An EPIC2021 Sponsored Panel by Facebook Moderator: JAY HASBROUCK, Facebook Panelists: SANYA ATTARI, Facebook Reality Labs; GENEVIEVE CONLEY GAMBILL, Facebook; JAMIE KIMMEL, Instagram Pathfinders, foresight strategists, and responsible innovation researchers help Facebook understand how cultures and communities evolve so our teams can create products that meet future needs. They think beyond the current moment to provide insight that minimizes potential risk to people, societies, and environments and help build toward promising opportunities. Although these researchers come from different backgrounds, they all share characteristics that are quite familiar to ethnographers: a propensity to think holistically, an appreciation of evolutionary patterns, and the ability to situate insights within large, complex systems across time horizons. Attendees will learn how pathfinders, foresight strategists, and responsible innovation researchers apply these qualities to their work at Facebook, as well as how attendees might apply...

An EPIC Talk with JAY HASBROUCK, Facebook Overview Building relationships within cross-functional teams is always challenging. Join Jay Hasbrouck as he explores four key ways to build on your skills as an ethnographer to find more effective ways for working across disciplines. His talk will help you discover ways to expand your empathy, usher a process of realization for your team, encourage curiosity, and situate your work strategically. He’ll conclude with some suggested frameworks for action that will help you refine your approach in the near, mid, and long term. Presenter Jay Hasbrouck has over 15 years experience working as an anthropologist in industry settings, including both in-house roles and consulting. He currently works as a Pathfinder at Facebook, focusing on discovering the ‘next next’ for Facebook’s users. Jay is also the author of Ethnographic Thinking: From Method to Mindset, and continues to reflect on life as an anthropologist in his blog: ethnographicthinking.com. Related Articles & Presentations Building...

by JAY HASBROUCK, Founder, Filament Insight & Innovation “Innovate or die"—this dictum is driving companies to build their innovation capacity, and fast. Most are turning to now-familiar practices such as Design Thinking, Lean, or Agile. But as they grow, many organizations find that they don’t see expected increases in innovation after deploying these practices. Why? Although they’re originally meant to drive creative thinking and strategic risk taking, innovation methods can quickly become rote in large organizations, especially when teams are expected to deploy them without context, or simply to check off a box on their performance reviews. Worse yet, some companies struggle to manage a combination of different innovation practices between teams, leading to a breakdown in collaboration and disjointed project pacing. What these organizations lack is an overall innovation strategy that drives their efforts to build innovation capacity, engages their teams with a purposeful vision, and ensures their efforts can evolve...

Tutorial Instructors: JAY HASBROUCK Hasbrouck Research Group CHARLEY SCULL Practica Group Contributor: LISA DICARLO, Brown University SUMMARY In this interactive tutorial, participants explored ways in which ethnographers can have an expanded role in addressing social issues and other wicked problems. In particular, it explored how ethnographic thinking can frame problems and catalyze change. Participants were first provided with a grounding in ways to approach systemic challenges and social entrepreneurship, including discussion of some successful roles ethnographers have played as part of inter-disciplinary teams. Then, instructors introduced three case studies (and frameworks of systems within them) that participants later used as material for exploring how broader applications of ethnographic thinking might work in real world settings. Those included: labor practices in the seafood industry, encouraging energy conservation, and managing the refugee crises. In the second part of the tutorial, participants divided into groups...

by JAY HASBROUCK, Hasbrouck Research Group (This article is also available in Chinese) Lufthansa flight 490, Seattle to Frankfurt Dinner just served, everyone was settling in, each in various stages of preparing their coping mechanisms for the painfully long flight. Laptops, eye masks, charge cords, earphones, earplugs, slippers, hand cream…they were very busy. The woman next to me popped a sleeping pill and was situating her blankets. I began my own ritual of scanning the entertainment channels to plan my movie lineup. As I was flipping through documentaries, I unexpectedly ran across an educational featurette titled “Design Thinking in 30 Minutes.” Yes, 30 minutes! The more I thought about this featurette as an offering aimed at a mass audience, the more it seemed like an indicator of sorts to me. At face value, it’s a sign that interest in design thinking has become so widespread that a 30-minute short on the subject warranted inclusion in a carefully curated inflight entertainment lineup. But did it also suggest...

JAY HASBROUCK and SUSAN FAULKNER This paper explores how methods used to procure ethnographic visuals transition between different cultural histories and varying visual vocabularies. We use an instance during which we were detained (and the police summoned) after taking photos of an apartment building in Cairo to illustrate how these transitions can lead to unexpected and serious consequences with which ethnographers must grapple. We argue that considering factors such as geo-political context, notions of giving and receiving, boundaries between private and public, as well as a culture’s historical relationship with photographic and documentary processes, are all essential to developing a critical position on visual procurement in the field....