The flower of focus is a really useful tool for distilling a mass of information down into common themes. I’ve used it recently in a project where radio producers go and meet members of the audience – and employ ethnographic techniques to develop insights, which feed into programmes.
You can imaging that having spent a day observing listeners, a couple of hours carrying out interviews, and then going on a night-out with their listeners – the producers come back with a wealth of information.
Once they’ve downloaded their thoughts, impressions, key quotes, etc. we cluster them into groups of subjects, which appear to be related. These are the petals around the flower. We then distil these ideas into a theme at the centre of all the petals – a word or phrase which summarises what all the thoughts were.
For one project we may build up a number of flowers of focus – which provide a summary of all the main issues to come out of the research. This can be the first stage in making sense of the mass of information that is be downloaded after field research.
Matt
flower+of+focus ethnographic ethnography creative creative+techniques consultancy matt+foster
