The Personal Inventory method is a creative, visual means to engage participants in research and elicit knowledge about values-in-practice. The design team has an opportunity to converse with participants and ask further questions to help understand values, behaviours, and memories. Sometimes items might have a clear explicit meaning and an implicit meaning. This can be done as part of an individual interview/conversation or as part of a group (with permission from all participants) to allow everyone to speak to what they are sharing. Once gathered, the process of ‘show and tell’ can be illuminating for everyone involved. The guidance for the participants is recommended to be light so that individuals aren’t too directed toward a particular ‘idea’ and influenced to give what they think the researcher wants. For physical-based projects, this could also including bringing in physical items (or photos of them). This might include original photos or videos, representative images from the Internet or magazines, even sound recordings. Provide a timeline for the project that is reasonable and have individuals capture artifacts that represent or illustrate what is important to them. The tool should be something that your participants feel comfortable with and this might require some initial training and support.įor using a physical media, a simple scrapbook or posterboard will do. For those who are using digital tools, it might be worth using a platform that is easy to navigate such as a Pinterest board, a shared Google Photos or Flickr folder, or a more sophisticated, but highly modifiable tool like Milannote. The next step is to provide a context for data gathering and presentation. For example, if we are seeking to design a system that supports patients in navigating their healthcare, we might ask a question: What is important to you about your healthcare experience? Or, What is important to you when being cared for? While it can be helpful to ask the question generally, most often we want to focus attention on a particular topic. The Personal Inventory is shaped around a specific question tied to importance and value within a context.
The Personal Inventory method is a means for participants to gather and catalogue artifacts and evidence of their activities that help answer the question they are posted about what is important to them in a particular context. The method is simple, flexible, and can be used in physical, digital, or hybrid contexts so it’s suited to a variety of situations where we might seek to understand the values and beliefs of an audience or particular service user. Keeping with a design-inspired ethos of ‘show, don’t tell’ the Personal Inventory method is a simple means to answer that question of importance for people. What’s important to you? It might sound simple, but when we engage in service design the way we ask that question will shape the answers we get.
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