participatory research

Intelligences

Reconnecting with the Public: Participatory Research and Co-creations within and outside a Public Institution

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LOK YI LEE Brandnographer XINYI JIANG Brandnographer Despite constraints on face-to-face meetings and social distancing policies under COVID-19, with the help of online tools, Brandnographer successfully conducted a series of online activities to facilitate stakeholders from different age and background to immerse themselves in situated scenarios, then to design and visualize their ideal public services in the future. This paper discusses how a participatory approach and design thinking framework have helped the researchers and decision makers collect thick data from the service users, transform user insights into prototypes for reiteration and concrete design principles. On the other hand, how the blurred identities in between observers, participants and designers have stimulated discussions and design possibilities by supplying real-life scenarios and evaluation on solution feasibility. Article citation: 2021 EPIC Proceedings pp 43–57, ISSN 1559-8918, https://www.epicpeople.org/epic...

Intelligences

Tutorial: Power Tools for Equity in Research & Design

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Power Tools for Equity in Research & Design
CHELSEA MAULDIN (Executive Director, Public Policy Lab) & NATALIA RADYWYL (Research Director, Public Policy Lab) This tutorial gives you robust, actionable tools for navigating inequity through a project life cycle. Overview This tutorial was conducted at EPIC2021. Exercises and discussions have been omitted to protect the privacy of participants. To do ethical, equitable work in any domain, we need robust tools for assessing and addressing power. Whether we’re creating products, services, or policies, inequities can create direct and indirect risks for research participants and underserved populations. This tutorial gives you robust, actionable tools for navigating inequity through a project life cycle. Public Policy Lab developed Power Tools over many years of innovative and effective work with at-risk communities. Across planning, research, design, and implementation, the instructors will teach you how to use Power Tools to check biases, inform theories of change and logic models, identify effective participatory...

Intelligences

Empowering Communities: Future-Making through Citizen Ethnography

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SUMANT BADAMI Habitus/Macquarie University, Department of Anthropology SOPHIE GOODMAN Sophie Goodman Research This paper proposes a way to harness the power and benefits of community-led future change through the process of “citizen ethnography”. Just as “citizen science” has become a potent method for non-scientists to collect and contribute to scientific knowledge and outcomes, citizen ethnography is where non-ethnographers are trained in the tools and techniques of ethnography to research social phenomena to understand, recommend and lead their own change initiatives. Citizen ethnography essentially flips the model of a single or small team of ethnographers and consultants working with a community, to one where groups of community members research their own challenges in order to identify their own needs, preferred futures and mechanisms for change. Importantly, this approach requires a significant ‘stepping away’ of the ethnographer as the research expert and move towards a role of skill-builder, coach and...

Intelligences

Scaling Out (Not Only Up): Distributed Collaboration Models to Get Work Done

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ALICIA DORNADIC MindSpark NIKKI LAVOIE MindSpark SHEILA SUAREZ DE FLORES 10 10 10, Eco.tter ELVIN TUYGAN MindSpark In this catalyst, we the authors describe the benefits of ‘scaling out’: reaching out beyond one's organization to bring in external partners to accomplish UX research. Organizations scale out their research efforts in order to cover more ground, draw from more specialties, or conduct more research more quickly than they would be able to alone. As opposed to growing an in-house team to meeting research needs (‘scaling up’), scaling out can be a more inclusive approach to generating user insights, where the voices of diverse research partners throughout the world are brought together to produce powerful UX research outcomes. A case study example of work with suppliers and clients illustrates scaling out. Collective intelligence pushes scaling out even further, as it counts research participants, users and potential users as part of the network of partners who get work done. Keywords: distributed collaboration,...

Intelligences

Tutorial: Participatory Visual Research—Getting the Most from Collaborative Methods

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KRISTA HARPER University of Massachusetts Amherst Overview Participatory visual research methods like Photovoice open up opportunities for collaborative sense-making and advocacy. In these methodologies, data and knowledge are produced not only as an end product, but also in process. As participant-researchers contribute to research design, ethical discussions, data collection, analysis, and presentation of results, they communicate users’ values and concerns that can inform better organizational practices and improve products and services. In the first part of this workshop, you will learn about participatory visual research methods, from their foundations as methodology developed in the global South to promote the public’s “right to research” (Appadurai) to their application in a variety of organizational settings and design projects. In the second segment, you will take part in a hands-on Photovoice workshop exercise designed to open up questions of visual representation, ethics, and participation. In the final...

Intelligences

Hearing Through Their Ears: Developing Inclusive Research Methods to Co-Create with Blind Participants

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GREGORY WEINSTEIN This paper recounts research into the orientation and mobility experiences of people who are blind or visually impaired, and describes the novel sonic research method I developed for this purpose. “Participant Phonography,” as I call the method, aims to empower research participants with low or no vision through the self-guided creation of sound recordings that represent their experiences of the world in a first-person perspective. More broadly, the paper highlights the inadequate efforts of ethnographers in industry to tackle challenges of disability and reflects on the ethical challenges that face researchers who want to include disabled people in research. Inclusive methods like participant phonography have great potential to break down traditional power structures that have rendered non-normative groups marginal in user research, but these methods also come with substantial barriers to their implementation in a corporate context....

Perspectives

“Understanding the World through Engagement”: Jeanette Blomberg, A Profile

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EPIC Profiles Series by CHRISTINE T. WOLF, IBM Research How can risk-taking propel an ethnographic career? Just ask Jeanette Blomberg, who is no stranger to professional risk-taking. Her career journey, including major contributions at foundational tech giants in Silicon Valley, has centered on making participation in various forms core to ethnographic work. Jeanette is Principal Researcher at IBM Research – Almaden Research Center (ARC), where she has been for 13 years. Previously, she was Director of Experience Modeling at Sapient, Professor at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, and founding member of the Work Practice and Technology group at Xerox – PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). I’ve gotten to know Jeanette over the past year, working as an intern and student researcher in the area of work practice analytics under her guidance at IBM. We set aside time to discuss her professional experiences on the occasion of her recent induction into IBM’s Academy of Technology, a high honor within the corporation...

Perspectives

Working for Social Change

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by CHUCK DARRAH, San Jose State University Chuck Darrah and Jeanette Blomberg are Host and Discussan of the EPIC2016 Salon Working for Social Change. Join them at EPIC2016! No matter the source of your employment, whether in the commercial sector or academia, we all want our work lives to add up to something positive. Yet it is easy to wonder how this or that project actually affected the world for better or worse. What can we do to make the next project better? How can we take what we learned so we can repeat the success in other projects or settings? Jeanette Blomberg and I have been engaged in an extended conversation with each other for over a decade about the relationship between our day jobs and our interest in promoting social change. The EPIC2016 Salon Working for Social Change is a chance for our community to reflect on the complexities of making the world a better place through our labor as EPIC practitioners and academics, both individually and collectively. Jeanette has spent a career working primarily in the...

Perspectives

The Para-Ethnographic Trajectories Of Professional Ethnography

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by MICHAEL G. POWELL, Shook Kelley Professional anthropologists frequently occupy unique roles, simultaneously inside and outside the organizations we work for or work with. Most of us are already adept at negotiating these roles, but don’t necessarily highlight this skill as something of great value, either to professional ethnography or to the broader intellectual life of anthropology. We should. Our role in the broader field of anthropology often remains marginal and our position—at once inside and outside, betwixt and between—is somewhat precarious and vulnerable (eg, Reddy 2012 touches on this, as do some of her guest bloggers). But it also affords opportunities. Professional anthropologists cross and complicate existing boundaries: collaborating with, debating, struggling with, writing about, negotiating, navigating and translating between different dynamic audiences. Embracing our hybridity is a powerful recognition that our difference is relevant and valuable. I offer here a story of my experience as a professional...