Case: What happens when 30 design students spend 3 days on a ship to do 9 simultaneous field studies
Every year we send a large group of design students on a passenger ship for OICL´s 10 days intensive course on field studies in design processes. Here is a recap of the 2019 edition.
The 30 students carried 9 field studies simultaneously on the ship: they followed different workers and passengers and analysed their user experience.
A ship’s performance often relies on whether its crew are able to fully take advantage of all its capabilities. Field studies are an important method that may help in the design of more user-friendly ships. However, such studies need to be well integrated into the multidisciplinary process of designing ships in order to reach their full potential. This is why we run a course about the use of field studies in design processes, for design students at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. To learn about how to plan and execute field studies, we help our students plan and execute a field study!
A ship offers the perfect conditions for a field study: it is an environment that designers are not used to, and when the ship is out at sea, the designers need to embrace their field work: there is no other place to go. We like to work with large passenger ships because they run on a regular schedule, and they offer the space required to bring 30 field researchers without disturbing the normal operations of the ship.
This year we worked with DFDS on the ferry route between Oslo and Copenhagen. We started out by contacting the innovation department at DFDS, who redirected us to the team that manages the Oslo-Copenhagen route. We met in Copenhagen to build a list of themes the students could chose for their field study. We met again onboard the ship in Oslo and refined the list together with the ship manager. Finally, DFDS came to the school to present the company, and their challenges when operating the Oslo-Copenhagen route.
The students studied user experiences related to food production, cleaning, way finding in the ship, children entertainment, and more.
Creating the conditions for the study
This was a dream scenario for us. DFDS is invested in continuously monitoring, analysing and monitoring their operations, and bringing students onboard to carry out field studies fit right into DFDS´s approach. Conversely, working with the organisation hosting the field study enables to define study topics that are relevant for the organisation. This is great for the host organisation, and also for the students, because it gives them the opportunity to work with a real customer, with real design problems.
The course took place in a large studio room, and we held preparatory lectures directly into that space. The students had just concluded a course about how to embrace complexity when designing, so they were sharp on their analytic and exploratory skills. We assembled groups of 3 to 4 students and put up a list of topics on the wall, and let the students decide what topics they wanted to work with. As soon as they picked up a topic, they started mapping it out on the walls, to identify potential design problems to be explored on the ship.
By the third day of the course, the students had a plan for their field study: they knew what they wanted to specifically look at, what observation methods they could use, what questions they wanted to ask, to whom, etc. So we boarded the ship and put everyone to work. DFDS had prepared a whole conference room for us, and we used it as our headquarters during the trip. The student groups would come to the conference room to prepare their next observation session or debrief the previous session, and ask for guidance to the two course leaders (myself and Kjetil Nordby).
The students´ experience
We always ask students to write down their reflections about their experience of the different tasks they work with during the course. This is part of the learning process, to reflect upon the tasks they are engaging with, and part of our design-driven field research model, where the field researcher navigates between field observations, and the meaning of these observations for the design process that is informed by the field study.
Collecting students´ reflections about the course also enables us to have an idea of the students´ experience of the course, and help us improve it. Here are a few examples of feedback from the students, translated from Norwegian to English:
“The Oslo-Copenhagen ferry was the perfect context. It is unexpected, it is really complex, and there are many interesting design problems.”
“We felt welcome and valued as students. We had a lot of time to perform the study, and that was very helpful. We could perform several rounds of observation and interviews of key informants. Questions that came up during the way could be answered the day after.”
“The most important thing I learned during this course is that things you take for granted, are not necessarily true. It is critical to go out to the field to test assumptions and talk to users.”
“I learned to use curiosity as a tool, and simply being curious. When I was working on the field on my own, it was very challenging to manage a conversation with an informant. But when I managed to use my curiosity as a tool, I was able to ask good questions and it became really enjoyable.”
What DFDS did with the course output
The students produced 9 reports, each one focused on a specific topic: the experience of passengers coming in the ship with their cars, the experience of foot passengers, the experience of children on board, the shopping experience in the duty free store, the experience of the crew who clean the passengers´ cabins, etc… The reports presented the observations made by the students, and how they analysed them as design problems. Each report contained a number of concepts to address the identified problems, and an evaluation of how each concept addressed a given problem.
How did the students do, in terms of relevance of their observations? We met with the ship manager onboard the ship while the reports were being compiled. “We are absolutely happy with the students´ work. They spotted some issues that we can fix right away. There are some that are more challenging and costly, but we already have added them to our list for the next docking of the ship. A rough estimation is that 50% of the students´ findings are new to us. The other 50% are known, and are mostly related to the fact that the ships always need to be upgraded.”
DFDS worked with all the reports and compiled a list of 86 initiatives (each one related to a design problem), and a list of 35 design problems (without any suggested initiative). DFDS operate two ships on the Oslo — Copenhagen route, so they looked at each specific initiative and problem identified on one ship, and checked if it applied to the other ship. This means that the output of one set of field studies carried out on one ship eventually spans the two ships that DFDS operates on the Oslo-Copenhagen route, the ferry terminals in Oslo and Copenhagen, and the shuttle bus in Copenhagen.
Conclusion
This has been a very successful edition of the course. The students were very happy and they learned a lot. DFDS has been a great partner and we collected a lot of data on how to improve the course for the coming years.
Read more about the course here and why field studies matter in maritime design here.
Credits
This chapter was written with contributions from Sigrun Lurås, Kjetil Nordby and Etienne Gernez.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the team at DFDS who committed to make this course such a rich experience. Thanks to the students for their engagement, energy and creativity, and thanks to the Oslo School of Architecture and Design for hosting this course.
