visual methods

Intelligences

Tutorial: An Ethnographer’s Guide to 360 Video

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Tutorial: An Ethnographer's Guide to 360 Video
Gain a critical and technical understanding of the benefits, affordances and production workflows of 360 video as an ethnographic and research medium Instructors: KARL MENDONCA &  BRYAN WOODS, Google Overview This video has been edited to protect the privacy of participants in the live tutorial. A goal of ethnographic fieldwork is to be able to experience the world from another person’s perspective, inhabiting their point of view as they go about their everyday routines, tasks, and interactions. For ethnographers and researchers, the growing availability of high-quality 360 video presents an opportunity to get a deeper understanding of other points of view, as well as instill a deep and profound sense of empathy toward end-users in our stakeholders. And with the turbulence of the pandemic, it has been an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of contextually situated behaviors when actual co-presence was restricted. As we embrace and learn to work with this incredible medium, we must ask core ethnographic...

Intelligences

Amplifying Resilient Communities: Identifying Resilient Community Practices to Better Inform Health System Design

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Diagram called "Strands of Health." Six strands of different colors are wound together, then unravel. The strands are labled: Environmental Health; Social Health; Physical Health; Emotional Health; Financial Health; Spiritual Health
ROMIT RAJ Quicksand Design Studio BABITHA GEORGE Quicksand Design Studio CRISTIN MARONA Matchboxology REBECCA WEST Ipsos ANABEL GOMEZ Independent Technical Advisor TRACY PILAR JOHNSON The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ADITYA PRAKASH Quicksand Design Studio SUNNY SHARMA Ipsos AYUSHI BIYANI Quicksand Design Studio MRITTIKA BARUA James P Grant School of Public health, BRAC University CAL BRUNS Matchboxology Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has been an inflection point, bringing heightened awareness around the preparedness and resilience of public health systems in dealing with severe shocks. While the pandemic has accentuated the existing weakness in public health systems, for many, especially those belonging to marginalized sections of society, seeking healthcare has always been fraught with severe challenges and frictions. This paper presents the findings from a two-year design research project conducted in South Africa and Bangladesh, which studied the challenges faced by health seekers, especially those...

Intelligences

Tutorial: Ethnographic Video—Storytelling for Impact

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Ethnographic Video: Storytelling for Impact
Instructors: CHARLEY SCULL (UX Researcher, Facebook), NICK AGAFONOFF (Director, Real Ethnography) & PRABHAS POKHAREL (CEO, Reduct) An end-to-end approach to scoping, planing, shooting, editing and sharing video ethnography projects. Overview This tutorial was conducted at EPIC2021. Exercises and discussions have been omitted to protect the privacy of participants. We’ve all seen the power of a well-crafted ethnographic video to capture the attention, and imagination of the room, whether that room is a design studio, a classroom or a boardroom. At its best, it can generate empathy, reveal insights that would be impossible to describe, and build conviction and consensus, in ways that can lead to alignment on what action to take next. In this EPIC 2021 tutorial we will show you just how accessible this powerful form of expression can be to produce. Join experienced video ethnographers and editors, Nick, Charley, and Prabhas, to explore the craft of ethnographic storytelling for impact, through video. You will leave...

Intelligences

EPIC2019 Ethnographic Film

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The film session at EPIC explores the ways ethnographic practitioners have used moving images to interpret data, share insights, and tell the stories of their work. Filmmakers showcase these forays in visual storytelling by screening examples and discussing the limits and possibilities of the form. Films were selected through anonymous review. Program Introduction, Charley Scull Food for Thought: The Path to Food Security in Newark, RUCHIKA MUCHHALA, Third Kulture Media The Learning Library: Using Ethnographic Film as an Organizational Change Tool by Scaling Human Insights across a National Preschool System, HAL PHILLIPS & MEG KINNEY, Bad Babysitter Clyde in Mulberry, ALLEGRA OXBOROUGH, Aero Creative Agency in the Smart Home of the Future, NICK AGAFONOFF, Real Ethnography Introduction CHARLEY SCULL, Committee Chair and Film Session Curator Considering the theme of agency through the lens of film offers many avenues for exploration, in terms of both the stories that film can feature and the power...

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

Creative Photography through Ethnographic Research

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GABRIELA OLIVEIRA INSITUM PechaKucha Presentation This is a short story of when my sides of researcher and photographer met during a trip to the rural countryside of Brazil, where I went to research about internet connectivity, but ended up learning more about human relations. Photography creates connection between people, much like ethnography, and they interlace in a deeper level than just registering of fieldwork. Visual registration of research can be as valuable as the content gathered from the conversation, and photography can enable both analysis and creativity in a researcher, by prompting him or her to train an observing eye to both content and surroundings. Thinking of photography as a tool as valuable as interviewing activates new ways for researchers to use their humanity to face ethnographic research. Gabriela Oliveira is a Brazilian research strategist based in São Paulo. gabriela.a.deoliveira@gmail.com 22019 EPIC Proceedings, ISSN 1559-8918, https://www.epicpeople.org/epic...

Intelligences

Educating the Educators: An Entire Franchise Preschool System Embraces Ethnographic Insights to Improve Brand Experience and Drive Growth

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MEG KINNEY Bad Babysitter HAL PHILLIPS Bad Babysitter This case study demonstrates the radius of influence that ethnographic insight can have throughout an organization as well as how it can be tied to business outcomes. This case also represents the power of video ethnography as a robust and enduring data set that provides a visceral, contextual, human record capable of aligning and galvanizing cross functional teams. At the cusp of aggressive expansion, Primrose Schools needed to address cascading business issues: low brand awareness relative to key competitors in new markets, brand engagement (vis a vis online content), and disappointing conversion rates for Parent enrollment. The first half of the case describes the design and key findings from our Parent Enrollment Study. Early education in present day America is contextualized against a backdrop of new parenting philosophies, socio-cultural relationships with smartphones and social media, and wage stagnation. The second half of the case illuminates how broadly the ethnography-inspired...

Perspectives

The EPIC Gallery: A Space for Action and Intervention

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by MAKALÉ FABER CULLEN “We don’t fail because we are not intelligent or erudite enough; we fail because we don’t present our stakeholders with engaging material that will improve their ideas. We choose the medium which makes us comfortable, not the one our stakeholders would prefer.” — Sam Ladner, Practical Ethnography (159) Our work as ethnographers, as social scientists, is rich, experiential, relational, multi-dimensional and full-sensory. As often as we can, we immerse ourselves in communities and in landscapes and then—we heighten all our senses, turn down our ego and try to understand the context. Nothing is as important as context. We document and analyze these contexts and the individuals and objects within them, refining them for a new context of service design or product development that is itself a whole new ecosystem of relationships, ethics, finances, goals, timescapes. Businesses and organizations have distinct customs, rituals, and standards for creating "evidence-that-counts." EPIC2019...

Intelligences

Evidence Outside the Frame: Interpreting Participants’ “Framing” of Information when Using Participatory Photography

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TABITHA STEAGER Pacific AIDS Network This paper discusses the benefits and challenges of participatory photography as ethnographic evidence and how as researchers we can “read” the evidence our participants create. Drawing on examples from an ethnographic study examining concepts and constructions of community on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, I examine how we can interrogate photographs as data rather than factual evidence. Adages such as “the camera doesn’t lie” support the view of photography as a purveyor of truth. Photos accompanying journalistic dispatches from far-flung outposts around the world are seen as authentic evidence of real-world situations. Amateur videos of people’s life experiences are filmed on smart phones and then posted to YouTube to be taken as authentic representations of life events. Early ethnographic uses celebrated photography as the ultimate tool for showing that anthropologists had actually “been there,” displaying the exoticism of other cultures in factual black and white....

Perspectives

Evidence before Art: An Ethnomethodological Approach to Video Ethnography in Commercial Research Contexts

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by NICK AGAFONOFF, Real Ethnography/The Practice Insights I think of myself as a video ethnomethodologist1 – a social scientist who utilises disruptive techniques (social experiments) in conjunction with technical videography to explore, document and represent how people subjectively make sense of and navigate their everyday worlds in relation to brands, products and services. My films and their usefulness depend entirely on the scientific process that I employ to facilitate objectification of the lived experience data collected, otherwise referred to as the evidence. My films become art the moment they become about my own subjective experience; the moment I depart from being an objective social scientist. At EPIC2017 in Montreal, I had the pleasure of presenting my 10-minute documentary Andrew’s Story, an emotional portrait of a man who had recently experienced a permanent disability but was refusing to claim on his disability insurance. My client wanted to understand why people like Andrew are not making claims when...

Intelligences

Emotional Landscapes: Observing and Capturing the Emotionality of Experience

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BRIDGET MONAHAN Vellichor Design PechaKucha Presentation This Pecha Kucha details how the imperative to employ visual thinking in doing ethnographic research work led to a fascination with capturing, through photography, the unguarded, natural emotions people express in their daily lives. It explores the differences in meaning behind these displays and the forcefulness of expressions captured in everyday lived situations. We, as researchers, pay attention to and interpret the words people say but often leave these emotional traces and visceral reactions undisturbed. An ongoing study of and immersion in these visible emotions formed a body of work around “emotional” landscape photography. Bridget Monahan, is a researcher and photographer. She has worked as a design researcher for a number of product design and innovation agencies, including MAYA Design, Razorfish, and Sapient. In 2017, she started Vellichor Design to concentrate more fully on her art and writing and to work as an independent consultant in the areas...

Intelligences

Instax as Objects of Record

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DAVID PETER SIMON Atlasssian PechaKucha Presentation—Instant camera images can act as a physical-digital assistant and craft richer ethnographic records. The author particularly underlines the importance of photography for design field research, drawing upon his fieldwork work in Uganda. Starting by briefly contextualizing the history of photography in research practice he introduces the concept of Spradley's“objects of record” (1979). How can we optimize the use of instant photography with participants, and make operable projects in corporate contexts. David Peter Simon is a senior design researcher at Atlassian, a software company. Before Atlassian, David was a design fellow at Medic Mobile, producer for World IA Day, experience designer with ThoughtWorks, and blogger on Indie Shuffle. David studied digital ethnography and information visualization at the University of Oxford (MSc). 2017 EPIC Proceedings, ISSN 1559-8918, epicpeople.org/intelligences...

Intelligences

Tutorial: Virtual Reality and Ethnographic Research

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KARL MENDONCA Amazon Music ADELE RAY Filmmaker; Berkeley City College OverviewWith growing interest across domains and industries in Virtual Reality (VR), this seminar style and hands-on tutorial gives participants essential skills for producing and incorporating virtual reality 360 video into ethnographic research. Participants will: Develop a critical understanding of VR by understanding it within a longer history of visuality and media studies. Learn about different workflows covering capture (cameras, rigs), editing (software) and distribution (viewing platforms) as well as technical elements behind successful VR (frame rates, camera movement, avoiding motion sickness). Review examples of VR based research methodologies such as diary studies, walk-throughs, contextual interviews, etc. Work hands-on with a VR camera to complete a short project based on a theme or set of research questions. This video includes only the presentation portion of the tutorial. Assigned Readings: Remediation...

Intelligences

Plus Size Fashion: What Happens when Stereotypes, Fueled by Popular Culture, Creep into a Retailer’s Business Decisions?

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MEG KINNEY Bad Babysitter HAL PHILLIPS Bad Babysitter Case Study—This case demonstrates the power of video as a data collection tool and a storytelling approach to the presentation of research findings. Fresh Produce Clothing specifically selected Bad Babysitter as a consulting partner for their expertise in video-based ethnography and narrative style of delivery. The case begins with contextualizing a business with an imperative to evolve and an organizational culture that was not aligned. The locus of the debate was the Plus Sized shopper – a consumer segment that put interpretation of hard data by headquarters at odds with impassioned anecdotal inputs from the field. Video offered a visceral way to get past conjecture and “bring her into the room”. The primary benefit to the brand was the immediacy for translating learning into actionable insights and consensus on the way forward. The revenue impact was dramatic: leadership took a 180-degree turn from phasing the Plus shopper out to investing in her....

Intelligences

How New Social Design Captures the Social with Photographs

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ILPO KOSKINEN School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University New social design defines “the social” rather than material things as its main design object, and builds usually on ethnographic research techniques in capturing the social. Designers use camera in their fieldwork but unlike social scientists, they build their camera practices on a variety of sources, often artistic and journalistic rather than analytic. This paper explores how new social design captures the social with photographs. It shows that the main unit of social action in photography is the design act. Place on the other hand remains a non-analytic feature that conveys the sense of having been there, but does not go deeper into the social. The most analytic constructs in photographs are diagrams and other representations. Discussion links these observations into the professionalization of design and its aesthetic rather than analytic base....