Hi everyone, my name is Adam Singer. I’m a Strategist at Gemic and I’m new to the world of ethnography. Gemic is a strategy consulting firm founded by anthropologists that embeds anthropological and social science theory and methods into the core of its work. It uses these tools among others to...
Driver-partners in the queue for ride requests at SeaTac are interviewed by members of Uber’s brand experience and design teams as part of an ethnographic field survey, November 2017. Photo by Adam Williams. Uber is a technology company rooted in the physical and social geographies of mobility...
by [contrib_author post_id='6169' name='Arvind Venkataramani'], EPIC2016 PechaKucha Panel Lead Even in a heterodox community such as EPIC, ‘Papers’ can feel like a forbidding mechanism for generating knowledge and exchanging ideas. To those not accustomed to, or comfortable with, thinking verbally...
We’re honored and excited to welcome EPIC2021 keynote speaker Jason Edward Lewis, Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University, to our conference and community! Lewis is a thinker and maker whose work on next-generation AI systems fuses the technical and creative, mechanical and...
At EthnoBorrel, an ethnography meet-up that I co-run in the Netherlands, we talk about the issues ethnographers face in their applied practice. One term in particular keeps cropping up: impostor syndrome. The people who attend our meetups are highly educated, capable practitioners who apply their...
What texts had a profound impact on you in becoming the anthropologist or social scientist you are? I sent this query to colleagues on the anthrodesign listserv and contributors to the Handbook of Anthropology in Business. Initial responses escalated into an unexpected flood of (sometimes...
by [contrib_author post_id='3114' name='Donna Lanclos'] (Univ. of North Carolina Charlotte) Come on, people—show us the shoes: #shoetweet @epicpeople_org You can think I'm irrationally obsessed with shoes if you want, but if you’ve never thought about the profound sociality of the #shoetweet,...
As Facebook approached its tenth birthday earlier this year, we took the opportunity to assess our progress thus far—and to gear up for all the work we still have to do—when it comes to pursuing our company’s mission to make the world more open and connected. Facebook is used in nearly every...
In the past decade we have witnessed the proliferation of mobile platforms, social media, and cloud computing. At AnswerLab, the user experience research firm where I work as a researcher, we have seen demand for ethnographic research steadily grow as technology becomes more and more a part of...