When your audience is not your audience: UX and feed sack fabric
A story of design and co-creation through necessity
At the core of good human-centered design is the idea of genuinely understanding the needs and motivations of your audience. However, we are rarely presented a circumstance where we are truly only designing for a single, granular audience. Audiences are made up of a complex quilt of overlapping circles: some of these circles work symbiotically, with aligned motivations. Some of these circles are relational, but opposed in their motivations. It can be easy to dismiss these conflicts — we might decide to completely ignore the needs of one audience, or fail to even recognize that the additional audience exists or is worth consideration.
[ Note: “Audience” in this article is a term encompassing groups of people that interact with products and services. It can be used interchangeably with “User” or “Stakeholder” or “Customer” and the meaning is the same. However, words matter and “Audience” feels more humane ]
Audience by Relation
When we design products and services, we also involve other parties in the process that may not be the end-point consumer. Sometimes, additional people in our lives (parents, children, friends, coworkers, employers) have some skin in the game when it comes to the choice architecture. This effect — audience by relation — can present itself in a variety of ways:
I am a high school senior looking to go to college. I am fortunate enough to have parent(s) that will support me financially in this. My parent(s) is/are an audience by relation.
I am a working parent trying to find a class on paleontology for my daughter. I am an audience by relation.
I am a teacher looking to help my students collaborate on coursework. I am an audience by relation.
Embracing this Relationship
Having a holistic view of audience that extends beyond the final point of consumption or interactivity isn’t just good practice: it can also open up additional possibilities for designing creative, sustainable solutions that address multiple needs and motivations without sacrificing or infringing upon the outcome of any single participant. The story of feed sack fabric provides a wonderful narrative of human-centered design done right.
What is feed sack fabric?
Feed sack fabric, also called commodity textile bags, were commonly used in the 19th and 20th century in order to transport materials such as grain, flour, animal feed, sugar, and salt (just to name a few). These cotton bags rose to popularity thanks to the invention of sewing machines that allowed for more heavy-duty construction of the seams of the bags, eventually replacing wooden barrels.
[ Note: It’s important to recognize that this paradigm shift took place due to the low cost of cotton — cotton was a relatively inexpensive commodity due to the United States’ long and abhorrent history of slavery and sharecropping. ]
Beginning early in the 20th century, feed sack fabric was used in place of purchased fabric off the bolt in many households to save money. This usage expanded greatly due in part to World War I, The Great Depression, and World War II. Rationing of materials, repurposing what you had on-hand, and extending the life of materials as much as possible was not only an issue of necessity — it was also viewed as a patriotic duty.
Feed Sack bag manufacturers took notice. They recognized two important things about their product:
- It was being used in a manner beyond its original intention
- There was an additional Audience by Relation driving the decision process
The Original Audience, The New Audience
In the historical context, it was primarily men that were involved in the work of purchasing materials that were contained within feed sack bags. At home, their female partners took on the role of efficiency and sustainability. They prepared the bags for reuse as fabric by deconstructing the current tailoring on the bag to make a flat piece of fabric, soaking and scrubbing to remove any labels, coloring or dying the material to make it appear as something wholly new. After this process, the remaining material could take on new life as a variety of items: linens & quilts, napkins, drapery, or clothing were popular choices.
What is interesting about this dynamic, and how it ties into modern product and service design, is that it created a dual relationship between the person purchasing the product (in this case, primarily men to use the contents inside the bag), and the person dictating and selecting the specific type of container that should be sought out. If we look at this through Don Norman’s Three Levels of Design Processing, we can see that men were operating on the Behavioral level, while women were operating on the Visceral and Reflective level, all in the selection of a single artifact.
Men would be provided with swatches and directions to seek out that specific pattern. Different items required a different number of bags to complete. For example: a dress might require three matching feed sacks to complete, a child’s outfit two, or a matching set of dresses for three daughters might click in at six bags. Quilts were a popular way to use excess scrap and material, as evidenced by the small piecework present in many quilts from that time.
As a result of the popularity of this endeavor, manufacturers began courting the female consumer as their primary audience. They understood that the decision was falling on the matriarch of the house, and that she held tremendous power in the selection of materials — not for what the contained material was, or how well it performed — but for the bag that it was transported in.
The designs, patterns, and detail of the bags became more intricate and varied as the result of this. Some manufacturers even printed sewing patterns directly on to the fabric (for example: for dolls, or pillows, or diapers) to allow for easy cut-out and assembly.
Why does this matter today?
As designers and creators, we carry multiple responsibilities. We should be thoughtful about the context and motivations of our audience. We should value their time and personal information. We should seek to add value to the world with the products and services we create. But that value can come in many different forms. One of the primary ideas behind co-creation is that we do not just put something in to the world with explicit directions on its use. Humans find ways to use the world beyond its intended use: we extend it, modify it, change it to fit our needs.
Stop and take a moment to consider the items that make up your daily life. These can be physical products, or they can be services. Notice where you are using them “off-label” in a space beyond their original intention. For example: I use Slack for work. I use Slack for professional groups that I am a member of. I use Slack to create a community for students and alumni. But the manner that I personally use Slack most frequently? To stay in contact with a small group of very close friends. No other current tool fits the needs of this group so specifically. Group texting doesn’t allow for our myriad of threaded topics of conversation, and Facebook Groups feels unsafe for the type of conversation we engage in. A business tool has become our preferred tool for intimacy, for sharing, for bearing witness, for supporting.
Our needs are far too varied to all be fully considered, and that is OK. Instead, we should take note of the way the things we create are used. We may find that there are additional opportunities for creation hiding in audiences by relation.
Historical References:
Make Do: Feed-Sack Fashion in the First Half of the Twentieth Century by Heather Vaughn Lee for Piecework Magazine
The Fabric of Life by Kurt Kohlstedt for 99% Invisible
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
