Advancing the Value of Ethnography

Tag: methods

Tutorial: Getting Started with Sensor Data

Tutorial: Getting Started with Sensor Data

Overview Activity trackers, instrumented environments, and other kinds of electronic monitors offer new possibilities and new challenges for ethnographic research. They provide a trace of what goes on when the...

Book Review: The Field Study Handbook, by Jan Chipchase

Book Review: The Field Study Handbook, by Jan Chipchase

Jan Chipchase has done something few of us would dare: write down his trade secrets and give them away in a book. In The Field Study Handbook he shares hard-earned lessons from running ethnographic research projects across the world. At face value the Handbook delivers on its promise. It lays out,...

Creating Business Impact

Creating Business Impact

I recently joined one of our teams in their team room during a visit from a top executive. The room would be recognizable to many readers—walls covered in post-its and flip chart sheets. The executive was immediately skeptical of the post-its. At the end of the session, he didn’t leave the room...

Tutorial: Ethnographic Research Design

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...

Tutorial: Agile for Researchers

Tutorial: Agile for Researchers

Overview Agile is taking the design world by storm, and requiring teams—including researchers—to rethink how we communicate, plan, and act. But is it possible, or even desirable, to apply agile methodologies to...

Building a Useful Research Tool: An Origin Story of AEIOU

Building a Useful Research Tool: An Origin Story of AEIOU

It is awfully nice not to have to invent a basic tool over and over again. For ethnographers, coding and categorization is work that has to happen whether you are studying housework or neurosurgery, with novices or experts, in an exotic location or in suburban Ohio (no offense to my friends and...

Biomimicry: Learnings from ‘The Field’

Biomimicry: Learnings from ‘The Field’

PechaKucha—The natural world is full of researchers – from the smallest of butterflies scoping out the perfect leaf to land on to the largest of elephants retracing the steps of their ancestors to find food and water. Every creature on earth is in a perpetual state of learning to adapt to the many...