information design

Tutorial: Information Design for Ethnographic Analysis

SHEILA PONTIS, Sense Information Design & Princeton University Overview Ethnographic analysis is the examination of raw data with an interpretative lens to identify themes, connections and patterns. How can you make this process more accessible to support data socialization and encourage collaboration from all members of an organization or team? In this tutorial you will learn and practice information design principles and visual frameworks to support research data analysis, translate findings into tangible forms and share learnings with more clarity. This hands-on tutorial will help ethnographic and design researchers analyze and synthesize field research data in a structured and visual way. Tutorial participants will create visuals that keep the power of the text, its meanings and emotions, without oversimplifying or misrepresenting the data. The tutorial will cover: Information design principles for supporting ethnographic research Six ways of seeing and showing for analyzing data and visualizing insights...

Elizabeth F. Churchill / A Profile

EPIC Profiles Series by KATHARINA ROCHJADI, Swinburne University of Technology At 7 am sharp on a Monday morning, Skype broke the silence with an incoming call. On the line was an affable, well-spoken woman with a British accent. It was Elizabeth Churchill, a familiar name in the EPIC community and a founding member of its steering committee. It was a great pleasure to speak with such a prominent figure in ethnographic praxis. Elizabeth is Executive Vice President of ACM SIGCHI and Director of User Experience at Google. Until very recently (in fact, at the time of this interview) she was Director of Human-Computer Interaction at eBay Research, and prior to that founder of the Internet Experiences Group at Yahoo! Research. Elizabeth routinely starts her morning by checking her emails. “I check to see what’s happening in the world, and also to connect with collaborators and colleagues in the research world as well as at my workplace. I like to check in and see if there is anything I need to catch up on as soon as I get up...

The Invisible Work of Being a Patient and Implications for Health Care: “[The Doctor Is] My Business Partner in the Most Important Business in My Life, Staying Alive”

KENTON T. UNRUH and WANDA PRATT In a distributed system of care, patients shuffle among many clinicians and spend the majority of their time away from the treatment center. Although we see the results of patients’ work (e.g., medication taken, arrived at appointment) we do not see the work itself. By failing to see this work, industry overlooks issues with vital implications for their business. To lift the veil of invisibility from patients’ work, we conducted a longitudinal field study to uncover the invisible work breast cancer patients do to obtain information, bridge inter-institutional care, manage dependencies and resolve inconsistent recommendations. In this paper we provide detailed examples of this work and explore the impact on patients and health-care operations; identify patterns of work with implications for patient-centered research and design; and propose common information spaces to improve patients’ work through designs that highlight dependencies, preserve state information, link recommendations to justifications,...