by STEWART ALLEN, MindSpark
With an ethnographic lens on foresight and planning, we can see how futures unfold through people's daily journeys of anticipation and improvisation.
What is Foresight?
Foresight is an umbrella term used to describe a wide variety of methodologies and approaches for considering and preparing for possible and probable futures in order to help inform present and future courses of action. Today, it is an important and widely deployed practice that has developed in a variety of fields, from public policy such as state and town planning, to technology and R&D, and more recently strategic and financial approaches in business fields to help ensure the long-term survival and success of companies. Many of the approaches that come under the umbrella of foresight blend into one another.
The majority of approaches to foresight typically employ pre-defined categories in their analysis – identifying trends in the social, technological, economic, and political spheres and extrapolating these using various...
Talks
How Research Can Drive Organizational Change for Digital Literacy and Inclusion
an EPIC Talk presented by , Facebook May 14, 2021, 8–9:30 am US Pacific Time This online event is free for EPIC Members Overview In this talk Nadine Levin presents research she led at Facebook that pushed the organization toward more inclusive and accessible design. She describes a multi-phase project on digital literacy from inception…
Perspectives
Ethnography for Sensemaking in Times of Trauma
Jennifer Collier Jennings
a book review by SHARON BAUTISTA, Mozilla
Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work
Kimberly Kay Hoang
2015, 248pp, University of California Press
The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age
Valerie Francisco-Menchavez
2018, 256pp, University of Illinois Press
The March 16 shootings in the Atlanta-area of Georgia in the southern United States, when a person shot dead eight people, including six Asian women, sent me into deep grief. I could barely register the text messages from concerned friends recognizing me as an Asian woman and offering support. Trying to muster the focus to work the next day, I felt the urge to mute the Slack streams of sincere acknowledgements and thoughtful compilations of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) resources shared by co-workers. Alongside my grief, I was frustrated by the meager news coverage of the people—and specifically the Asian women—who were murdered. There seemed almost...
Perspectives
How Ethnographic Exhibits Can Shift Business Paradigms
Jennifer Collier Jennings
by ADRI REKSODIPOETRO (Nation) and ALEXANDRA MCCARTER (Spotify)
Through the art of exhibition, curators immerse people in new worlds and new points of view, whether by transporting visitors to 18th century India or through challenging art history’s colonial gaze. The goal of an exhibition is a shift in perspective, to move people to think differently about something than they did before.
Researchers do something similar: our first task is to learn something new, but the ultimate goal is to share what we learn in a way that shifts the perspectives of our colleagues, organizations or clients. In this article, we show how we applied curation techniques for a project we worked on together at Spotify. The project focused on understanding people in Indonesia who bought Spotify Premium, and the exhibition served as our main deliverable. The exhibition jump-started a new way of thinking about Spotify users because it enabled our colleagues to experience a different understanding of value and music streaming in the country.
Why an Exhibition,...
Intelligences
将（资讯）安全分析师考虑其中——从‘人机交互’到‘人机协作’
Jennifer Collier Jennings • 0 Comments
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH: Bringing the Security Analyst into the Loop: From Human-Computer Interaction to Human-Computer Collaboration
作者：LIZ ROGERS, IBM（资讯）安全
摘要
本案例讲述了IBM人工智能（AI）安全软件团队基于民族志和用户研究，放弃一个被购买决策者视为“酷”、“令人印象深刻”、和“复杂“的产品核心功能，采用新的交互式知识图谱（KG）的可视化设计，从而使得安全分析师用户们可以更加简单地理解和使用知识图谱（KG）。在民族志和用户研究的成果的指导下，QRadar Advisor with Watson团队创建了新的可视化知识图谱（KG）。与联想式的人工智能（AI）和“互联网的方式“相比较而言，这个新的可视化知识图谱（KG）更加匹配安全分析人员调查潜在安全威胁的实际方式。该新功能由IBM在2020年第一季度发布，并已被用作IBM开源设计系统的组成部分。此外，IBM目前正在对它作为专利申请的提交内容进行审查。...
Talks
Anticipating Credible Futures
an EPIC Talk presented by , Fuse Foresight July 21, 2021, 8–9:30 am US Pacific Time This online event is free for EPIC Members Overview Strategic planning is becoming less and less viable in a volatile world prone to black swan events. Prediction is a low-percentage approach to an unknowable future. But we still need…
Perspectives
Move Fast, Break Shit, Burn Out: The Catalyst’s Guide to Working Well
Jennifer Collier Jennings
a book review by TABITHA STEAGER, Workday
Move Fast, Break Shit, Burn Out: The Catalyst’s Guide to Working Well
Tracey Lovejoy and Shannon Lucas
2020, 305 pp, Lioncrest
As I write this, we’re just a few months into 2021, and, well, the world hasn’t magically changed. When the clocks ticked over on December 31, it felt as if there was a collective, cautious sigh of relief while we continued to hold space for the grief and turmoil so many of us have experienced in the last year. Instead, we’re still in a sort of stasis globally, waiting for vaccine numbers to reach critical mass and learning how to combat new virus variants, so you’d be excused in feeling like this stasis is the new normal.
Yet the days are getting longer and on my walks I see the snowdrops pushing their way up through the ground. It feels a little corny to write this, but spring is coming. It has been a long, upending year that’s left me on the edge of burnout (fully over the edge of burnout some days if I’m completely honest) and even more...
Courses
Representing Your Professional Self: Positioning, Strategy & Portfolio Review
Refine your goals, materials, and strategy for navigating job transitions with the support of a career coach, peer cohort, and insights from senior hiring managers in research and design. Instructor: TRACEY LOVEJOY, Catalyst Constellations Enrollment: 30 Schedule: Self-paced learning & 3 live sessions: May 13 & 27, June 3. For details see Coursework and Schedule.…
Perspectives
Evaluating Food Delivery in a Pandemic: Usability & Ethnographic Principles to Guide Consumers
Jennifer Collier Jennings
By CHARU AHUJA, Consumer Reports
For almost 85 years, Consumer Reports has been detecting and anticipating shifts in consumer need for products and services so that we can guide consumer choice with rigorous research and testing. When the COVID-19 pandemic started to peak in March 2020 in the U.S., our ability to access the 63 product testing labs at our site changed. These labs house specialized equipment, such as a pressurized water dunk tank that is used to simulate conditions that electronics like phones and watches must be able to withstand if their manufacturers claim they are waterproof. And CR’s anechoic chamber removes all reflective sound signals, allowing a clean read on noise levels emitted by products. Such specialized equipment allows CR’s product testing experts to conduct repeatable and accurate testing across a large number of competing models in any given product category.
Like most other organizations, we had to quickly pivot. To the extent possible, our product testers set up makeshift labs in their homes,...
Courses
Using Theory in Research: Applying Social and Cultural Frameworks
Learn how to use core models of society and culture to create better research, deeper insights, and more powerful value propositions for businesses, organizations, and communities. Instructor: KATE SIECK, PhD Enrollment: 20 Schedule: 6 live online sessions + independent work, 8–10:00 am US Pacific time, May 13, 20, 27; June 10, 17, 24. For details…
Talks
Let’s Get Real about Burnout
an EPIC Talk presented by , Catalyst Constellations & EPIC co-founder Overview Burnout is at an all-time high and mental health at an all-time low. From vague head fogs to serious illness, we feel it in ourselves and our families, friends, teams, and research participants. What’s going on, and what in the world are we…
Perspectives
加速用户研究：在Spotify我们如何从速度出发管理用研洞察
Jennifer Collier Jennings
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH: Accelerating User Research: How We Structure Insights for Speed At Spotify
作者：SARA BELT, Spotify
不同于以往考虑我们如何能加快用户研究的速度，现在的问题变成我们该如何更好地将用户研究整合到产品开发流程中，以及加快组织学习和迭代的速度。
一直以来，由于人们认为用户研究的有效性较低，用户研究所得的洞察都在产品开发中被边缘化。我在职业生涯的第一阶段致力于提倡组织为什么该积极地听取用户的意见和想法，为什么每一个人应该相信定性见解可用于指导他们的决策，以及为什么用户研究是需要专业技能的实践领域。
随着用户研究逐渐证明贡献价值的能力，对于其效度的质疑和争论也在日趋减少。从数据、证据和同理心的角度来考虑产品的设计已经成为一种既定的方式。 在像在Spotify这样的公司中，用户研究的需求在快速增长，我们不得不开始考虑如何将用户研究的实践规模化。新的、更实质性的问题开始出现，要求我们以更快速度来创造价值的能力能够与快速将产品推向市场的财务和竞争优势相匹配。用户研究，或者是更广义上的洞察，一直因为产出速度慢而备受诟病...
Talks
Doing Ethnography in Civic Spaces
An EPIC Talk moderated by , Principal Design Researcher, Code for America Panelists: , Tech Talent Project & EPIC Board , Director of Research and Future Planning, Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer , UX Researcher, Central Integrity, Facebook , Service Design Lead & Customer Experience Strategist, NASA Overview Ethnography has always illuminated the…
Perspectives
The Power of Not Thinking
Jennifer Collier Jennings
a book review by GERALD LOMBARDI
The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them
Simon Roberts
2020, 336 pp, Blink Publishing/Bonnier
In The Power of Not Thinking: How Our Bodies Learn and Why We Should Trust Them, Simon Roberts aims to resuscitate the human body from the sepulchre of Western thought, where Descartes and his successors presumably buried it, and to correct popular misconceptions about how we generate knowledge. In the author's words:
"Our intelligence does not just arise from our brains... nor can it be programmed as a set of rules or propositions that enables us to think in particular ways or perform particular actions. Instead, our understanding of the world arises from our bodies’ interactions with and perceptions of the world – and it is through these interactions that our bodies acquire knowledge." (p. 6)
This proposition will be taken for granted by some readers of this review, and by anyone who follows its intellectual touchpoints: embodied cognition, situated learning,...
Talks
From Users to User Ecosystems
An EPIC Talk with (Youngblood Group), (American Board of Internal Medicine) & (Amazon Lab126) Overview User research and human-centered design help us solve real challenges and create better experiences. But there’s a problem: when we explore user experiences, we often frame these as individual, personal engagements with products and services. This can cause us to…