Making an Impact

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Around the world EPIC Members are doing amazing things! Their achievements inform and inspire our community, advancing the value of ethnography. Check out this recent work:

[full_width]Meghan McGrath, a design researcher on the IBM mainframe security team with a background in ethnography, oral history, and poetry, is profiled in the Designing Women series by Fast Company. Like poets, says Meghan, “the responsibility of a design researcher is to push past assumptions, and to recognize the seemingly mundane details of everyday life that could lead to more successful human-centered design.”[/full_width]

[full_width]Genevieve Bell (ANU/Intel) has bold plans to create a new applied science for the 21st century—and she’s looking for interlocutors like the amazing people in the EPIC community. She’s also presenting the prestigious 2017 Boyer Lectures on what it means to be human in a digital world—you can attend live (in Australia) or subscribe to the podcast. [/full_width]

[full_width]EPIC feels like family and sometimes it really is—our distinguished sister members Julie Norvaisas (Director, User Experience Research, LinkedIn) and Stefanie Norvaisas (Director of Strategy, Design Concepts) are profiled on the dscout blog.[/full_width]

[full_width]Julia Haines (Google) is part of the inaugural class of the ACM’s Future of Computing Academy, a platform to “empower the next generation of computing leaders.” Get to know Julia and her work on the contributions of ethnography to venture capital and startups.[/full_width]

[full_width]Nancy Frishberg (Research & Strategy) has seen it happen again and again—Agile teams fail without UX research. In a new article in Communications of the ACM (with G. Convertino) she shares 5 common reasons for failure and how to avoid them.[/full_width]

[full_width]In his new essay Navigating Ethics, management consultant Carsten Knoch (Carsten Knoch Consulting) argues that ethnography helps break out of the narrow, normative frameworks in business that can blind us to the ethical implications of our work.[/full_width]

[full_width]Erin Taylor (Holland FinTech) recommends 10 essential books in economic anthropology—tackling issues from central banks and microcredit to factory work and smuggling. Also check out Erin’s article How to Talk about Money: Ethnographic Approaches to Financial Life.[/full_width]