Three day ethnography and speculative design workshop on the humans of Beijing

In early 2019, Dr. Rowan Page of Monash University in Australia contacted my team for a possible collaboration on a 3 day undergrad workshop for his industrial design course. As a tradition, the course brings students abroad on a 2 week field trip each year, and China has been the chosen destination this year.

Since the 3 days in Beijing would be the students’ first stop on the trip, and for many them their first experience in China, we decided the workshop should give the students a broad overview of how some of the most transformative social and technological changes in the world are manifesting in a Chinese context. And at the same time, Rowan wished these experiences would ultimately help the students to reflect on issues and opportunities for innovation for Australia.

After some discussions, we decided an experimental teaching method, and it involved ethnography in Beijing for stimulation, followed by a speculative design process for the Austrian context.

To help the students quickly immerse in the many aspects of daily lives of the people in Beijing, I led a crowd-sourcing effort to collect "peculiar yet regular events" that happen throughout Beijing each day. And these data were consolidated into a "temporal map" of the city, outlining the time and location for events such as "being pushed by a staff to board the subway during rush hour", and "robots serve people at this hotpot restaurant".

The three day workshop was half a day of theory, followed by 1.5 days of field work and one day of downloading and synthesis. During the theory session, I talked to the students about the basics of ethnography, and encouraged them to frame subsequent field and design work with the 7 global trends: wealth gap, gentrification, rapid digitalization, aging, competition and finding daily sanctuaries. To give the students more local insight, the workshop also invited local participants to join each student group. And off they went with their maps.

On the third day, the students met back up with the photo and story evidences they gathered. Each student group were asked to analyze particularly unexpected discoveries from the field in relation to real social issue in Australia, and turn the inspiration into a specific design concept.

 A few groups of students were especially struck by the amount of social activities in the elderly population in Beijing. One of those groups created a concept for community housing, while another designed a pop-up tea and board game stand for bringing together elderly men.

 A third group was inspired by the bustling electronics repair businesses in Beijing's west side, and designed a concept for a community electronics reparation station, completely with tools and a computer for instructions.

A few weeks later, I was delighted to receive an email from Rowan sharing experiences from the rest of the field trip and a discussion on how the workshop in Beijing was even more successful in hindsight, as it prepared the students with a broad understanding of social issues in China, and provided context before they dove deeper into specific issues on the remaining of their trip.

In reflection, I feel we took some risk in making the workshop as unstructured and open ended as possible to give the students the most control. The map and the local participants were definitely essential for making the process more efficient. The themes we have chosen also provided useful lenses through which the students can think about their observations with more depth. These are elements I would definitely keep for less structured educational programs in the future.

Having been working as a vendor for corporates and NGOs, where pragmatism in a design is key, it was really liberating for me to do speculative work with students. To me, speculative design is a thought experiment, or a hypothesizing exercise, that helps me practice the skills of not having "too much experience". In this respect, I can always learn from students.