The promise of generative AI technologies is seductive to product leaders: frictionless research in which...
Tag: methodology
The Sound of Friction: How to Do Things with Listening
This paper assesses listening from an ethnographic perspective and demonstrates its value and applications across...
Tutorial: Spatial Ethnography – A Place-Based Approach to Research
Overview Understanding how people use and engage with their physical surroundings adds depth and dimension to your ethnographic analysis, enabling you to design better products and services. This tutorial...
Tutorial: Beyond “Quant-vs-Qual”—Creating Collaborative Inquiry
Overview Qual and quant are so divided these days—by academic discipline, language, communities of practice, job titles. Too often, quantitative research is conflated with data science (or vice versa), and data...
Tutorial: Ethnographic Research Design
Ethnography is closely associated with the core qualitative methods of interviewing and observation. But ethnographers in business often work with a broad range of other methods, from video and diary studies to...
Speculating about Autonomous Futures: Is This Ethnographic?
As researchers working on automated vehicles, we are grappling with fundamental questions about how to do research and design for the future. Or, to be more precise, how can we tap into and participate in futures that are in the process of being made, that may both reproduce and rearrange...
The Automation of Qualitative Methods
Introduction Anthropology and its methodologies cannot easily be automated. However, both design and engineering based organizations are attempting it. I argue that this is based in part on historic legacy systems, a misunderstanding of the ethnographic toolkit, and an over-reliance on the...
Tell Me Why You Did That: Learning “Ethnography” from the Design Studio
This paper questions the role and form of ethnography in the studio setting through a comparative analysis of interviews with service and brand designers, and the promotional rhetoric of the studio organizations in which they work. It proposes that the way in which designers practice ‘ethnography’...
Knowing a Country: A Post-Brexit Polemic
"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." —Lenin My country has changed so dramatically in the last few days that I don’t know where to start. I don’t know if I even know my own country anymore. I am reeling. Shocked. Dismayed. Worried. I am not alone in...
Sensemaking Methodology: A Liberation Theory of Communicative Agency
[this is one of two posts on sensemaking; see also the companion piece Sensemaking in Organizations by Laura McNamara] I’ve seen a lot of methodology fashion come and go. Before completing a doctorate that really anchored my work in ethnography, I was trained as a cognitive psychologist, designing...