Toy Trucks in Video Analysis

Video fieldstudies of people who could be potential users is widespread in design projects. How to analyse such video is, however, often challenging, as it is time consuming and requires a trained eye to unlock experiential knowledge in people’s practices. In our work with industrialists, we have discovered that using scale-models like toy trucks has a strongly encouraging effect on developers/designers to collaboratively make sense of field videos. In our analysis of such scale-model sessions, we found some quite fundamental patterns of how participants utilise objects; the participants build shared narratives by moving the objects around, they name them to handle the complexity, they experience what happens in the video through their hands, and they use the video together with objects to create alternative narratives, and thus alternative solutions to the problems they observe. In this paper we claim that when analysing for instance truck drivers’ practices, the use of toy trucks to replicate actions in scale helps participants engage experiential knowledge as they use their body to make sense of the on-going action.