Iteration

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Introduction

Iteration involves taking the most interesting prototypes from your Specification phase and bringing those out for the public to encounter.

In the Iteration phase, you want to be ready to hold onto your desires for how this intervention will work AND practice close reading what the intervention is actually doing.

In this phase, it is vital to (again) gather a set of divergent thinkers—in particular some who have been thinking alongside you and some who will experience the piece from the outside as members of the public.

check out the iteration phase in our case studies!

Social Emergency Response Center (SERC)

Public Kitchen

Let’s Flip It

Lighting the Bridge

An invitation to notice and reflect

Close Reading

Close reading is a way to collectively describe the effects of a prototype together, so that we can have common ground on which to interpret what effects our intervention is having. Is what I’m seeing what you’re seeing? What do each of us notice?

Close reading is the practice of continually asking ourselves and one another: What is it you’re seeing, that I can also see, that has you draw that conclusion? Or that has you make that interpretation?

Close reading can be approached a number of different ways and grows out of a set of four nested ideas. 

  1. The first of these is an understanding that really seeing something requires finding ways to verify that you’re talking about what’s in fact there -- not what we assume is there. 

  2. The second is that a group of people looking at something together can see more dimensions of that thing than one person looking alone. 

  3. The third is that deliberate use of specific, descriptive language can support the goal of helping one another to see more. 

  4. And the fourth is a recognition that habit is a strong enough force that you need a shared protocol to keep from skipping over your stated intention to engage in new kinds of seeing. If we know that the temptation will be to skip over plain description of what you  see, jumping right into interpretation (or judgements, likes or dislikes, opinions) then you need something or someone to hold the container.

Design Research Questions

First we give ourselves time to process our emotions.

“Oh my god, it worked! They loved it! We’re awesome!” or “That was really awkward! It didn’t go at all like we hoped. It sucks.”

Then we try to dig into what we can learn from our experience in the field.

We ask ourselves questions beyond if it “worked” or not, and get to what we were testing for and what we saw/heard/felt while in action.

We use our Design Research Questions to consider what ideas, arrangements and effects the prototype might have impacted:

User Research

  • Did the people who you wanted to experience the intervention actually experience it?

  • If so, what were their responses? (Did they engage with it? Avoid it? Share it with others? etc.)

  • Did you have unanticipated users? If so, what were their responses?

  • What did the intervention shift—if anything—in terms of how the intended users were experiencing the problem you were trying to address?

Terrain Research

  • How did the intervention affect the space?

  • Did it shift who was at the center and who was at the margins of the space?

  • Did it shift how people saw the space or felt in the space?

  • Did it change any formal or informal rules about the space?

  • Are there ways you might have gotten the space wrong—were you in the wrong space, or in the right space at the wrong time?

Conceptual Research

Here are some questions using the I-A-E framework for evaluating your social intervention:

  • Ideas

    • What new line of possibility does this intervention point out?

    • How does this intervention help us think better about a problem or desire?

    • How does it help us think differently about a place, population, arrangement or issue?

  • Arrangements

    • How does this intervention help us see hidden or overlapping arrangements?

    • How does it help people question or think differently about arrangements that we take for granted?

    • How does it help people come up with new ideas for intervening in arrangements?

  • Effects

    • How does this intervention help unearth effects that we are not paying attention to?

    • How does it generate effects—intended or unintended—that we are interested in?

    • How does it have ephemeral effects, like changing an atmosphere in a space?

Participatory Action Research

Engaging a PAR team throughout your social intervention design and execution is ideal. This team can then join you for the three research types above.

You can read more about “Evaluating Social Intervention” in the Ideas-Arrangements-Effects book, p. 156-159.

Feeling stuck in the creative process? Need some inspiration?

What’s next?

The design process can be thought of as recursive (looping back on itself) or fractal (a zoomed in view has the same shapes as a zoomed out view).

So the next phase could look like revisiting any of the previous phases.

You might go all the way back to Discovery if the Iteration phase showed you significant new things about the way you were framing the problem. Or maybe, in the Iteration phase you found yourself day-dreaming about something from the Ideation phase that you’d dismissed but now want to go back and test.

Trust your gut, trust your divergent thinkers, trust your questioning, and keep going.

Looking for more resources?

Want to keep exploring? Visit our Library for more design resources to continue honing your designerly thinking.