In the past year, our team encountered unexpected friction when recruiting efforts resulted in zero participants...
Tag: health
Let’s Chat!: Prototyping, Productive Frictions, and Radically Restructuring Adolescent Sexual Health Counseling Interactions
This case study examines the use of iterative prototyping to raise concerns important to adolescents and...
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 commissioned a mixed-method Community Impact Assessment to better assist and serve...
Architecture Can Heal: Spatial Literacy to Protect COVID-19 Healthcare Workers
In April 2020, a study of The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City was conducted to better understand the challenge of adapting idealized infection control design guides to site-specific conditions during a pandemic. The study aimed to capture quick interventions that are working, offer a new...
Adapting to the Lack of Agency: Research in Prisons
PechaKucha Presentation How can a researcher adapt to the lack of agency in secure environments? HM Inspectorate of Prisons in the UK published in 2012 a thematic report about the use of the “person escort record” (PER) with detainees at risk of self-harm, highlighting the high number of deaths in...
Self-Ethnography: Or, How I Earned my Berkeley Citizenship in an Ethnographic Journey through the Crunchy Granola and the Scientific
PechaKucha Presentation A researcher who used to combine “thinking + feeling” lines on a journey map found herself on the feelings frontier by widely exploring new innovations in neuroscience, psychology, and mind-body connection, alongside the resurgence in popularity of “old” ways of healing –...
Caregiver/Family Agency: Rebuilding Confidence, Play, Familiarity, and Passion in a Healthcare System
During recovery and transition to the ‘new normal’, the loss of agency for patients and families of patients who go through a major health disruptor such as transplant, cancer, or cardio-vascular disease can be profound. Considering this, how can acute care hospitals help solve for caregivers’...
Owning Our Devices: Learning from People Who Adapt Tech for Well-Being
Margaret Morris interviewed by Anna Zavyalova Public debate has rightly focused on the perils and toxicity of new technologies, and questioned the motivations of the companies building them. Meanwhile though, people are creatively adapting technology to their own social and psychological needs....
Taking Sides in E-cigarette Research
In the last ten years, an eclectic mix of electronic nicotine delivery products (‘e-cigarettes’) and practices have proliferated in the US with little restriction, producing a vast array of vaping mechanisms, flavors, and styles. At the same time, anti-tobacco movements have targeted e-cigarettes...
Ethnography Is the Path-Maker to Better Care: Paving the Way to a Patient-centric Healthcare Model
This paper presents a clear and flexible model for understanding the concept of patient-centricity. This model emerged from our own ethnographic work in healthcare contexts, and was tested and strengthened with a literature review and interviews with experts and thought leaders in the healthcare...