digital ethnography

Intelligences

The Ethnography of a ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization’ (DAO): De-mystifying Algorithmic Systems

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Slide from presentation: A cartoonish drawing of a dumpster in an alley with eyes and a smile, half open, with flames coming out of the open side. Label underneath dumpster sayd "Governance". Slide title is "The Field Site: 'Decentralized Autonomous Organization' (DAO)... A.k.a:"
KELSIE NABBEN RMIT University, Centre for Automated Decision Making & Society / BlockScience MICHAEL ZARGHAM WU Vienna / BlockScience This paper details ethnographic methods, experiences, and insights from an ethnographer and an industry engaged complex systems engineer in how to study resilience in blockchain-based DAOs as a novel field site. Amidst digitization of numerous elements of government, work, and everyday life, ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’ (DAOs) provide a field site for the generation of ethnographic insights into opportunities and limitations in organizational resilience in human-machine assemblages. As a broad organizational form, DAOs aim to enable people to coordinate and govern themselves through automated rules deployed on a public blockchain (Hassan & Di Filippi, 2021). DAOs are an experiment in ‘computer aided governance’. These adaptive, socio-technical infrastructures are envisioned as capable of restructuring the foundations of governance in human societies (Merkle, 2016;...

Intelligences

The Future of Hygiene: Constructive Expansive Futures

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SIDDHARTH KANORIA Quantum Consumer Solutions DIMITRI BERTI Quantum Consumer Solutions CHRISTI KOBIERECKA Unilever There has been significant interest in Futuring as a discipline after COVID-19, as multiple industries are beginning to interrogate their post-Covid future. Quantum Consumer Solutions and Unilever came together to interrogate the post-COVID future of hygiene in Europe, to inform brand and product strategy for Unilever. This project took a culture-first approach to futures, with a diverse and inter-disciplinary team working together using an Agile approach. Using a mixed-methods approach, the team used a combination of digital ethnography, speculative design and an Opportunity Spaces framework to distill the future of hygiene into ten Opportunity Spaces for Unilever. Readers can expect to learn more about why a culture-first approach to futures is recommended, how speculative design could represent an ‘ethnography of the future’ and how a simultaneously analytical and creative approach to futuring could be...

Intelligences

Reconnecting with the Public: Participatory Research and Co-creations within and outside a Public Institution

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LOK YI LEE Brandnographer XINYI JIANG Brandnographer Despite constraints on face-to-face meetings and social distancing policies under COVID-19, with the help of online tools, Brandnographer successfully conducted a series of online activities to facilitate stakeholders from different age and background to immerse themselves in situated scenarios, then to design and visualize their ideal public services in the future. This paper discusses how a participatory approach and design thinking framework have helped the researchers and decision makers collect thick data from the service users, transform user insights into prototypes for reiteration and concrete design principles. On the other hand, how the blurred identities in between observers, participants and designers have stimulated discussions and design possibilities by supplying real-life scenarios and evaluation on solution feasibility. Article citation: 2021 EPIC Proceedings pp 43–57, ISSN 1559-8918, https://www.epicpeople.org/epic...

Intelligences

Tutorial: Using a Mobile Research Platform for Multi-dimensional Ethnography

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JULIA KATHERINE HAINES Google BOB EVANS Google Overview The TRACES methodology focuses on foundational research at multiple levels of granularity and across multiple dimensions, digital and embodied. It is an approach to gathering more meaningful data around people’s daily lives, as they move within and between different devices, services, environments and product ecosystems. In this tutorial, participants will learn about TRACES and how to implement it using the Paco mobile and desktop behavioral research platform. Paco is an open source tool used around the world in both industry and academia. It can capture both emic and etic perspectives using sensors and logs, surveys, experience sampling, triggers, and prompts. Background on TRACES and Paco: Toward Multi-dimensional Ethnography, Julia Haines Paco: Applying Computational Methods to Scale Qualitative Methods, Bob Evans This tutorial was presented in full at EPIC202020. The video includes instructor presentations; discussions and breakout sessions...

Intelligences

Tutorial: Digital Ethnography in Domestic Spaces

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JENNY KENNEDY RMIT University ROWAN WILKEN RMIT University Overview This tutorial explores research in people’s homes through digital methods. The instructors focus on how to utilize participant’s existing digital skills and materials to undertake ethnographic research on and in their home environment, and develop a greater awareness of how geographical and socio-economic circumstances impact the research process. Participants collaborate to discuss how understanding of domestic contexts might frame our research design and specific methods, and consider ways for enhancing the collaborative and participatory process of data collection in the domestic space. This tutorial was presented in full at EPIC202020. The video includes instructor presentations; discussions and breakout sessions are excluded for the privacy of the participants. Instructors BROWSE ALL TUTORIALS...

Intelligences

Towards Multi-Dimensional Ethnography

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JULIA KATHERINE HAINES Google, Inc. In this paper, I argue for the value of multi-dimensional ethnography. I explore the potential for ethnography to venture beyond sites, into different dimensions. As an example of work moving in this direction, I present a new approach, dubbed TRACES, which emphasizes the assemblages that constitute our lives, interweaving digital, embodied, and internal experiences. Various data streams and sources provide different vantage points for analysis and synthesis. I illustrate how we have used these to gain greater insight into the human lives we study, with different data sources providing different perspectives on a world, then delve into our use of tools, data sources, and methods from other traditions and other fields, which, combined, give us not only a more holistic picture, but a truer one, which refutes the false dichotomy of the digital and the real. I argue that we must continue to adapt and extend ethnography today into such spaces, and that reformulating the sites of ethnography as dimensions...

Intelligences

The Lifecycle of a Washing Machine: Transforming the Customer Experience for a Home Appliance Manufacturer

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BETH KELLEY Doblin, Deloitte Consulting LLP JENNIFER BUCHANAN Doblin, Deloitte Consulting LLP Case Study—This case study explores a customer experience transformation strategy and development research project run by Deloitte for a multinational U.S.-based home appliance manufacturing company. It explores the shift in strategy and approach for the company based on the team's digital ethnographic research, as well as applying the ethnographic method to a non-traditional data source (digital and social media). Part one lays out the background on the client and the team and challenge proposed by the client. Part two lays out the details of the team's methodology and process of evaluating social data using ethnographic and other qualitative and quantitative methods. Part three reflects on the findings of the research and how these differed substantially from the client's assumptions. Part four evaluates the contribution the digital-based research made in providing a new perspective on the enterprise's customer experience strategy...

Intelligences

LOLZ OMG, I’M DEAD. The Rise of Performative Behavior in Social Media, and Its Implications for Digital Ethnography

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KATHLEEN HARTNETT SapientNitroDownload PDF PechaKucha—Performative behavior is an action taken specifically with an audience in mind, to elicit a response or reaction. Digital Ethnography encounters this on a daily basis, as we study behavior on social & digital networks where performative behavior is rampant. As a research source, social media behavior is often dismissed because of it’s orientation towards performance – but as people lead more omni-channel lives, the distinction between online and offline lives is becoming harder to discern. As such, we need to start viewing performative behavior as extensions of fully formed individuals. This means today’s Ethnographers need to become Digital Ethnographers as well, to better understand individuals as the sum of both thier online & offline personalities. Kathleen Hartnett lives in Brooklyn, NY and works at SapientNitro, where she leads the Social Insights capability within their Consumer Intelligence Practice. She is passionate about understanding how social...

Perspectives

Digital Living and Sensory Perception: Implications for Ethnography and Design

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by SARAH PINK, RMIT University As an ethnographer working at the interface of theory and praxis, I frame my research by the need to understand the sensory and digital environments in which we live. Approaching the world through the prism of the digital and sensory offers us a novel and effective way of engaging with contemporary social and environmental challenges – like those relating to energy, safety or privacy – which are also challenges for industry. But why these particular turns to the digital and the sensory? And why now? Every few years ethnography gets caught up in a new theoretical ‘turn’, a novel way of thinking that casts existing paradigms into critical relief. Sometimes it feels like theory turns so often that, if we took each trend seriously, we would get caught up in whirlpool of abstraction. We have been through the reflexive, gendered and embodied turns of ethnography of the 1980s and 1990s. More recently we’ve seen Christine Hine’s Virtual Ethnography and Ethnography for the Internet, Tom Boellstorff...