Project Chat with Microsoft’s Richard Banks

A few weeks ago, I had a call with Richard Banks from Microsoft Research in which I discussed my area of work and learned about the non-academic research environment. I was interested in whether the combination of my design background and my more recent approach and area of interest (being developed on this course) might fit into this field in future.

I met Richard a few weeks earlier as we were both sitting on a panel for final year students of the university of Dundee Product, Digital Interaction and Interior Design courses. I reached out to him as Microsoft Research’s Human-Centred-Design department are currently working on some research around the human interaction with, and perception of the products of machine learning and AI and I was interested in learning more about a design research led approach to these topics.

Concept Feedback

I described the current state of my final project idea to Richard:

I’m interested in exploring how data can be used to empower communities at local-level; turning the uneven power dynamic of big data and surveillance capitalism on its head and returning the power it generates to community level. As part of this, I’d like to explore how these communities work with, alongside, and despite existing systems and digital infrastructures.

Richard explained that some research had been done at Microsoft on this topic previously and pointed me in the direction of an interetsing project they’d worked on that might be relevant:

Tennison Road

One of these projects was the Tennison Road project by Alex Taylor and team that explored how big data relates to a community at street level (Taylor et al., 2014).

“Illustrated image of Tenison Road by resident. Tenison Road is road running from top-middle of page (approx. North) to bottom-middle (approx. South).” (Taylor et al., 2014)

One thing that struck me about this project was the beauty of the interaction designs created by the designers to visualise the data the community were interacting with. Can I create some artefacts that are as intricate and beautifully crafted as these?

Data visualisation system at Tennison Road (Taylor _et al._, 2014).

Concept Feedback

One thing that concerned me was that Richard decribed the topic of citizen use of data as “a bit of a well worn path”. I’m aware that many topics that might be new and exciting to me will always be very familiar with someone, but I’d still like to explore a topic that’s somewhat new and innovative in my final project. Does anyone else have feedback on how they’re approaching this? I also don’t want to fall into the trap of just doing a project about AI or blockchain because that’s the most popular topic at the moment.

Process

Richard also had some interesting suggestions around the process I could follow in exploring my chosen topic that I’m sharing here in case it might be helpful to some of you: “do a thing in a week”. Instead of mulling and thinking too much, to test the strength of your project idea just carry out a mini-project in one week. It’s important that we can get out of the “stressed researcher” mindset that we so often build on a long-term project.

References

Taylor, A.S. et al. (2014) ‘Data and life on the street’, _Big Data & Society_, 1(2), p. 205395171453927. Available at: [https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951714539278](https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951714539278).