For its volume, velocity, and variety (the 3 Vs), big data has been ever more widely used for decision-making and knowledge discovery in various sectors of contemporary society. Since recently, a major challenge increasingly recognized in big data processing is the issue of data quality, or the...
Genre: Paper
Acting on Analytics: Accuracy, Precision, Interpretation, and Performativity
Case Study—We report on a two-year project focused on the design and development of data analytics to support the cloud services division of a global IT company. While the business press proclaims the potential for enterprise analytics to transform organizations and make them ‘smarter’ and more...
Can I Get a Witness? The Limits of Evidence in Healthcare Quality Evaluation Systems in American Hospitals
“I got verbals, but verbals don’t hold up in court….I need it in black and white.” After Sheila submits hospital quality data to the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), reports indicate that her data hasn’t been received. She makes countless calls to the CMS Help Desk to get answers....
Mobility is More than a Device: Understanding Complexity in Health Care with Ethnography
This case study on mobility in health care demonstrates how ethnography and design research helped Intel meet the business challenge of redressing market share. Ethnography enabled the team to assess the interplay between mobile devices and other hospital technologies, understand how they fit...
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...
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...
The Stakes of Uncertainty: Developing and Integrating Machine Learning in Clinical Care
The wide-spread deployment of machine learning tools within healthcare is on the horizon. However, the hype around “AI” tends to divert attention toward the spectacular, and away from the more mundane and ground-level aspects of new technologies that shape technological adoption and integration....
Who We Talk about When We Talk about Users
I begin with some questions: how have the theories and methods which subtend design research been changed by their migration from academy to industry? How have they adapted to their new commercial culture? What languages and customs have they had to acquire to fit in? To address these questions, I...
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...