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...
Tag: methods
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,...
The Pop-up Ethnographer: Roles of the Researcher in Temporary Spaces
As our lived reality becomes ever more mobile and networked, society and business has adopted cultures and practices to embrace the creation of temporary interstitial ‘pop-up’ environments. These spaces, which can take the form of work environments (e.g. the UK Innovation Charity Nesta’s...
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
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
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
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...
Tutorial: Fundamentals of Observational Research
Overview This tutorial offers a solid foundation in the art of observation as a field research method for human-centered design and innovation. An expanded, hands-on version of Mike Youngblood's popular EPIC...
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...