tacit knowledge

Intelligences

Preservation through Innovation: New Works Inspired by Tradition

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Zosha Warpeha playing the violin on stage at EPIC2022
ZOSHA WARPEHA Independent Artist In this Wildcard presentation at EPIC2022, violinist and composer Zosha Warpeha speaks about her artistic research in Norway, which involved an immersive study of Nordic traditional music and the development of a highly personal solo performance practice. This session illustrates a participatory model of ethnographic research through which the artist built an embodied knowledge of traditional music and laid the groundwork for artistic expansion. She speaks about aural transmission in traditional folk music, tacit knowledge attained through embodied practice, and reciprocal relationships between bodies in space. She also discusses the tension between two visions of preservation—one that captures a tradition in a single moment in time and one that allows the tradition to organically evolve alongside a community—and makes the case for the necessity of innovation as a method of preservation and resilience. This video includes a short musical performance that demonstrates the culmination of the...

Intelligences

Can Any Hairdresser Fix a Car?: Mechanics Seeking Agency in Automated Car Diagnostic Contexts, and How Observing Agency Can Help Designing a Car Diagnostic Tool

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CHLOÉ HUIE BRICKERT _unknowns GUILLAUME MONTAGU _unknowns As part of an international research conducted for a French car manufacturer, a team of anthropologists and designers were asked to analyze the use of a car diagnostic tool by mechanics in their garages, in order to recommend ways of improving it. A single glance at the diagnostic tool’s interface was enough to get a feel for mechanics’ new reality: lines of codes and numbers, webpages filled with blue hyperlinks leading to readymade repair methods. Does being a mechanic in an automation era mean anything anymore? Based on findings from a study conducted in 5 countries with mixed ethnographic and UX methods, this case study explicits the interest of understanding mechanics as a profession – or even more, as an art – before studying the use of the tool itself, and mostly, it demonstrates how solutions can be contained in agency – and how design and tech teams can find inspiration from bypasses, local initiatives, and informal rituals. From supervising an international...

Intelligences

Eye Tracking in Medical Ethnography: Evaluating Evidence for Perception, Action, and Collaboration in Healthcare Professions

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LARRY S. MCGRATH Design Science Consulting, Inc. Using eye tracking in ethnographic research poses numerous theoretical and practical challenges. How might devices originally intended to record individuals' vision of two-dimensional planes be useful in interpersonal contexts with dynamic visual interfaces? What would the technology reveal about collegial environments in which different levels of knowledge and expertise come together and inform decision-making processes? Why would pupil movement show us anything that conventional ethnographic methods could not? In this paper, I argue that these challenges are not intractable. When tailored to specific questions about perception, action, and collaboration, eye trackers can reveal behaviors that elude ethnographers' gaze. In so doing, the devices enrich the observational and interview-based methods already employed in ethnographic studies of workplace dynamics. Hospitals are a fruitful context in which to test the value of eye-tracking evidence. Healthcare professionals look, interpret,...

Perspectives

The Virtues of the Visceral

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Soldiers check papers and take valuables at the checkpoint at A Day in the Life of a Refugee.
by SIMON ROBERTS, Stripe Partners The news on BBC Radio this morning: The Syrian crisis enters its seventh year with 400,000 dead and little hope that this complex catastrophe will be untangled any time soon. The scale of suffering is huge, but Syria accounts for just a fraction of an even more staggering number – the UNHCR estimates there are 65 million refugees or internally displaced people worldwide. Like many others I watch the steady stream of grisly news from Syria – it comes to us in facts, figures, infographics, human stories and historical comparisons. I've been shocked. But I am also inoculated. Whatever the quality of the reporting, however harrowing the scenes, our attention moves on. It is difficult to truly grasp the scale of what we have seen, hard to understand what it must be like to be a refugee. In an age when a seemingly limitless amount of information is at our fingertips, when we can know more than ever about events around the world, we still fail to understand. Here’s the challenge of contemporary...

Intelligences

Strategy as an Unfolding Network of Associations

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TOM HOY Stripe Partners TOM ROWLEY Stripe Partners Cast Study—This case explores a business strategy development project run by Stripe Partners for a London-based online healthcare company, Dr Ed. The first part lays out the details of the process: an intense four-day ethnographic research programme called the ‘Studio’ involving the Dr Ed senior management team. The second half reflects on the outcomes of the process one year on through a series of management interviews, and evaluates the contribution the Studio made in relation to the new business strategy. The evidence from the case suggests that the concept of strategy can be reappraised. From strategy as a static set of choices made at a specific point in time to strategy as an unfolding network of people, shared experiences and artefacts that is constantly being remade. The primary benefit of the Studio approach is its capacity to initiate, align and catalyse a ‘strategy network’. Studios are effective because they combine ethnographic encounters with collective problem...