Perspectives

Perspectives publishes leading global expertise about ethnography in business & organizations. Articles show how integrating theory and practice to understand human societies and cultures creates transformative value for people, businesses and the planet. If you’re interested in contributing, get in touch.

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Perspectives

Ethnography, Ethics & Time

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  "Ethnographers flit forwards and backwards all the time as we create research objectives, wonder whether what we learnt yesterday is really the full story, and create and debate theories." Ethnographers are not time travelers, but we may be close. Our frameworks and methodologies develop a nuanced understanding of how relationships, processes, and objects evolve over time. This 'temporal expertise' is key to enacting our ethical responsibility to the past and future, says anthropologist Dr. Oliver Pattenden, who will explore these themes in his upcoming EPIC Talk on April 25, 2023: From Complex Histories to Possible Futures: Ethical Practice Across Time. In this Q&A, he discusses the intersection of ethnography, ethics, and time; how to encourage organizations to focus on ethics as a core component of decision-making, and what he's learned from his three-year-old son lately. We hope you enjoy this rich conversation! When people think about ethics, time probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. What inspired...

Perspectives

How Can the Job Search Suck Less? Use Ethnography, Community & Reflexivity in Career Transitions

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Photo of the "Golden Bridge" in Da Nang, Vietnam: A yellow-hued bridge is supported by two gigantic hands
"What exacerbates the pain of the job search is how simplistically we define community.... What if we always felt supported by and useful to others, whether in a job or not?" Ethnographers are pathmakers by nature...but navigating the job market and other work transitions can be grueling and isolating. How can design and ethnographic methods, community building, and personal practices help sustain us? EPIC member, design researcher, and career coach Sarah Malin has some strategies to share with you: she's co-facilitating our next Career Pathmaking Meetup on April 4: Job Search Resilience: A Career Support Event for Ethnographers, Researchers, and Strategists. In anticipation, we chatted with Sarah about how to make the job search less soul-sucking, how ethnography informs her work, and the power of a good question. For many, searching for a job can be isolating, draining, and demoralizing. What is the role of community in the job search process? How can we make it more human—and community—centered? I think what exacerbates the pain...

Perspectives

Art & Imagination in Online Qualitative Research: A New Tool for Brand Listening

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How can we engage improvisation and imagination in digital research? By PETER SPEAR, Spear At the beginning of the pandemic, I was pretty sure I was done. I had been a qualitative researcher and brand consultant for 25 years. I had spent the past decade building my practice around an approach that centered contextual and imaginative face-to-face research. I called it brand listening, and it combined ethnographic interviews and free association and projective techniques. In a 2019 project for Tom Brady’s fitness brand TB12, I tagged along with people as they went to the gym, to a stretching session, even a pole dancing studio. I will never forget what Michael showed me about the burden of masculinity, when he confessed to me he would only do yoga at home, out of embarrassment. Or what Lisa showed me about belonging, when she talked about her “pole sisters.” Working for the mattress brand Leesa Sleep in 2018, I was welcomed into people’s homes and bedrooms to explore rituals and routines around sleep. The ability to connect...

Perspectives

Making Tech More Accessible: An Ethnographic Lens on Ability and Disability

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Mural on a street in Croydon, London in blue, light brown, black and cyan colors. A busy image with many different figures that are both humanoid and rectangular/robotic. A central image has three large eyes arranged vertically.
"An ethnographic lens influences us to define ability and disability in a way that is maximally inclusive...many different abilities are present in our world, and each deserves to be taken as its own reality and respected as such." —RICHARD BECKWITH (Research Psychologist, Intelligent Systems Research Lab) & SUSAN FAULKNER, (Research Director, Research and Experience Definition), Intel Corporation EPIC Members Richard Beckwith and Susan Faulkner (Intel) have assembled a panel of luminaries in accessible tech research, design, and engineering for our January 26 event, Seeing Ability: Research and Development for Making Tech More Accessible. In anticipation, we asked them a few questions about their approach to accessibility and key first steps all of us can take to do more inclusive work. How do you define ability and accessibility? How does an ethnographic lens influence your definitions? Ability has to do with what an individual is capable of perceiving or physically doing with their body; accessibility has to do with...

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....

Perspectives

EPIC2023—The Big Reveal!

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EPIC2023 CHICAGO, OCT 22-25  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...

Perspectives

Ethnography for the AI Age: How to Get Started

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By MARIA CURY, MIKKEL KRENCHEL and MILLIE P. ARORA, ReD Associates To influence the development of artificial intelligence, ethnographers must build more partnerships and new kinds of outputs. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made huge strides recently in areas like natural language processing and computer-generated images – every other week seems to bring another breathtaking headline. Engineers, developers, and policymakers in the AI community are more seriously grappling with the fundamental risks that AI poses to society, like perpetuating unfair biases, putting privacy and security at risk, harming mental health, or automating tasks that provide livelihoods for people. As people flock to the fields of 'responsible AI,’ ‘AI ethics,’ and ‘AI governance’ that are all about shaping AI towards what is helpful for humanity, it is time we ask: where are the ethnographers and applied anthropologists? Many are doing ground-breaking work in AI, and reporting back to the EPIC community (see here, here, here, also here for just...

Perspectives

Resilient Customer Archetypes: How Research Teams Can Build an Enduring and Evolving Understanding of Users

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by GILLIAN BOWAN, Atlassian Atlassian teams rely on a range of customer archetypes to empathize with customers, understand their problems, and design solutions that meet user needs. But what happens to these artifacts over time? Do they become anecdotal, fuzzy, weathered and smooth via repetition and distance from primary data? Do they merge with an organization's cultural fabric, taken for granted and beyond the scope of reflection? And how can we, as researchers, sketch out and maintain resilient yet flexible archetypes that hold their shape over time? Members of our growing research team are reflecting on this challenge as we breathe new life into a long-standing trope of customer behavior, The Champion. Broader industry shifts, including the mass transition to cloud apps and changing priorities within our organization prompted our research team to reassess this archetype. Our experience suggests the power of a research community coming together to refresh our data and connect existing concepts to emerging business needs. Through...

Perspectives

What’s Next versus What’s Valuable: Perspectives on the Value of Ethnography in a Future-Focused World

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by LOUISE VANG JENSEN & LEA MøLLER SVENDSEN, IS IT A BIRD A framework for ethnography and futures work that expands our understanding of the nature of change Ethnographers operating in the future-focused context of business consultancy face a core challenge. Our approach is holistic and human-centric, “based on the researcher sharing time and space with the people he or she wants to understand, establishing relationships with them and thereby experiencing life from their perspective” (Kirsten Hastrup et.al: Ind i verden, 2010). Our clients want to stay relevant in the future. They want us to predict future behaviours, aspirations and dreams; to demonstrate what will change, what will disrupt and how people will be different. We’re often confronted with the perception that ethnography is a toolkit limited to exploring present worlds, and therefore holding limited value to futures work and business strategies. This notion relies on a somewhat sci-fi view of the future as something disconnected from the now. As something...

Perspectives

User Research & Engineering: Better Together During Discovery

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by JULIA TAN & CAROLINA ALDAS, Spotify When we think about the “Discovery” phase in the product development process, we often picture product owners, design, and researchers working to understand a problem area, the needs of end users in that area, and testing product ideas that might deliver on those needs. When no product exists yet, it can be difficult to justify Engineering’s time. As such, the Discovery phase tends to be heavily driven by product owners, designers, and insights practitioners by default, and Engineering takes a more active role when product requirements and specifications become more defined. The process looks more like a relay race than synchronized swimming. In the process of passing the baton, important context gets lost and some agility is compromised. We’ve all been there. We devote time and energy to truly understand people, their needs and motivations. We identify and user-test solutions that have a high promise to deliver user and business value, only to find out it’s not entirely feasible...

Perspectives

Seeing the World at Scale and in Depth: A Journey with Big and Thick Data

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by QAMAR ZAMAN, Stripe Partners When I was studying economics at university one of our professors introduced us to Jorge Luis Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science”, a one-paragraph story. It imagines an empire so enthralled by cartography that larger and larger maps of the place are built by successive generations until a map on the same scale as the empire is drawn. Following generations realise a map of such magnitude is cumbersome and “in the western deserts, tattered fragments of the map are still to be found, sheltering an occasional beast or beggar”. Our professor’s point back then was that in a world where trying to see and make sense of too much is impossible, simple models to comprehend the world (and economics was built on simple models) carry immense value. Some years on from that, combining big data and thick data promises the ability to see and understand much more. Their combination can provide maps which are vast but also allow us to make sense of the landscape and people inhabiting them. This piece shows what...

Perspectives

An Interview with Tiffany Tivasuradej

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Tiffany Tivasuradej is a Senior Manager at CBRE and co-chair of the EPIC2022 PechaKucha Committee. Tell us about yourself in one sentence. Anthropologist that’s exploring the future of work for her work and baking a lot when she’s not at work. Why did you say ‘yes’ to being on an EPIC committee? EPIC is such a great organisation and the annual conference is always fantastic - who could possibly not say yes to being on the EPIC committee? When you think about the best proposals you read, what really made them stand out? Relevancy to EPIC’s conference theme, a personal touch, and a compelling and actionable narrative that makes me think, “wow!” Is there a particular talk you’re looking forward to? I definitely look forward to the PechaKuchas as I’m helping to coordinate them! Keynote speakers are also always of interest to me too. Is this your first EPIC? What are you looking forward to at EPIC2022? I first joined EPIC in 2020 as a PechaKucha speaker (albeit online). In 2021 I was invited to act as one of the...

Perspectives

An Interview with Robin Kwong

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Robin Kwong is New Formats Editor at the Wall Street Journal in New York and a member of the EPIC2022 Case Studies Committee. Tell us a bit about yourself. I'm neither an ethnographer nor a researcher, but found my way to the EPIC community through a curiosity about organisational culture and how to help people work better together. These days, I help news organisations adapt to a changing digital landscape, and, in my spare time, I explore the intersection of art and journalism. Why did you say ‘yes’ to being on an EPIC committee? The EPIC community was so welcoming when I attended my first conference, and I learnt so much from the sessions over the years, that I want to give back and help make the conference as good as possible. When you think about the best proposals you read, what really made them stand out? I reviewed the case studies this year, and the best proposals all did a great job at changing the frame of reference. Case studies are invariably about a particular project or piece of research, but the best proposals...

Perspectives

An Interview with Kristen Guth

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Kristen L. Guth is Principal of Product Research at Reddit. She is presenting a case study at EPIC2022 titled "Creating Resiliency of Research Findings: Using Ethnographic Methods to Combat Research Amnesia". Tell us about yourself in one sentence. I am a social scientist research leader focused on change at the intersections of strategy, technology, innovation, and the digital space. Describe your presentation in less than 10 words. A technique to fight research amnesia in organizational memory. Without giving too much away, what is the most interesting finding from your talk? Frame-shifting research into actionable recommendations across multiple sources undergirds validity and enables people to find new resonance in existing work. How do you prepare to speak in public? What’s your process? I run through the slides against a time box and modify to simplify the words and focus on the story. What was your process for writing the proposal? I considered the EPIC program theme and topics of interest in conjunction with organizational...

Perspectives

An Interview with Romit Raj

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Romit Raj is Principal at Quicksand Design Studio in India. He is presenting a paper at EPIC2022 titled "Amplifying Resilient Communities: Identifying Resilient Community Practices to Better Inform Health System Design". Tell us about yourself in one sentence. I am a design researcher and technologist. Describe your presentation in less than 10 words. Identifying resilient community practices to better inform health system design. Without giving too much away, what is the most interesting finding from your talk? That people's perception of their own health is more expansive than the view of health public health systems subscribe to. How do you prepare to speak in public? What’s your process? I will rehearse the presentation a couple of times but never on the day of the presentation. On that day, I will just try and relax. What was your process for writing the proposal? It was a collaborative process. We already had so many amazing things that we learned from an enriching design research process that has been going on for over...