Who we are shapes how we study. What we know shapes the questions that we ask. 

I recently picked up Listening to People by Annette Lareau. My intention was to use it as a reference for an upcoming qualitative user research project at work, but I thought it would also function as a handy guide for future ethnographic fieldwork. In the second chapter, Lareau divides the first step of a research project – formulating the question – into two stages: Dreaming and Thinking. Both are work, both are essential, and both accomplish different things. 

Dreaming is conceptual, abstract, and emotional. It is the question at its most raw, without the understanding of the naysayers or restrictions around answering it. We daydream about people finding peace among the trees, about the difficulties of war and borders, or how our hometown may look in a future century if it were powered entirely by renewable energy.

It is this stage where I’m most comfortable. I rarely think with words; my mental landscape is a mix of images, color, memory, and imagined social interactions. The next stage, Thinking, demands that these daydreamed clouds coalesce into something stable. The vapor above must come to earth as rain.

 What do you want to know? Who will you ask? How will you capture data? What do you anticipate to be good data or bad data? What rules must be followed? Where did previous studies get it wrong? Where were they problematic? What isn’t satisfying in the available literature? 

These questions pierce to the heart of the matter, and actively seek tangible evidence and response. As an undergraduate (and, frankly, early in my product journey) this stage is where I tended to fumble. It is difficult to take the imagined and give it form, whether it’s a concept for a painting or a sudden idea for an app. The journey of a daydream to the chance at creation is a chasm that has taken many victims. Even if the proper medium through which to bring the dream into the world is understood, we are practically hardwired to doubt ourselves. We wonder if we have the authority or knowledge to craft the dream at all.

Doubt and dreaming come so naturally to us. So too does thinking. Thinking well is an art itself that takes time, space and patience to grow.

As I stand at the chasm, twisted with doubt and loose ideas for a bridge to make my ideas manifest, I find myself wondering why I’m here at all. I could be in the garden, baking cookies, or at the ocean for an afternoon coffee. Yet, I’m reading. I’m daydreaming. I’m thinking. If these capacities for imagination and invention are innate to us humans, I wonder what it is that motivates us to contribute to the world of ideas in the first place.