The promise of generative AI technologies is seductive to product leaders: frictionless research in which...
Genre: Paper
Toward an Ethnography of Friction and Ease in Complex Systems
This paper offers frameworks and tools to support complexity- and systems-oriented approaches in design...
Government Forms as Friction: Identifying Opportunities for Innovation at the Intersection of Staff and Resident Needs
This paper explores a key friction in service delivery that is inherent in forms – the ubiquitous and seemingly...
The Sound of Friction: How to Do Things with Listening
This paper assesses listening from an ethnographic perspective and demonstrates its value and applications across...
Accessibility as Apparatus: How the Friction Filled Experience of Using Hearing Aids with a PC Led a Corporation to Design for Accessibility
This paper presents ethnographic studies of hard of hearing (HoH) users that had significant impacts on the...
The Uncommon Good: Making Room for Radical Transition Imaginaries
Public, social and community organizations are, in many locales, driving systems change toward social and...
Favoring Friction: Examining Hotel Browsing and Buying through the Lens of the Bazaar
This paper demonstrates the importance of combining social and cultural analysis with pricing and economic logics...
In Pursuit of Authenticity: Commodified Community, Curated Experience, and Fandom
This paper assesses the economic impacts of hyper-monetization, immersive advertising, and general shifts in...
The Ethnographer in the Machine: Everyday Experiences with AI-enabled Data Analysis
This paper proposes a model of researcher-AI interaction and argues that ethnographers can smartly leverage AI in...
Local Frictions in the Energy Transition: Design Anthropology for the Emergence of Energy Communities
Critical challenges in energy transitions are social and cultural - not just technical and economic. This paper...