Mientras estudiaba mi maestría en TU Delft, hace ya casi 10 años, escribí un paper que hace poco tiempo revisité. Habla acerca de los diferentes tipos de “experiencing selves” que menciona Daniel Kahneman (premio nobel de economía y “padre” del behavioral economics).
En 10 años pasan muchas cosas, creo que en este momento cambiaría algunas cosas del paper. Pero de igual manera me dieron ganas de compartirlo por aquí para cualquier curioso e interesado. Creo que el tema de como vivimos, recordamos y experimentamos nuestra vida es muy relevante y aún poco implementado en áreas como el diseño e investigación de usuarios.
Los dejo con el Miguel de hace 10 años.
Who are we looking to?
ABSTRACT
Design research is constantly increasing in relevance and in the variety of techniques; the theory of the two selves developed by Daniel Kahneman brings new ways of understanding users and how they experience their lives, context and interactions as well as how they remember them and make decisions in the future. This paper provides an initial approach between this theory and design research techniques and suggests some considerations about how they can complement each other to develop a better understanding of how a user experiences a product and design itself.
1. INTRODUCTION
The importance of context research in the design discipline is constantly increasing; new tools and approaches are constantly emerging with the goal of bringing new insights about what is important for the user and relevant in the environment in which their interactions take place.
The core of many of these new techniques relies on getting to know the user with the aid of generative techniques (toolkits and workshops) at different stages of the design process, which might start from the very first approach to even letting users design products for themselves.
On one side these processes might lead the researcher to a better understanding of the user by discovering tacit and latent needs. On the other it might lead users to achieve higher levels of satisfaction by designing/customizing their own products.
However new findings in the field of behavioral economics related to how individuals remember, become satisfied and take decisions in their life point out possible mistakes in the current techniques and posit new ways to understand and study the user and their context.
This paper will explore the concept of the two selves of an individual, the challenges that arise from them, and their repercussions in both, the field of design research and the perception of satisfaction that users get from designing products for themselves.
2. THE TWO SELVES
The Nobel Prize laureate and precursor of the behavioral economics field, Daniel Kahneman, have developed the concept of the two selves.
The theory states that we experience our life between two inner selves, one that lives in the present, called the experiencing self (ES), and another that remembers and keeps track of the lived experiences, called the remembering self (RS).
The experiencing self tracks how an individual feels inside a present experience and generates material for the remembering self, which is in charge of reporting how an individual feels about an experience and generating memories about it.
The main findings in Kahneman’s research show that these two selves are very different and have complex ways of influencing how individuals experience, remember, share and make decisions about their actions in the future.
2.1 Experiencing self
Consider a doctor pressing on an injury of his patient and asking how or what does he feels; that would be the experiencing self in action. The moment that an individual perceives as the present is calculated to be of about 3 seconds long, this means that an average lifetime consists of about 600 million present moments (Kahneman, 2010) in which the experiencing self lives and interacts with its environment.
The ES is responsible for the feelings that an individual has in their daily life. It pays attention to and ignores very specific things, for example, its satisfaction is greatly influenced by spending time with people that an individual likes, and it is barely affected by factors such as the climate.
2.2 Remembering self
Consider a doctor asking its patient how he has been feeling the past couple of days; that would be the remembering self in action. The remembering self is nourished by the information generated by the ES, however it ignores most of it and keeps track of very specific things.
The RS is the dominant self, it is the one responsible for the memories, storytelling and the decision making process of an individual. It has been found that individuals think about the future as anticipated memories (Kahneman, 2010), which means that human beings put more weight on memories than on experiences in their daily life.
It is therefore very important to understand what kind of moments are the ones that manage to stay in the RS. Studies have shown that changes, significant moments, but above all, endings are the ones that compose the memory of an experience and stay as the mental material from which an individual tells about an experience.
2.3 The selves in action
To show how the two selves interact in living and reporting about an experience, an example of a colonoscopy study realized by Redelmeier and Kahneman will be illustrated.
At the time at which this study was performed, a colonoscopy was a very painful procedure.
Patient A and B where asked to report their pain every 60 seconds during their colonoscopy (Figure 1). The experiencing self was clearly suffering more pain for a longer duration in the case of patient B, however, when these two patients were asked to report their experience afterwards, patient A reported to have had a much worse memory of it.
Figure 1. Patient A and B reported pain over time during a colonoscopy.
The explanation is that at the final time of the experience patient A was at its pain peak, whereas patient B was at a lower peak. The remembering self of patient B had a much more pleasant ending to the story about its experience, which at the end dominated the whole memory, although objectively it was much worse.
3. STUDYING THE USER
There are different techniques that can be found to study users to gain context knowledge and insights for design purposes (Stappers, et al, 2005). These techniques offer access to different levels of knowledge and require different actions from the user (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Different levels of knowledge and the techniques to access them.
It is appreciated however, that there is a lack of awareness of who is the self that is actually being studied. Awareness that can bring a better understanding of where the insights are coming from, what are they useful for and their potential impact on the research and final design.
Though the separation is not strict, it is important to try to state who is the kind of self that it is being addressed by studying what people say, do, use, know, feel and dream (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Levels in which the reflective and experiencing selves are addressed.
3.1 What users say and think
By studying what people say and think, using research techniques such as interviews, questionnaires and focus groups, what is being actually studied are the memories and stories that the RS has of past experiences and the anticipation that it has for future memories.
Therefore some considerations have to be taken into account.
The memory and hierarchy of the duration of an experience that a user has is most likely to be reported with distortion since for the RS time duration of an experience is not really important, what is important is the amount of novel experiences over a period of time, for example, a two week vacation spent relaxing by a beach in a hammock will maintain less memories in the RS than a weekend trip spent hitchhiking across different cities, where more novel experiences are expected to happen.[1]
On the other hand, it could be stated that what a user tells about his or her expectations for a product might be closely tied with the ending of the experience that his or her RS is projecting in the future, for example, purchasing intention of a coffee machine might be directly related to latent memories of previous coffee drinking experiences in which the context of the experience plays a bigger role than the coffee by itself.
3.2 What users use and do
By observing what people do in their context using techniques such as naturalistic observation, the researcher has one of the few opportunities available to analyze the ES in action.
It is by these kinds of techniques in which, for example, the real feelings and enthusiasm of a given individual can be observed in a specific context. However while it is of course impossible to know exactly what a person is thinking during an activity, it is possible to observe and infer how a person is living an experience, which will ultimately be radically different from how he or she will report it.
In other words, it is by observing the user’s actions, that it is possible to understand how people live in their lives, rather than what they think about it.
An important consideration is, for example, that one of the dominant aspects that affect the ES of human beings is spending time with people that they like, in this sense, observing the people that surrounds a user in a given situation might bring insights into the emotions that the user might be experiencing, for example, the emotions that an activity such as playing soccer might produce in an individual, are more tightly related to with whom the individual plays or relates the activity of playing than what it is believed to.
3.3 What users know and feel
Generative techniques allow researchers a means to gain insights into users’ tacit and latent knowledge, some of these techniques bring the opportunity to both observe users living an experience (ES) and to see how it is that they reflect upon the past and what they expect from their future (RS).
The researcher has to be aware of the way that the user reflects upon an experience, in this way, hints of where to put attention to find latent and tacit user knowledge will be more easily spotted. Take for instance the time factor; if a sensitizing kit was given to the colonoscopy patients mentioned before, they would reflect upon their experiences and use their memories in the generative session, but they would still ignore the real amount of time that they had actually suffered, and would portray their experience in a very distorted way, such that the researcher would have to identify and respond by having a good preparation and an ability to identify how the two selves interact with each other.
3.4 Users as designers
New platforms and technologies allow users the opportunity to design and/or customize their own products; this relatively novel and increasingly popular phenomenon has naturally raised a lot of questions regarding the new roll of the designer and the user itself in the design process.
There are important considerations regarding the experiencing and reflective selves that can help to better understand this phenomenon.
Figure 4. IKEA effect, users that invest effort on their products like their possessions more
Ariely and other researchers had come up with what it is called the IKEA effect, and it basically states that: “through the investment of thought and effort we come to love our creations much more.” (Ariely, 2010) It would seem that under a certain amount of effort— enough to keep the ES busy but comfortable— the whole experience ends up being more memorable for the RS, due to the fact that there is a memorable ending, which is a personalized product.
It is also interesting to consider that the RS does not take time in much consideration, which means that the user can actually withstand the extra production time that customization might take keeping the same amount of satisfaction in his or her memory.
These kinds of considerations briefly show that the products and the systems in which the user is involved to design and/or customize need to be carefully studied and designed, and that rather than being a threat to the design discipline, it is much more an opportunity for the development of certain kinds of consumer products.
5. Considerations
The presented approach raises certain questions and considerations to be taken into account in further studies, for example the fact that memories in the RS change and evolve over a period of time, and therefore the perception that a user might have about an experience will be also closely tied to the time in which that experience took place.
6. Conclusion
While there is still a lot to be considered, the theory of the two selves seems to provide an opportunity to the design research field towards a better understanding of the user, their behavior and how context affects them.
Further study and research might point out key considerations for the existing research techniques and ultimately generate better ones.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Pieter Jan Stappers and the whole staff of the Context and Conceptualization course of the Industrial Design Faculty of TU Delft for their inspiring passion for design and research.
REFERENCES
1. TED (2010). Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory.
http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html
2. Ariely, D. (2010) The upside of irrationality. Harper Collins, Great Britain.
3. Redelmeier, D. A. & Kahneman, D. (1996). "Patients'' memories of painful medical treatments: real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures." Pain 66(1): 3-8.
4. Stappers, P.J., van der Lugt, R., Hekkert, P.P.M., & Sleeswijk Visser, F. (2005) Context & Conceptualization Reader. Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft.
5. Harvard Business Review (2009). The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love. http://hbr.org/web/2009/hbr-list/ikea-effect-when-labor-leads-to-love
6. 99% (2010). Strive for the IKEA Effect http://the99percent.com/tips/5874/Strive-for-the-IKEA-Effect
[1] More information about how pleasure is perceived over time can be found on what Ariely calls hedonic adaptation on his referenced book.