Jennifer Collier Jennings

Intelligences

Tutorial: Seeing Differently – An Introduction to Semiotics

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Tutorial: Seeing Differently - An Introduction to Semiotics
Learn core semiotics concepts and techniques that bring deeper, more meaningful human insight to research, design, strategy, and communications. Instructor: CATO HUNT, Director of Innovation, SpaceDoctors Overview This video has been edited to protect the privacy of participants in the live tutorial. Semiotics helps us understand culture and people more deeply by revealing how meaning is constructed, shared, and constantly changing. When we see the world as a ‘sign system’ we become aware of how culture influences everything we see, feel and do; it’s a hidden influencer. EPIC People working to create more meaningful experiences and shape more positive outcomes can use semiotics to create deeper insight and identify the most relevant and meaningful paths forward. This tutorial will equip participants with some key frameworks, techniques and hands-on experience to begin their own semiotic research endeavors. Beginning with a grounding in semiotic theory, we will focus on building practical skills through ‘live...

Intelligences

Tutorial: Cultural Domain Analysis – Methods for Human Insight Research

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Tutorial: Cultural Domain Analysis - Methods for Human Insight Research
Learn simple, yet powerful methods to understand shared cultural knowledge and mental models for user, market and organizational research. Instructor: ROSALYN NEGRóN, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Boston Overview This video has been edited to protect the privacy of participants in the live tutorial. The cultural knowledge that influences our routine choices, behaviors and beliefs can be difficult to articulate. Cultural Domain Analysis (CDA) helps surface these perspectives on the world, revealing nuances about concepts that may be shared or distinct among groups. CDA approaches for collecting, analyzing and interpreting data offer deeper understandings of people that are essential for effective products, services, organizations and strategies. This tutorial covers: An introduction to CDA and when to use it Collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the results with free lists and pile sorts Using multiple dimensional scaling maps and cluster analysis graphs to co-create...

Intelligences

Tutorial: From Research to Action – Leading Teams Through Synthesis

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Tutorial: From Research to Action - Leading Teams through Synthesis
Learn strategies and abductive methods for key challenges in the synthesis stage of research and design projects. Instructor: MARTA CUCIUREAN-ZAPAN Design Director, IDEO Overview This video has been edited to protect the privacy of participants in the live tutorial. After the richness of fieldwork, the research and design team must figure out, “What does this mean?” and “What should we do?” In this tutorial, you’ll gain a richer understanding of the synthesis and learn strategies for two key challenges: emotional dynamics—how we navigate interpersonal relationships to come to alignment amid the discomfort of newness and transformation—and convergence—how to prioritize when faced with tons of data and ideas. Participants will learn how to externalize the hidden criteria that are the key to client/stakeholder commitment and engagement. Synthesis presents a tough set of issues: we want to accurately represent all of our participants, yet we must make hard decisions around whose stories and learnings...

Intelligences

Tutorial: Systems Theory in Strategic Practice

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Tutorial: Systems Theory in Strategic Practice
This tutorial will help you use systems theory and mapping methods to understand and make change in the world around you. Instructor: SCOTT MATTER, Associate Director, Shaping Futures, Department of Premier and Cabinet New South Wales, Australia Overview This video has been edited to protect the privacy of participants in the live tutorial. Whether we work on new products and services, strategy, or wicked problems, we are intervening in complex systems. These systems can be surprising and frustrating—they often refuse to change in the ways we want them to, head off in unexpected directions, or just seem too collosal to influence or anticipate. Systems theory and methods give us tools to think and act with. Learning key vocabulary, core principles, and some simple mapping techniques can help you understand and influence systemic change. This tutorial introduces systems concepts and tools to enhance your strategic practice. Participants will apply theory and methods to map a system relevant to their work, then...

Intelligences

Preservation through Innovation: New Works Inspired by Tradition

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Zosha Warpeha playing the violin on stage at EPIC2022
ZOSHA WARPEHA Independent Artist In this Wildcard presentation at EPIC2022, violinist and composer Zosha Warpeha speaks about her artistic research in Norway, which involved an immersive study of Nordic traditional music and the development of a highly personal solo performance practice. This session illustrates a participatory model of ethnographic research through which the artist built an embodied knowledge of traditional music and laid the groundwork for artistic expansion. She speaks about aural transmission in traditional folk music, tacit knowledge attained through embodied practice, and reciprocal relationships between bodies in space. She also discusses the tension between two visions of preservation—one that captures a tradition in a single moment in time and one that allows the tradition to organically evolve alongside a community—and makes the case for the necessity of innovation as a method of preservation and resilience. This video includes a short musical performance that demonstrates the culmination of the...

Intelligences

Getting Savvy: Rewriting the Story of One of Our Most Important Customer Archetypes

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Rewriting Customer Archetypes; Atlassian, EPIC2022 Platinum Sponsor Panel
An EPIC2022 Platinum Sponsor Panel by Atlassian Moderator: LEISA REICHELT (Atlassian) Panelists: SARAH HYNE (Atlassian), (Atlassian), GILLIAN BOWAN (Atlassian), ANDRé JANSSON (Atlassian) In this panel, moderated by Head of Research & Service Experience, Leisa Reichelt, Atlassian researchers and data scientists will explore how different crafts, methodologies, and perspectives came together to evolve one of our most important customer archetypes; the champion. Showcasing the power of a research community, panelists will reflect on how they contributed to the evolution of this critical archetype by employing a range of research methods and cross-craft explorations. Join us to learn how we applied qualitative data, innovative survey design and partnerships with other crafts to opportunistically apply a refreshed champion concept to emerging business strategies and leadership asks. We’ll discuss how we devised and executed on a research program that applied mixed methods approaches for greater confidence and...

Perspectives

Assessing Quality in Qualitative Research

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a book review by SAM LADNER Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research by Mario Luis Small and Jessica McCrory Calarco August 2022, 230 pp, University of California Press This book is a must-read for any researcher, even those who specialize in quantitative methods. It aims to be a textbook but achieves much more than that because it focuses on what it takes to be “literate” in qualitative data – the very thing that our stakeholders need to be more sophisticated customers of our work. Qual researchers know all too well that basic qual familiarity is lacking in most contexts, but we don’t always have the language to explain to our stakeholders how to best leverage qual data. This book helps us do that. Imagine being a writer in a world where no one was literate. Imagine the constant struggle to train up, support, and explain your work to people who cannot read, while at the same time being told the reason they cannot understand your writing is because it isn’t good enough....

Talks

Removing Barriers for Research Participants with Disabilities

Removing Barriers for Research Participants with Disabilities. EPIC Talk: February 7. Christine Hemphill, Tom Pokinko, Cathy Rundle, Kate Mesh, Josh Wintersgill, Lynn Cox & Samantha Fletcher; Open Inclusion. epicpeople.org/talks

An EPIC Talk with CHRISTINE HEMPHILL, TOM POKINKO, CATHY RUNDLE, KATE MESH, JOSH WINTERSGILL, LYNN COX & SAMANTHA FLETCHER, Open Inclusion February 7, 2023, 8–9:30am Pacific / 5–6:30pm CET Free for EPIC Members Overview Over a billion people worldwide (and around 25% of the populations of the USA and Europe) live with some kind of…

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Talks

Career Pathmaking Meetup

EPIC Meetup, December 8, 2022. Career Pathmaking: Mentorship and peer support for challenges and transitions in our career journeys. epicpeople.org/talks

Panelists/Mentors: , Managing Director – UX Research, JP Morgan Chase , Founder & Principal, The J. Michelle Group , 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…

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Perspectives

EPIC2023—The Big Reveal!

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EPIC2023 CHICAGO, OCT 7-10  EPIC2023 chairs Marta Cuciurean-Zapan and Evan Hanover announce our next conference location and theme! Watch, read or listen—then get ready for our Call for Participation coming in January 2023...   Hello! We are Marta Cuciurean-Zapan, Director of Research and Insights at IDEO, and Evan Hanover, Director at Conifer Research. We are incredibly excited to invite everyone in the room today and online, EPIC members past, present, and future to… …Chicago, Illinois, for EPIC2023 next October! Chicago has a rich history shaping the theoretical and methodological foundations of American social science. Some of you may have made your way there to study at one of our colleges and universities. Or had foundational work experiences at firms that put social theory and an ethnographic approach at the forefront of their practice and positioning—such as eLab or Doblin, or the place where the two of us first met and collaborated, Conifer Research. Then there is the location of the actual...

Talks

Designing Research across Language and Culture

An EPIC Talk with JILL KUSHNER BISHOP, Founder & CEO, Multilingual Connections Connecting with global research participants requires more than just pure language knowledge. How do we ask questions in a way that reflects an understanding of their culture? In ways that resonate with them? How do well-intentioned researchers address issues of gender neutrality and…

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Perspectives

Favorite EPIC PechaKuchas

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carrie yury performing a pechakucha at EPIC2015
In anticipation of our 18th annual conference, and in loving memory of two incredible EPIC people who championed this format—Paul Ratliff and Suzanne Thomas—we're sharing just a few of our favorite PechaKucha presentations. PechaKucha are performances of 20 image-rich slides that show for 20 seconds each—performance poetry with visual punch. They offer a creative and reflective format for sharing unique insights, perspectives, juxtapositions, and provocations about ethnographic work. It was...really hard to choose just a few performances to highlight (and I know I'll hear about what's left out!). So take this as an invitation to explore our video library, get ready for a fabulous new program of PechaKuchas for EPIC2022, and ponder your own PechaKucha submission for EPIC2023! Collateral Revelation PAUL RATLIFF, EPIC2014 Our work of investigating experience is rarely directed at personal transformation. The impact we seek to create is not specific to our participants or intended for them alone, if at all. We don’t go...

News

An Ethnographic Master: Suzanne L. Thomas

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“Practiced masterfully, our analysis can be intense, immersive, rigorous, deeply collaborative, endlessly curious and profoundly social. Ethnographic masters revel in a detail overturned to reveal yet another. The result is the rendering conscious and ultimately visible the logics and patterns of human social life.” —Suzanne L. Thomas, The Martial Ethnographic Arts We were heartbroken to…

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Talks

Re-imagining Business Models for Greater Social Impact

Re-imagining Business Models for Greater Social Impact, and EPIC Talk with Melea Press, University of Glasgow. epicpeople.org/talks

An EPIC Talk with , Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow The world is looking for business to step up—now—and address profound social and environmental issues at local and global scales. The essential connections between current business models and climate change, inequality, and many other significant problems is clear, and demand from customers, employees,…

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Perspectives

Techno|theory Deathmatch: “Using Theory in Research” Read-along

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Image of game avatars from "Techno|theory Deathmatch"
A new cohort of EPIC members has just embarked on "Using Theory in Research"—a foundational EPIC Course taught by Kate Sieck, PhD (Senior Manager, Machine Assisted Cognition at Toyota Research Institute). We invite you to read along! In the first of six lectures and group seminar sessions, course participants explored what theory is and how it infuses our everyday work practices. Kate also covered the value of sociocultural theory, how it’s different from other approaches, its special value to work in business and organizational environments, and some foundational frameworks of society and culture. Kate recommended the following reading and listening for week one. Yep, that's cyborg-avatar Lucy Suchman with a WALL-E body. You'll also get to see Bruno Latour in Superman trunks. Have fun! You can also participate in the next course cohort. "Techno|theory Deathmatch" by Jay Dautcher, Mike Griffin, Tiffany Romain, Eugene Limb KATE SAYS: Certainly good methodological practices are important. However, our assumptions about people...