknowledges the role of theory as well as the researcher’s own role and that views humans as part object/part subject’.

Transferred to non-academic settings, ethnography proved to be highly valuable, but was often also perceived as time- and resource-consuming, or non-generalizable due to its focus on individuals and small groups. PEOPLE has experimented with alternative routes to understanding. The so called short-term or rapid, but still theoretically informed ethnography is emerging as an approach to doing research that is contemporary in both its subject matter and in its use for applied research projects designed to lead to informed interventions in the world. It is a type of ethnographic research adapted to non-academic, corporate settings’ time constraints. Short-term ethnography is characterized by forms of intensity that lead to deep and valid ways of knowing. They employ participatory and collaborative (rather than observational and distanced) ethnography. It involves intensive excursions into peoples’ lives, which use more interventional as well as observational methods to create contexts through which to delve into questions that will reveal what matters to those people in the frame of what the researcher is seeking to find out.

Through these collaborations with project internal and external participants, the intensity of the research encounter becomes part of the way that we learn and empathize. To illustrate, spending up to four or so hours with one person in a context where one is focused on trying to understand or imagine their embodied practices, sensations or emotions, asking them questions about this and reflecting on one’s own affective responses, is an exhausting experience. Both, the researcher and the informant begin to feel overwhelmed by the depth and intensity of our respective research encounters. We journey into what is important to the participants and learn about elements of their everyday work lives that they normally do not talk with anyone about. Overall, the research is designed to enable ethnographers to ‘share’ or better understand other peoples’/stakeholders’ experiences, and to generate closer and empathetic understandings of these experiences in contexts of further analysis, interpretation and dissemination.

It is very important to note that the (short-term) ethnography as proposed and conducted in the PEOPLE project is not disassociated from its academic roots in anthropology. It draws from contemporary renderings of anthropological ethnography, originating in the late twentieth century reflexive turn of the ‘‘writing culture’’ debate and its legacy the idea anthropological ethnography involves doing research with rather than about participants. The fact that people-centred development is grounded in ethnography and in constant dialogue with the anthropological theory makes the approach unique and distinct from other approaches, such as user-centred design and design thinking. The PEOPLE approach goes beyond perceiving people solely from a design and business consulting perspective and makes a crucial step from “users”/”customers”/”clients” to the “actual”/“real people”.

We aim to emphasize a clear distinction, i.e. moving from a simple, linear and customer-oriented design process to a theoretically informed and data-driven approach involving ethical considerations and understanding bigger contexts of emerging futures and world’s challenges. Anthropology students are educated in theoretical disciplines and spend several years learning how to observe people. Therefore, the key added value of people-centred development lies in its field work and data interpretation involving real people as co-creators from the very beginning. The breakthrough switch – which also requires change in the mindset – is that products, services and solutions are not only made FOR the people but are developed WITH the people that we – as people-centred developers – are willing to serve.

From "Big Data" to "Thick Data"

People-centred developers are looking at emerging human dynamics that have not been discovered and understood yet. Thick data is brought to light using qualitative, ethnographic research methods that uncover people’s emotions, meanings, behaviours, stories and models of their world. Relying solely on big and quantitative data increases the chances that we will miss something, while giving us the illusion we know everything. “People are getting caught up on the quantity side of the equation rather than the quality of the business insights that analytics can unearth. More numbers do not necessarily produce more insights”. 'On the other hand, integrating big data and thick data provides organizations a more complete context of any given situation. To form a complete picture, people-centred developers need both big and thick data because each of them produce different types of insights at varying scales and depths.

In her inspiring paper “Why Big Data Needs Thick Data”, Tricia Wang concisely explains the importance of thick data and difference between both types – stating that thick data can rescue big data from the context-loss that comes with the process of making it usable. Thick data requires smaller samples to see human-centred patterns in depth. Thick Data reveals the social context of connections between data points while big data reveals insights with a particular range of quantified data points. Thick data techniques accept irreducible complexity, while big data techniques isolate variables to identify patterns. Thick data loses scale while big data loses resolution (see Table 1).

BIG DATA	THICK DATA
What, where, when, (how)	Why, (how)
Analytics, social media posts, GPS positioning	Ethnography and other people-centred approaches (participant observation, interviews, focus groups, experiments)
Large number of participants	Few people
Collected and analysed by machines	Collected and interpreted by people
Broad	In-depth
People are (often) not aware of data being collected	People are highly aware of data being collected
Analysis uses statistical methods	Analysis includes developing codes, summaries, and themes

Thick data is the best method for mapping an unknown territory. When organizations want to dig into an unknown territory, they need thick data because it gives something that big data explicitly does not – inspiration. The act of collecting and analysing thick data through ethnography produces deep insights. 

While using big data in isolation can be problematic, it is definitely critical to continue exploring how big data and thick data can complement each other. This is a great opportunity for qualitative researchers to position our work in the context of big data’s quantitative results.

Desirable, viable and feasible ... and sustainable

People-centred development is uniquely situated to arrive at solutions that are meaningful, reliable, useful, desirable, feasible, viable, ethical and sustainable. By starting with people - their values, motivation, hopes, fears, and needs – the process aims to uncover what is most desirable. However, this presents only one lens through which people-centred development looks at future solutions. Once a range of different possibilities are researched with the actual people and communities, the co-creation focuses also on what is technically feasible to be actually implemented and how these solutions could be financially viable. It is a balancing act, but one that is absolutely crucial to designing and developing solutions that are reliable, successful and sustainable.

In addition to the beforementioned 3 pillars, the people-centred development projects map onto the United Nations sustainable development goals. PEOPLE considers the Sustainable Development Goals as the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. Goals address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate, environmental degradation, prosperity, and peace and justice.

 

Conveying ideas

One of the key steps of the people-centred development approach is to test and refine the ideas together with people as potential future users of solutions. To keep the thinking, design and development sharp enough, the ideas should be made tangible. Pure abstractions are neither useful or precise enough to properly convey the ideas and to learn how to improve them. And because people-centred developers very rarely succeed the first time, they need to share what has been developed, and iterate based on the feedback they receive.

Therefore, people-centred developers are also makers, crafters and builders. They use different tools and methods to properly convey their ideas; from cardboards, art constellations, campaigns, videos, performance to physical prototypes and sophisticated digital tools. In the process of actually making something, the developers frequently discover opportunities and complexities that had never been thought about before. People-centred developers are action oriented so their ideas should be taken out of their minds and put into hands of people as co-creators.

Remaining optimistic in the face of failures

Developing, co-creating, experimenting with and testing ideas require an understanding that not everything is going to work. If this involves contemporary societal and environmental challenges the probability that several proposed ideas are bound to fail at very early stages will be even higher (despite the fact they were co-created and tested with people as potential end-users). The relatively high percentage of “early failures” requires adopting the right mindset.

People-centred design and development starts from discovering the unmet needs and opening up the possibilities together with the people, jointly researching the challenges and co-creating potential solutions. People-centred developers are aware that only through ACTIVE listening, thinking, collaborating, interpreting, building, co-creating and refining, they will be able to come to meaningful, sustainable and desirable products and services. Therefore, they are not afraid to fail and they often “fail” very early to be able to improve and succeed later. Refusing to take risks can lead to a situation where developers close themselves from the outside world and therefore minimize their chances to co-create and innovative with the people they serve. On the other hand, the people-centred mindset calls for firstly identifying what will not work as part of discovering what will. The basic idea is to release the prototypes as early as possible and then use them to keep learning, asking, testing and “failing”. When people-centred developers get it right, it is because they got it wrong the first (and second, and third etc.) time.

Therefore, people-centred development is in its essence driven by curiosity, positive attitude and optimism. Optimism is the embrace of possibility, the idea that even if we don’t know the answer, that it is out there and that we can find it. Optimism makes development and co-creation process more creative, encourages developers to push on when they hit dead ends, and helps all the stakeholders in a project gel. People-centred developers are persistently focused on what could be, not the countless obstacles that may get in the way. Constraints are inevitable, and often they push developers toward unexpected solutions. But it is the core animating belief – that challenges are solvable – that shows just how deeply optimistic people-centred developers are.