The practice of ethnography can be described, among other ways, has having the emergent qualities of relationality, fluidity and creating a sense of place. These qualities also inform who we are at EPIC, our growing community and our location in NYC for 2014. Moreover, ethnographic practice...
I recently joined one of our teams in their team room during a visit from a top executive. The room would be recognizable to many readers—walls covered in post-its and flip chart sheets. The executive was immediately skeptical of the post-its. At the end of the session, he didn’t leave the room...
https://player.vimeo.com/video/1038669025?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479 Working in an organization as large as Shell and as a Senior User Researcher, I have been thinking about how to land my work more effectively. Last year I worked on strategies of communicating...
Researchers across all industries have endured periods in which their business value was questioned. In industry terms, research is a cost center, so throughout economic downturns, research has often felt the brunt of company downsizings. This held true for researchers in tech during recent (and...
Almost a decade ago, after I successfully transitioned from a post-doc in academia to an industry job at Facebook, I started receiving emails and LinkedIn messages asking for advice. The situation in academia was (and continues to be) dire: after the 2008 recession, the number of tenure-track jobs...
A VR headset floats in empty space, then a man straps it onto his head. A series of clips flash before our eyes: a guy wearing a jetpack jumps off a building, a pair of arms dodging a horde of zombies, two giant figures looking over a miniature island, C3P2O and R2D2. A voice off-screen introduces...
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...
The future, of course, is inherently unpredictable. As the EPIC2021 theme Anticipation begins, “There are no future facts. Yet we humans constantly create potential futures.” People create futures when they begin to see alternate possibilities and situations where their decisions—and those of...
For almost 85 years, Consumer Reports has been detecting and anticipating shifts in consumer need for products and services so that we can guide consumer choice with rigorous research and testing. When the COVID-19 pandemic started to peak in March 2020 in the U.S., our ability to access the 63...
Some years ago a renowned UK-based charity invited me to help them understand why their legacy donations had flat lined for two years. The conventional wisdom had been that charitable donations had decreased as a result of the financial crisis in 2008. But when a statistical analysis showed that...