Advancing the Value of Ethnography

Tag: EPIC2018

Play it Back: Research as Intervention

Play it Back: Research as Intervention

PechaKucha Presentation The social welfare system was built to protect the vulnerable through the provision of basic needs. I left my social service job to join an organization with a mission to shift that system from safety nets to trampolines - from services designed to maximize safety, to those...

Working with Intuition

Working with Intuition

PechaKucha Presentation Evidence, today, can have very narrow definitions. For digital products, this type of evidence usually includes clicks and engagement metrics. I believe that in our effort to only listen to numbers and data, we have created a culture that looks down on intuition as...

Screenplay, Novel, and Poem: The Value of Borrowing From Three Literary Genres to Frame Our Thinking as We Gather, Analyze, and Elevate Data in Applied Ethnographic Work

Screenplay, Novel, and Poem: The Value of Borrowing From Three Literary Genres to Frame Our Thinking as We Gather, Analyze, and Elevate Data in Applied Ethnographic Work

Applied ethnography still struggles with the fundamental challenges of (1) framing research to obtain ‘thick’ data, (2) making sense of data in teams and with clients, and (3) making a convincing case with data in challenging environments. We have observed that borrowing from literary genres can...

How Is Evidence Created, Used & Abused? EPIC2018 Opening Remarks

How Is Evidence Created, Used & Abused? EPIC2018 Opening Remarks

We chose Evidence as the EPIC2018 theme in part to explore this question of why some things constitute evidence and not others. There are lots of factors we could point to, but since I’m standing next to a data scientist the first one I’ll talk about is digitization. Digitization changes how...

The Root Cause is Capitalism… and Patriarchy

The Root Cause is Capitalism… and Patriarchy

Case Study—The authors used anthropology and other design research methods to develop a new kind of study to capture the world of professional creatives and the people they work with. To uncover core collaboration challenges for professional creatives the authors asked them to walk through past...