Advancing the Value of Ethnography

Tag: design research

Reassembling the Visual

Reassembling the Visual

  In her presentation to EPIC, Kimbell reflects on how data are visualized and how they are experienced. Drawing on work in the visual arts and design, she considers what practices that seem to be gathering and visualising data are actually doing, from installations such as her project...

Empathy as Faux Ethics

Empathy as Faux Ethics

“The term ‘empathy’ has provided a guiding thread for a whole range of fundamentally mistaken theories concerning man’s [sic] relationship to other human beings and to other beings in general.” —Martin Heidegger Popular design discourse is full of articles, books, and conference presentations on...

How to Scale a Culture of Human Understanding

How to Scale a Culture of Human Understanding

IBM is big. We have around 350,000 employees including 20,000 design and user experience professionals, and only a fraction of them are experienced design researchers. Many of you reading this also work in or with large enterprise organizations and, as you know, at that scale it can be easy to get...

Midway Atoll

Midway Atoll

PechaKucha Presentation We live our lives in contexts of overlapping systems. Developing the skill to connect dots of evidence between social, ecological and economic evidence offers the potential for more effective interventions in complex challenges. Sarah Brooks, Sarah Brooks’ teaching and...

How New Social Design Captures the Social with Photographs

How New Social Design Captures the Social with Photographs

New social design defines “the social” rather than material things as its main design object, and builds usually on ethnographic research techniques in capturing the social. Designers use camera in their fieldwork but unlike social scientists, they build their camera practices on a variety of...

Primate Pathmaking

Primate Pathmaking

PechaKucha—This presentation explores the 3 guiding principles for research to create impact: clarity, coordination, and curiosity. Without all these elements, research struggles to make impact for the intended users. In this case, the user is Jojo, a silverback gorilla. Jojo was 80 pounds...