The (dis)Connected Lives project (dCL) has completed its third year.
It is an ethically motivated study into digital culture.
The brief has remained constant: explore digital pathologies (e.g. narcissism, incivility, envy etc) and design digital remedies (e.g. etiquette, empathy, detox etc). But the outcome and delivery has evolved.
This is because the teaching style has changed, digital culture has advanced, and the mindsets of the students have changed.
This report will share some reflections on the process and student work.
Shifting focus from remedy to pathology
When dCL started three years ago, we focused on designing a service or product. For example, there were games that connected parents and children, an AI that filtered your Instagram content, apps that jumbled up your Facebook page, and reports from a digital detox.
This year, the focus flipped: we decided to encourage the students to spend time exploring their research and presenting it in a compelling manner. Consequently, there was little remarkable about the remedies, but the research itself was far more incisive.
A Cultural Focus
This year, there was more focus on understanding ‘culture’ as a unit of analysis. The first lecture explored the Cultural Canvas in depth, and students were encouraged to engage with the various aspects of culture.
Cultural groups explored included dating-culture, drug-culture, influencer-culture, Minecraft gaming-culture, and commuting-culture. Some of these groups are on the fringes of society, for example one group explored the gentrification of cannabis culture, mapping out the transition from an informal economy to a legalised and medicinal one.
The digital pathologies explored were equally diverse, and included polarisation, acceleration, distraction, addiction, and ambiguity.
Experiential Insight
Several of the groups incorporated experiential insight into their research presentation. Theatricality, an interactive quiz, guided meditation, a Tinder simulation, staged distractions — all of these provided increased engagement, better retention of information and a fun atmosphere.
This suggests an exciting new space for design, culture and insight. For example, it invites us to explore differing theories of drama. We can start to ask: should the delivery of insight provide an escapist experience that absorbs the audience in the world created by research (associated with the Stanislavskian method), or instead should it seek to unsettle the audience (the Brechtian method)?
Innovative Methods
During class, we bombarded the students with research methodologies — cognitive frameworks, phenomenological interviewing, archetypal analysis, and so on. As a result there was a creative and free approach to research strategies.
For example, one group ran a cognitive experiment testing digital distraction across different age groups. Another balanced a big data analysis of the London underground with an immersive psychogeography — matching an extremely quantified approach with an extremely qualitative approach. And another used extensive netnography of YouTube comments to provide a powerful insight into the lives of YouTube influencers.
Intrinsically motivated topics
There was a clear correlation between the quality of the output and the students interest level. In a short space of time, each of the student groups created powerful and insightful mini-narratives about different aspects of digital culture.
This intrinsic motivation manifested itself in a confident delivery. Their style was free and felt improvised in a way that is only possible when mastery over the subject material is achieved.
Concision
One of the most important skills to learn as a researcher is how to say something powerful with brevity. As such, we ran a seminar focusing on how to communicate insight using the three dense paragraphs that are structured as flowing from beginning->middle->end.
Many of the groups incorporated this into their final debrief, and it helped audience insight processing. Furthermore, the experience of collaboratively obsessing over the minutiae of wording is an important (and poetic) skill for any researcher in the attention economy.
Insight Archives
A key concept in the research practice used in dCL is the insight archive. This basically refers to Trello boards that captures and categorises all the insight collected. A design philosophy based on minimalism and decluttering is central here, and the archive represents a form of structured and atomised insight.
I believe that this stage of the research process is critical. It makes the next stage of mapping complex phenomena into a coherent narrative easier.
Money and Alienation
In this article I have mainly focused on the forms used in the project — I’ll focus more on the content once I’ve explored the research in more depth.
However, I would like to end this piece with a clear thread that ran throughout many of the reports: the role of money in the digital sphere and the growth of new types of alienation. This runs across kids that get paid to play Minecraft, influencers that have arguments to increase views, dating platforms that have monetised romance and so on.
As a practising researcher myself, I don’t see this type of insight discussed much in the business ‘press’. Yet it is intelligence that is of crucial importance for securing the long-term health and brand equity of any organisation in an era of brand purpose and responsibility.
