Government websites and online services are often built with limited input from the people they serve. This approach limits their ability to respond to ever changing needs and contexts. This case study describes...
Tag: government
Anticipating the Unanticipated: Ethnography and Crisis Response in the Public Sector
This case study emphasizes the importance of ethnographic research in the public sector, specifically regarding emergency preparedness and crisis-response. In the summer of 2020, Surrey County Council in England...
Designing for Dynamics of Agency in NYC Homeless Shelters
Public sector innovation (PSI) is an emerging multidisciplinary field that is attracting practitioners from a wide range of sectors and industries, with a correspondingly broad set of skills and experience. PSI aims to significantly improve the services that a government has the responsibility to...
Designing and Envisioning a More Resilient Social System: How to Start from What’s Good to Create Something Better in Public Services
Segurança Social (Portugal’s Social Security System) offers multiple service channels to the people. However, they were not perceived as a whole because the assistance was not standard, depending on the channel...
#GoingEthno in the Indian Bureaucracy
Case Study—Based on experience of working in the Department of School Education, Government of Haryana on a Management Information System being built to reduce administrative workload on teachers and bureaucrats, this case study describes how ethnography was used to understand and address the...
Ethnography of Civic Participation: The Difficulty of Showing Up Even when You Are There
Article 3 in the series Data, Design and Civics: Ethnographic Perspectives The days of gathering in the forum are long gone. Today, the sphere of American civics is teeming with new forms of participation—from emergent advocacy organizations like MoveOn.orgi and shifting information paradigmsii to...
Becoming Digitally Resilient: Understanding the Gap between Online Government Services and Low Ability Users
In the Netherlands, approximately 2.5M people struggle to use technology in their daily life and are unable to use online governmental services independently. People with low digital literacy are increasingly...
Changing the Perspective of Government
Case Study—This case study highlights the value of ethnography in changing a client's perspective. New Zealand's productivity has been deceasing, and the government wants to reverse that trend. Empathy's government client believed that macro-level forces were having a major impact on the...
Introduction to “Data, Design, and Civics: Ethnographic Perspectives”
This post introduces the series "Data, Design, and Civics: Ethnographic Perspectives" edited by Carl DiSalvo. With all of the civic hackathons, civic tech meetups, and civic innovation teams bustling around the world, you’d think we'd have the challenges of government and civil society figured...
The Way to Design Ethnography for Public Service: Barriers and Approaches in Japanese Local Government
This paper introduces various barriers hindering the introduction of ethnography in support of public service design improvement in Japan, and discusses ways to overcome these barriers. Service design approaches using ethnography are gaining popularity in the public sector, especially in Europe....