<aside> 🚩 A situation scan (a sitscan) is a research activity that involves a selective and iterative exploration of an environment, the people in it, and the interactions among those people and between them and the environment, as described by a Design Brief. It results in an organized collection of information about the context for which a design intervention will be developed.

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Overview

What is a Situation Scan?

A sitscan is the process by which a design team develops and maintains a knowledge base of information about a situation that is pertinent to a design project.

Good designers can create bad designs if they do not understand what the situation really is that they're trying to improve. Often, the problems that clients present to designers are really just symptoms of deeper problems. As in medicine, addressing the symptoms rarely leads to successful outcomes. A proper design solution will address the deeper, root-cause problems that gives rise to the symptoms that clients perceive. Sitscans help you understand how things are, so that you can find out what the real mismatches is between how things are and how we wish they were.

Sitscanning is also good for team collaboration. It helps your team:

• work together to develop a deep understanding of all the nuances of a situation,
• ensure that everyone on the team agrees on the nature and extent of the situation, and
• ensure that everyone is working together on the same situation.

A sitscan is only about how things are and not at all about what your future design may eventually be. So:

• Stay grounded in the present. Do not think about how you might improve the initial situation. Don't try to solve the problem; instead, explore the conditions in which your eventual solution will have to exist.
• Avoid thinking about your future designs. Do not discuss specific potential or actual solutions, parts, subsystems, technologies, or products that you think might improve the initial solution.
• Make no judgments. Do not discuss which aspects of the initial situation are dispreferred, undesirable, or "bad." That comes later. Situations simply are what they are.

The sitscan evolves over the course of the entire project. Designers will often discover specific situational aspects that are relevant to the project throughout the development cycle. When they do, they need to pause their design work and do the background research necessary to expand the sitscan and document those situational aspects, to ensure they can justify their decisions.

Teams are expected to update their sitscan regularly throughout the course to capture all significant research findings.

In this course, a sitscan takes the form of a structured document with the following sections. Each section captures a specific type of information.

“GECUS”

This is a (admittedly weak) mnemonic (think: “gekkos”, but with a “u” instead of an “o”) for the five aspects that constitute a sitscan:

• Goal: The goal of your particular intervention.
• Environment: The ecological, social, technical, economic, and cultural aspects of the initial situation that are relevant to the goal.
• Competition: The currently available products or services by which users satisfy their needs as inferred from the Design Brief.
• Users: In broad strokes, the characteristics of the user group(s) targeted by the Design Brief.
• Strategy: Some specific details of your team’s approach to the new intervention.

The five aspects are described in detail below.