Despite companies facing real consequences for getting ethics wrong, basic ethical questions in emerging technologies remain unresolved. Companies have begun trying to answer these tough questions, but their techniques are often hindered by the classical approach of moral philosophy and...
Tag: technology
It’s Not Childs’ Play: Changing Corporate Narratives Through Ethnography
Case Study—After discovering that there were over 25 projects going on in various business units in the company that involved children as end users, and that most people had a limited understanding of children's play, the researchers proposed a multi-cultural ethnographic project called...
Pushing New Frontiers: Examining the Future of Paper and Electronic Documents
Rapid socio-technological change is underway in the world of work. The Xerox Future of Work team conducted ethnographic studies to explore the impact of these changes on the use of paper, printing, and electronic documents. Study findings revealed needs and requirements for workers of...
Ethnography, Ethics & Time
Ethnographers are not time travelers, but we may be close. Our frameworks and methodologies develop a nuanced understanding of how relationships, processes, and objects evolve over time. This 'temporal expertise' is key to enacting our ethical responsibility to the past and future, says...
Implementing EMRs: Learnings from a Video Ethnography
This yearlong video ethnography of a healthcare clinic that transitioned from a paper process to a scanning solution documents in detail how the new technology impacted different groups in the clinic. While the scanning solution reduced the retrieving, filing, and paper-processing work for the...
The Politics of Visibility: When Intel Hired Levi-Strauss, or So They Thought
This paper examines the politics of visibility – the ways in which the work of ethnographers is positioned inside and outside organizations not only as means of unpacking the “real-world” but often as means to create business and marketing differentiation. We contend that the institutional...
Drawing from Negative Space: New Ways of Seeing Across the Client-Consultant Divide
Focusing on the client-consultant relationship, well honed, but perhaps overly so, this paper aims to shed light on the conditions that at once streamline and challenge our collaborations. To do so, we borrow a page from the visual arts; namely an experimental method of representation called...
The Cackle of Communities and the Managed Muteness of Market
Researchers at EPIC face something of a trap. Situated in an ethos of twenty first century consumer capitalism, our professional duties overemphasize individual consumers, and the products of our research always diverge towards our respective corporations’ interests. As a result we have little...
Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Ethnography and Selective Visibility in the Technology Sector
As ethnographers practicing within an engineering driven industry, we often struggle with visibility and its effects. Exposing the methodological and technical underpinnings of ethnographic practice can bring us closer to the teams we work with, but it can also draw attention to the ways that...
(In)visible partners: People, Algorithms, and Business Models in Online Dating
[contrib_author post_id='566' name='ELIZABETH F. CHURCHILL'] and [contrib_author post_id='566' name='ELIZABETH S. GOODMAN'] [s2If is_user_logged_in()]Download PDF[/s2If] A confluence of personal, technical and business factors renders priorities, practices, and desires visible – and...