Future Frictions: Social Complexity in the ‘Blue Skies’ of Innovation
Innovation is often conceptualized as taking place in ‘open space’, as though the work starts from a tabula rasa in a terra nullius. Design and innovation processes...
Tutorial: From Research to Action – Leading Teams Through Synthesis
Learn strategies and abductive methods for key challenges in the synthesis stage of research and design projects. Overview This video has been edited to protect...
Designing Good Jobs: Participatory Ethnography and Prototyping in Service-oriented Work Ecosystems
Three service design projects, in hospitality, finance, and health care, highlight how to design for agency in the workplace, including the implementation of automated...
Situated: Reconsidering Context in the Creation and Interpretation of Design Fictions
Design fiction and ethnographic methods strengthen each other by creating a creative but rigorous scaffolding for interrogating expectations and reactions to the...
A Thrice-Told Truth
PechaKucha Presentation—“But what do anthropologists do? What kind of special knowledge do you have access to?” This question was posed during one of the salons...
Well, That Was Awkward! The Value of Discomfort
The awkward pause, the impolite topic, and the embarrassing moment are occupational hazards for the ethnographer. Rather than shun these uncomfortable moments and...
Consulting against Culture: A Politicized Approach to Segmentation
Because market segmentations are a familiar managerial artifact, it is easy to overlook the assumptions teams make as they construct these representations. Segmentations...