Buzzing

Jon and I spent a crashcourse month preparing the trip and developing materials and this past week was our first experiment with real subjects. The purpose of the week was to gather as much information about the organization as possible in terms of their vision, number of members, roles, hardware, software, day to day activities, hierarchy, company culture etc. We learned very quickly that the structure of the materials we created was hopeless and flexibility would be our greatest ally.
I likened our experience with context research this week to trying to dress an excited child. We came with all of the clothes and assumed that we would begin with the underwear and finish with tying shoe laces but in the end we were most efficient when we kept a shoe in one hand and a hat in the other to fit them on whenever the chance arose.
Kiva's Soroti office has been very gracious in hosting us and it has been our challenge to learn as quickly as possible how we can best take advantage of our time here. Some of the culutral differences within the organization have kept us busy trying to understand and respond to. Our behavior has also been a subject of discussion. Alfred asked candidly, "why do you drink (so much) coffee?"
Me and Jon finished the week with lots of good material to review although that sometimes brought us very close to tackling the child to tie the laces.