Noticing the world around us.

On my search for inspiration for rewriting the design observation element, I found this article. I once met Steve Portigal in Hong Kong, he might be a good person to interview. In the article he writes:

"This process of noticing once and then noticing again is how you start finding patterns and uncovering themes. For example, in the throbbing Shibuya skyline we noticed enormous video billboards for a new album by Ayumi Hamasaki (who we’d obviously never heard of). Then we saw trucks driving through the streets with billboards on the side promoting the same album. A few days later we passed the stadium and there was a huge crowd going to see her in concert. And along the street were dozens of vans that Ayumi Hamasaki fans had customized with pictures of her face. It’s not that we wouldn’t have walked past all these things, but that the activity of noticing the first one, and documenting it, meant that I was ready to notice and document the second, and beyond. So when we saw the concert crowd and the vans, we were able to connect it: “Oh, this is the performer that we’ve been seeing all the ads for.” This process of trying to figure out what’s going on in a new place, of finding and understanding patterns and themes, is exactly what we do in our user research."

I was thinking of an activity that draws on this repetition of noticing. You condition yourself to notice again because you became interested but your interest for knowing was not entirely satisfied the first time. He also wrote, noticing is a conversation with the world around us, and our inner ‘ego’. I don't want this skill to be an outburst of developing a self-concept but truth is, in order to understand others we have to understand us (our self) first.

They mention 2 activities to train your noticing-skills. One technique is reporting about what you have experienced between a certain time frame (we do this already in compendium 1) and the other is uploading a daily picture to flickr with annotation or making a blog entry. This reminded me somehow of Peter’s ‘What is design’ article. Maybe we can draw connections between quite and designer design and noticing for design observation.

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