When Research Excludes
Reflections on Black Lives Matter and Research Practice
The Black Lives Matter (#BLM) movement is raising awareness, conversation and reflection for many disciplines, including ours. Some organizations’ reactions have inspired serious changes and pledges, while others have made for social media fodder. Our industry (UX research, qualitative research, design research — whatever you’d like to call it) is also engaging in the BLM discourse. The Qualitative Research Consultants Association (QRCA) has started #BlackMRX Chat to bring together Black professionals to discuss realities and aspirations and ultimately to build community. The Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community’s (EPIC) president, Rita Denny, released a statement that indicates all our claims to be such, “there is no neutral ground” in the work of research and product development and we should be aware of our biases.
While these declarations and conversations are being had, we are turning our gaze inward to our everyday research practice at twig+fish. Meena recently presented on FluxibleTV, speaking about the cost of not doing qualitative research. The argument in her talk is that research provides a source of inspiration and alignment for designers and product teams. Inspiration and alignment reduce long-term resource bleed, lack of purpose in the design, and other hidden costs that affect product development (a summary of her talk was written up by Kelly Pedro of Zeitspace). By being stringent with research resources, we do a disservice to the business and to the people we serve.
In our continuing reflections, we wondered, what else are we overlooking that has a “cost of not doing?”
Given the BLM discourse, we began to look more deeply at the conversation. Ultimately, resource-poor research processes are indeed vulnerable to not only neglecting the Black voice but excluding it. Our discipline’s familiar practices are so reactive to money and time constraints that we have made compensating behaviors the norm. These compensations, namely in how we recruit participants and tell their stories, must be re-examined and rectified in order for us to move forward and improve our practice.
When we pinch on recruitment, we go for what’s convenient.
In design research, organizations primarily focus on behavioral and psychographic sampling criteria (what the participant does and what they believe about themselves). Demographics, details such as age and income, are also often carefully defined (e.g., between ages x — y, no less than x income bracket, etc.). However, one demographic data point, race, is widely accepted with a request of “a balance” or “a mix,” if possible.
By accepting this standard of elective racial balance, we perpetuate exclusion at a deeper level beyond a singular study. We allow organizations to see this as an admissible practice, indicating that we can achieve a meaningful participant sample even with racial homogeneity. While many third-party recruiting firms keep their customer list databases secretive and proprietary, one thing is for certain: these lists have their own biases, often the most willing and able people included, which can tend to exclude many populations.
When we can’t get the full story, we perpetuate biases.
Design often considers research as a service to its process. The value of research activity lies in its ability to inspire designers toward better decisions. The merits of research are rarely positioned as solely creating empathy and deeper connections with humanity. This void between what is and what isn’t leads us to seek purpose. We do so by positioning ourselves as problem solvers. What better problems to solve than the ones we falsely believe we fully understand?
With this mindset that we already know the problem, we also believe we are capable of solving it. Designer Danah Abdulla of Decolonising Design claims that design today “does not disrupt the status quo, it does not disorder the established order.” Our design and research practice is heavily weighted and embedded in a Western, capitalist society, in which we favor efficiency and optimization. The focus ultimately comes to the bottom-line, where what is right for humans rarely takes precedence. Because of this, we are never truly able to consider the perspectives, needs, and expectations of populations that do not fit well into our efficiency structure.
When we overlook getting the full story, we take short cuts (stereotypes).
Resource and process-poor research leads to valuing efficiency over holism. In this dynamic, we see the value in the story only for its potential to be “mined for insights.” We spend less time with participants engaging them in ways that will reveal new topics. We ask pointed questions, that yield predictable answers, rather than embedding ourselves in their lives for a day. We look to familiar sources of inspiration; we find comfort in socializing an internal narrative over the effort it takes to reveal or craft a new one. When we do consider a new story, it long sits in a position of novelty and highlighted for its difference. How often are we in a room where, because of one participant or team member, we represent “the female voice” or the “Black perspective?”
“Tokenism” is particularly dangerous in research, not because of its effect on participants, but its potential impact on workplace dynamics. Suddenly, the Black person in the design studio is subconsciously (or consciously) subjected to perform to certain expectations or to be the arbiters of stories from Black people overall (for example). The exploitation of human experiences (both from participants and team members) is yet another way we create compensations in research.
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As researchers, we need to determine where our responsibility lies. Because we are so often coupled with design practices, we believe ourselves to be in service to the efforts of solution-making. Researchers are problem identifiers, describers and reflectors of people. We know well that the solution to complex problems isn’t one that can necessarily be constrained to a singular organizations’ capabilities (i.e., we won’t stop global warming with company x’s offering only).
Even in resource-rich research environments, these patterns that lead to inequities still occur. So, when it comes to conversations on racial inequities and systemic bias, we must acknowledge that we are beholden to the people we are tasked with understanding, not the organization.
In this way, perhaps we can actually begin to address the problem.
