PROLOGUE

Social commentator Ellen Goodman said it best, “there’s a trick to the graceful exit.” And it’s true. So many times when we, as ethnographers or design strategist, are engaged in initiatives we tend to focus our efforts on the needs, desires and aspirations (articulated or not, real or not) of individuals and how to address them. And we imagine that if we meet their desires – or the imagination of their desires – at one time, then we’ve met them for all time, or at least a long time. We try hard to foster loyalty and longevity through our technologies, products and services to make them more relevant and useful. And this is good work. Yet, simultaneously, we recognize the increasing pace of technological development, of product evolution and change, of companies coming and going. And we do not tend to focus our efforts guiding people from one thing to the next, that is, on managing the transitional experience, of leaving one thing behind and moving onto something else. It’s almost as if, building up is cool; tearing down, isn’t.

In this new economy – where “things” and “experiences” vie for value, the importance and relevance of long-term possession is under question. There are new models of “fractional” or “shared” ownership and new possibilities where digital experiences are created, popularized and marginalized in very short periods of time. In these contexts, managing transitions and endings is going to become as critical as designing for attraction, relevance, or desire. What we hope to do in this paper is raise awareness of the need for focusing on endings – in both the small, e.g., products and services, and in some rather larger contexts, e.g., institutions and even nation states – and provide a few initial guideposts for ways in which the ethnographic praxis community can consider a focus on transitional experiences into their strategy toolsets.

We also note that this view is not entirely new to our industry thinking. It has been present in service design initiatives for some time, e.g., with emphases on customer journeys service design practitioners have focused efforts understanding the total experience from beginning to end and designing touch-points to bring someone through complex journeys. Yet still, there has been little focus on how to best stage purposeful endings and perhaps converting that to successful beginnings; and dare we say: Renewal.

INTRODUCTION

When we hear: “The End.” Does it suggest “finality”? Perhaps it’s the completion of a story, a play, a move, or a song. Perhaps it’s the ending of a relationship, “that’s it, I never want to see you again” or of a contest: “well, it’s over, let’s throw in the towel”, or even better: “We won.”

Clearly, there are good (satisfactory, expected, desired) endings and there are bad (undesired, painful, tragic) endings. We often celebrate these good endings: Go Team! And we often don’t mind endings when the “journey” has been distasteful – like concluding a terrible course of chemotherapy. Some endings are much anticipated for what they demarcate – final exams (as the dénouement, perhaps more so than the commencement), the departure of a houseguest who has overstayed their welcome. Some things we think shouldn’t end, and some endings are more acute than others: the sudden death of a loved one, the sudden fall of a be-loved public official, the termination of a contract. And some ends can signify beginnings, e.g., revolution.

From these, it seems we rationalize some “goodness” from the end; we look for the “silver lining”; we look for the (psychic?) “good in it” – and there’s almost always some goodness to be found – even if, as last resort, it’s the proverbial “god’s will” or “if it does not kill you, it makes you stronger.”

In talking about graceful exists, Ellen Goodman goes on to say:

It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage or a relationship is over – and let it go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance to our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry that we are moving up, rather than out.

It’s odd, we admit, to refer to Ellen Goodman. But we think here, she captures the common or conventional wisdom an elder would impart to a youngster. Why is it necessary to rationalize the end as a beginning and to move “up”, rather than “out”? Why can it not be what it is: a simple ending, a thing that’s done?

What is this rationalization that even in the admonishment to “let go”, seemingly prevents us from actually letting go? The making of such attributions – some real, some fantastical seems to be one of the things we do as humans. It perhaps helps makes sense of understand the people, things and events around us. We explain; we make attributions and judgments and in so doing we develop schemas and mental models for how to act, react, think and even feel in different situations. If we wish to reconsider “endings”, we need to reconsider the schemas with which we process them and attempt to design accordingly.

SCHEMAS

Numerous theories of cognitive development suggest we become psychologically and physiologically attached to people and events, e.g., attachment theory (Bretherton, 1992) and attribution theories (Menton et al, 1999) respectively. Another contributing reason might be the nature of how we learn. Cognitive studies of learning suggest strongly that learning is “hard work” and that we operate best when we learn something well, and internalize it – create mental “schemas” – so that we don’t have to expend significant effort on the same task repeatedly (i.e., we have shortcuts) while simultaneously putting effort into some other pressing task. Latour calls these “black boxes”, where we encapsulate “known” whole related sets of phenomena whereby subsequent opening of the black box becomes a non-trivial, effortful endeavor (Latour, 2005)). Arguably it is changing them – re-assessing their worth, learning some thing new that requires changing something old – that seems to be more difficult as the old maxim: can’t teach an old dog new tricks, seems to suggest.

As individuals, we develop “mental schemas” over the course of our lives. Classic examples include how to act in social situations, or what we expect from a high-end restaurant, or even how we read maps (or now, interact with GPS systems). Schemas also inform us about endings; how to interpret them, how to act when they happen, when to expect them, whether we’re disappointed or elated at them. Schemas tell us individually how to participate in the endings, even sudden ones, like what to expect from a funeral. And while we don’t have schemas for everything making new ones is a part of development and learning–it is what we do (Willingham, 2010).

We find the changing and altering existing schemas to be the real challenge for us. We are challenged to comprehend events that don’t match our existing schemas, as when something ends that we hoped or thought would never end, or some previously unimaginable or improbable event actually occurs. It is here when we experience dissonance – the inability to harmonize or explain one set of observations with a belief or expectation based on a different set of expectations. We predict December 21^st, 2012 will be a “day of dissonance” for many people who are planning for the (apocryphal) Mayan end of the world.

We want to consider teaching the old dog new tricks is what we should focus our effots. As ethnographers, user researchers and design strategists, we typically focus our efforts on innovations and new product/service experiences that may be unfamiliar to people – they require a schema-shift or a transition to fully embrace– and people need a foothold to make the transition.¹