This paper demonstrates the value of ethnography for housing and property development markets where urbanization...
Tag: urban
Friction and Innovation in Chicago Neighborhoods
https://vimeo.com/803229626 "Friction can be either good, bad, or something in between. But it will always be the start of change." The South Side of Chicago—site of EPIC2023 and the neighborhood where Tayler Ulmer grew up—was birthed from friction. In this Lightning Talk, Tayler explores how...
Tutorial: Spatial Ethnography – A Place-Based Approach to Research
Overview Understanding how people use and engage with their physical surroundings adds depth and dimension to your ethnographic analysis, enabling you to design better products and services. This tutorial...
Cities as Anticipatory Systems: Analyzing “Weak Signals” to Explore Beyond the Predictability of Their Future
In the last decade, Future Studies have developed a very important corpus of theory and methods aimed to analyze the future of cities. Meanwhile the world is confronted with major challenges like climate change, global pandemics, migration, inequality and poverty, government agencies, professional...
Out to Dry: Change and Agency Across Urban China
PechaKucha Presentation This PechaKucha will take the audience on an intimate, visual exploration of the evolving ways that clothing is dried outside across urban China as drying practices are forced to adapt to limitations by evolving regulation and perceptions of urban modernity. Increasingly,...
Human Sensemaking in the Smart City: A Research Approach Merging Big and Thick Data
This paper aims to contribute to the debate on the integration of ethnography and data science by providing a concrete research tool to deploy this integration. We start from our own experiences with user research in a data-rich environment, the smart city, and work towards a research tool that...
To Have and Have Not: Exploring Grammars of Sharing in the Context of Urban Mobility
This paper explores cultural differences in the practices of car sharing in the context of urban mobility. Challenging the all too frequent and often uncriticial uses of the term “sharing economy”, we argue for a more granular representation of practices that occur when “sharing” meets “economy”,...
What is a Sustainable Innovation? Cultural and Contextual Discoveries in the Social Ecology of Cooking in an African Slum
This paper investigates how a close understanding of human activity can inform the design of culturally and contextually sustainable innovations for subsistence markets. Building on existing literature related to poverty alleviation initiatives and an ethnographic field study, this project...
“Hey, the water cooler sent you a joke!”: ‘Smart’, Pervasive and Persuasive Ethnography
Article 6 in the series Data, Design and Civics: Ethnographic Perspectives How must we conjure up smart spaces? ‘Smart city’ has become an over-indulged urban metaphor, whipping up an apparition of dispersed, highly networked and interconnected socio-economic, infrastructural and communication...
Ethnographies of Future Infrastructures
Article 4 in the series Data, Design and Civics: Ethnographic Perspectives On April 1, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced a $317 million federally funded initiative in textile innovation and manufacturing—a national consortium of public and private organizations to be led by MIT. It’s...