Intelligences

Intelligences

Tutorial: Power Tools for Equity in Research & Design

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Tutorial: Power Tools for Equity in Research & Design
This tutorial gives you and your teams robust, actionable tools for navigating inequity and shifting power hierarchies, from project planning to implementation. Instructors: CHELSEA MAULDIN, Executive Director, Public Policy Lab & NATALIA RADYWYL, Head of Research & Capability, Today Design Overview This video has been edited to protect the privacy of participants in the live tutorial. To do ethical, equitable work in any domain, we need robust tools for assessing and addressing power. Whether we’re creating products, services, or policies, inequities can create direct and indirect risks for research participants and underserved populations. This tutorial gives you robust, actionable tools for navigating inequity through a project life cycle, including planning, research, design, and implementation. You will: Identify power dynamics in research and design projects Learn frameworks and tools to navigate power dynamics through a project lifecycle Learn power-based assessments to use with individuals...

Intelligences

Tutorial: An Ethnographer’s Guide to 360 Video

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Tutorial: An Ethnographer's Guide to 360 Video
Gain a critical and technical understanding of the benefits, affordances and production workflows of 360 video as an ethnographic and research medium Instructors: KARL MENDONCA &  BRYAN WOODS, Google Overview This video has been edited to protect the privacy of participants in the live tutorial. A goal of ethnographic fieldwork is to be able to experience the world from another person’s perspective, inhabiting their point of view as they go about their everyday routines, tasks, and interactions. For ethnographers and researchers, the growing availability of high-quality 360 video presents an opportunity to get a deeper understanding of other points of view, as well as instill a deep and profound sense of empathy toward end-users in our stakeholders. And with the turbulence of the pandemic, it has been an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of contextually situated behaviors when actual co-presence was restricted. As we embrace and learn to work with this incredible medium, we must ask core ethnographic...

Intelligences

Tutorial: The Ethnographic Arts of Interviewing

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Tutorial: The Ethnographic Arts of Interviewing
Learn what makes ethnographic interviews distinct and distinctly valuable, how to develop interview protocols that align with a research brief, and specific skills for engaging with research participants. Instructor: MICHAEL G. POWELL Overview This video has been edited to protect the privacy of participants in the live tutorial. Interviews are research bread and butter. But a method often referred to as “common” and “easy” actually comprises a vast terrain of approaches, techniques, theory and analytical frameworks—not to mention the interpersonal and sensory arts at the heart of interviewing. This tutorial provides a grounding in ethnographic interviewing, which generates unique value by prompting and actually participating in the articulation of our participants’ worldviews and discourse. It covers framing questions, asking questions well, actively listening, providing feedback and prompts for exploration. You will learn: How to think about research project design in ways that value ethnographic...

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

The Myth of the Pipeline Problem: Creating a Diverse and Thriving Team

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Photo of Shakima Jackson-Martinez presenting on stage at EPIC2022
SHAKIMA JACKSON-MARTINEZ Senior Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at AnswerLab with support from Kristin Zibell, Director of Products and Services at AnswerLab Corporate leaders issued countless statements decrying racism and investing in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in 2020. As a result of the pandemic and the ongoing racial reckoning that year, the overlap between societal events and corporate commitments became sharply visible. But the actions on those commitments, less so. Focusing on DEI sparks all sorts of biased statements from colleagues like, “There are no Black/Trans/Women researchers,” “We don’t want quality to suffer,” and “There’s no pipeline, these folks just aren’t out there.” In the face of these false and racist sentiments, researchers, leaders, and managers can create diverse and thriving teams. Shakima Jackson-Martiniz, Senior Director of DEI at AnswerLab, a research and insights firm, has done just that. In this PechaKucha, she will tell the story of how...

Intelligences

Social Resilience: Shifting from an Individual to a Shared Social Model for Building Resilience

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A women sitting on what appears to be a metal bunk with no mattress in a prison cell. A handwritten label at the bottom of the image reads "feel unworthly locked up" (sic?)
JENNY RABODZEENKO Allstate KELLY COSTELLO Panorama Innovation Through Designing Your Future workshops at Cook County Jail in Chicago as part of WIND (Women Initiating New Directions) programming, we have had the chance to connect with incarcerated women awaiting trial. From these interactions with women who, despite tremendous life adversity, are extremely resilient, we have realized that the notion of resilience is a double-edged sword. While heroic, the myth of individual resilience, in the context of criminal justice, may simultaneously allow society to abdicate responsibility for those in jail. In this PechaKucha, we propose a reframe, from individual to social resilience, which holds us all accountable. Through understanding the many types of adversity faced by at-risk women throughout their lives, especially mental health and substance abuse challenges, we show historical and current precedents for more humane solutions that enhance individual resilience via social support. The presentation concludes with a call to...

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

The Next Billion Creatives

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Presentation slide: three photos of people doing flips. Three clips of overlain text: "Aspirational influencers". "Indian flippers." "Best tiktok flips."
Keynote Speaker: PAYAL ARORA, Erasmus University Rotterdam & FemLab Payal Arora is a digital anthropologist, a TEDx speaker, and an author of award-winning books, including ‘The Next Billion Users’ with Harvard Press. Her expertise lies in user experience in the global south, digital inequality, and inclusive design. Forbes named her the “next billion champion” and the “right kind of person to reform tech.” She is a Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Co-Founder of FemLab, a future of work initiative. Payal’s work explores key issues in designing for, with, and in the Global South. Design has long been dictated by the aesthetic taste, values, needs, concerns, and aspirations of consumers in the West—but the “next billion users” are pioneering creative ways to repurpose design in ways that we are currently failing to capture. Does localization go against universal design principles? Is diversity scalable? How do we do justice in representing the voices of non-users or limited users?...

Intelligences

Defining Social Determinants for Resilient Health

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Kurt Ward speaking on stage at EPIC2022
Keynote Speaker: KURT WARD, Philips Healthcare Kurt Ward is a Senior Design Director at Philips Healthcare who is responsible for strategic alliances and collaborations across businesses and partners to stimulate, inspire and explore new value spaces and innovation opportunities. He is based at Philips in the Netherlands and has led global design teams for over twenty years. He was previously the Director of research at Westwood One/CBS networks in New York. Kurt’s work focuses on redefining social determinants for resilient health. To design sustainable and adaptable health systems in the future, how can we reframe our understanding of humanity’s relationship with ourselves and the natural world? Throughout his 22 years at Philips Design, he has constantly honed his skills and developed design thinking across many areas of the company. From Philips’ brand identity to helping to craft its mission and vision. From managing customer event experiences across Europe to the concept development and creative direction...

Intelligences

Creating Companies and Products Conducive to Life

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Melissa Gregg presenting on stage at EPIC2022
Keynote Speaker: MELISSA GREGG, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel Melissa Gregg is a senior principal engineer in user experience driving carbon reduction and green software strategy at Intel. With a Ph.D. in gender and cultural studies, she is a widely cited author, theorist, and ethnographer, with over 60 peer-reviewed publications and books. Her research has appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Fortune, The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, and CBC, and has been translated into Russian, Mandarin, and Korean. Melissa joined Intel in 2013 after a career in academia. She led Intel Labs’ first university investment in the social sciences before building user research to a position of strategic impact in the PC business. In client computing, her research informed a range of initiatives to support a more flexible and agile office, women’s role in the smart home, and increasingly responsive, energy-efficient laptops (Project Athena/ Intel EVO). Her current focus is driving sustainability strategy through software and open-source...

Intelligences

Resisting Resilience: An Anthropologist’s Paradox

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Slide from presentation: a photo of wavy patterns in beach sand with footprints.
NADYA POHRAN University of Cambridge Resilience can be a tremendous asset to any individual’s ability to carry on despite difficulties. At the same time, revering resilience without a healthy amount of respect for emotional vulnerability—by which I mean the intentional choice to tap into our emotional beings and allow ourselves to deeply experience the emotions that arise in us doing our fieldwork and analysis phases of ethnographic research—can be a hindering block to doing good anthropological work. Drawing upon three examples from my personal work as an anthropologist—one from academic research in interreligious relations, one from a healthtech start up context, and one from doing ethnographic work in corporate settings—I call out for anthropologists to not neglect our emotional experiences. I point back to the often-referenced “empathy” within anthropological spheres and, looking at empathy as both a cognitive and an emotional phenomenon, I join the conversation of others who are arguing for the intentional...

Intelligences

With the Phone in the Field: Making the Ethnographic Toolbox Resilient to Change

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close-up phooto of an eye looking to the right
SIGNE HELBO GREGERS SØRENSEN Alexandra Institute The characteristic smell that makes you think of a summer cabin and the warm feeling when touching a wooden surface. It was such sensory insights that we hoped to obtain during a study with the aim to explore people’s experiences of living in wooden houses. But then the COVID pandemic hit. Instead, we had to find ways of entering people’s homes through digital means and at a distance. One day during the study we received a message from one of the informants via the app that was used to collect snapshots of their homes: “ (..) But I see no reason in showcasing my private home on video and if you can’t proceed without it, I’m done with your silly study…” With the phone in the field, what had suddenly happened? This submission explores these digitally mediated encounters with a post-phenomenological lens, as it can give us insight as to what happens when trying to make ethnography resilient to change. By reflecting on technology’s mediating role, we can harvest...

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...