What I Have in Common with Ellen Degeneres, The Pope and Kim Kardashian.

What I Have in Common with Ellen Degeneres, The Pope and Kim Kardashian.

Ellen did it at the Oscars!

The Pope does it with his followers!

Kim is publishing a book of her doing them!

And I am an advocate for it!

Specifically, I am an advocate for Selfies as a design research method and I would like to be the first to suggest selfies can be used as a powerful research tool for businesses and organizations.

Selfies have taken off this year and have become a global phenomenon. Selfies are spontaneous, improvised, and temporal; with the primary purpose to be seen here, now, and by other people. Taking a quick self-portrait, made with a smartphone camera may not seem overly revolutionary, but these simple pictures offer a gateway to knowledge that was previously untapped by organizations.

Organizations that are looking to understand how users engage with their products and services, may find using selfies as a mechanism to provide useful context to this problem and insight to these interactions.

Selfies are a form of visual communication that are distributed immediately of where we are, what we’re doing, who we think we are, and who we think is watching. Within selfies, meta data of information such as location, mood (facial expressions), other users (who is in the photo), unique ways of interacting with a product or service, tags, emojis and in real-time can provide insight for an organization to adapt its product, service and marketing to the needs of its users.

For instance, selfies can indicate early adopters and extreme users of products- a key component for organizational innovation, or indicate novel ways products are being used to solve unmet needs of certain user groups. Selfies can also play a role in mitigating risk from the miss use of products or indicate intellectual property infringement. Organizations can even create a selfie index (S-Index) to measure product or service use per Tweet or Instagram post- much like the Kardashian Index (K-Index) does for research scientists and citations.

No doubt advancement in technology can play a role in extracting information from selfies by finding patterns from these photos over a large population. Since selfies are commonly placed on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, selfies offer organizations an added dimension to link engagement through social media to what is popular- where and when. No doubt future technological advancements will produce even more unique forms of selfies- from holographic, historical, full-size, animated, pedagogical and interactive.

Selfies can be traced back to the Greek theatrical idea of methexis— where the audience participates, shares and partakes within the play, Greek theory of citizenship by actively playing a role within the community and in Plato’s Theory of Forms.

Selfies can be compared to the sociological research method of photo elicitation when Collier (1957) from Cornell University found certain “…themes to be difficult to explore in surveys or in-depth interviews and decided to try a new interview technique using photographic images…”

Selfies can be seen as a reflection of modern life, with significant power to provide insight to the past and in aiding us to anticipate the future. Imagine what the collective pool of selfies could tell us about the details of our lives today and if we had them- of Ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Roman civilizations.

The mass amount of knowledge found within selfies, combined with advancement of technology offer a rich research environment for businesses and organizations to better understand their customers. I am encouraging businesses, organizations and researchers to follow the selfie movement and use selfies as a method of research for understanding present and future needs and trends of their products and services.