Panelists/Mentors: MARTHA COTTON, Managing Director - UX Research, JP Morgan Chase JASMIN M. GOODMAN, Founder & Principal, The J. Michelle Group IAN LOWRIE, Senior UX/DX Researcher, Intel December 8, 2022, 8–9:30am US Pacific Time (5–6:30pm CEST) Free for EPIC Members A new meetup offering mentorship and peer support for our careers as ethnographers, researchers and strategists. The goal of the Career Pathmaking Meetup is to generate the collective wisdom, support, and solidarity that are essential to our success—and our sanity! This session focuses on job transitions. Whether you're moving from academia, shifting to another field or industry, making a consulting/in-house move, or just exploring possibilities, navigating the job market can feel bewildering and isolating. Career possibilities for ethnographers and researchers are manifold, but our pathways are rarely defined by linear ladders and credentials. In this session, EPIC mentors Martha Cotton, Jasmin M. Goodman, and Ian Lowrie will discuss: How...

An EPIC Talk with NICHOLE CARELOCK (Ad Hoc LLC), MARTHA COTTON (Fjord/Accenture Digital), & CARRIE YURY (Fjord) Overview The daily work of ethnographers requires being the room with key people, working through a range of challenges in shared spaces. We do this in workshop settings, for brainstorming and planning, and for the myriad ways we collaborate with teams, stakeholders, clients, and others. COVID19 has upended our ability to work together in this way. How do you make virtual collaboration not only effective but also feel authentic? How do you lean-in to digital instead of trying to force fit analog experience into digital boxes? There are best practices for remote and virtual ways to be together and approximate that "in the roominess." Along with expertise from many fields, ethnographers can draw on our deep understandings about the way culture, meaning, ritual, and other dimensions of human interaction shape experience in physical and digital spaces. Join us for this EPIC Talk where a panel of your fellow EPIC...

EPIC2017 Platinum Panel Moderated by: MARTHA COTTON (Fjord) Panelists: JULIA KATHERINE HAINES (Google), BRIAN KING (HEC Montréal), MARIE-AGNES PARMENTIER (HEC Montréal), CARRIE YURY (Beyond Curious) & MICHAEL WINNICK (dscout) Overview This panel explores perspectives that emerge from the intersection of ethnography and agile methodologies—from real constraints to exciting possibilities. We seek to better understand what “agile” is and where it comes from and then explore tools and approaches that allow us to be relevant in agile contexts. Is being “agile” just about efficiency and speeding up our processes? Or is it about ongoing efforts that offer the right spark at the right time? Or maybe something in between? In this panel we explore this timely topic that currently—or soon will—affect most members of the EPIC community....

Instructors: MARTHA COTTON, gravitytank SHELLEY SATHER As practitioners, EPIC people continually work to help our teams, organizations and clients understand the value of ethnographic approaches and “the ethnographer” as a team member. We help colleagues and clients to think and work differently, adapting the value we bring to the organization’s existing work flow and process. In this tutorial, Martha Cotton shares the curriculum gravitytank developed to teach their clients—including many Fortune 500 companies—to work differently and in a way that better supports innovation and design thinking. This tutorial gives you concrete strategies and behaviors you can use in your own work practice and for creating change in your organizations. Martha Cotton is a partner at gravitytank, where she helps lead research discipline and external marketing. Her career began at eLab in 1990s, and has included leadership roles at Sapient, Hall & Partners, and HLB. She has worked across a wide variety of industries as an applied...

by MARTHA COTTON, GARY GEBHARDT, TRACEY LOVEJOY, ABBAS JAFFER — and you! How have professional skills & requirements for ethnographers and other human-centered researchers changed over the last 10 years—and where are they headed? How can you evaluate the confusing terrain of position titles and descriptions, as well as assess the organizations offering them? Post your questions, insights & ideas! EPIC people gathered for an online discussion with Martha, Tracey, Gary & Abbas. Here are the introductions. Introductions Martha Cotton, Partner, gravitytank Back in the mid-90s when I was at eLab, researchers went through a brief period where our business cards said “Understander.” As a word, it fit to describe what I did for a living. But as a job title to communicate my role to others outside of my small ethnographer community, it was very hard to, well, understand. I have a memory of handing my business card to the store manager of a Boston area sporting goods store where I was to spend the day observing people...