This paper examines the cultural counter-flow between ethnography and remote usability testing, specifically what such tools might offer ethnographic practice. I explore how remote usability testing can both extend and delimit ethnographers’ sight lines. Because remote testing has a narrow...
Genre: Paper
The View From The Studio: Design Ethnography and Organizational Cultures.
This ethnographic study of designing explores the relationship between the organizational surroundings of the design studio and the way in which design ethnography activities are accomplished, with a focus on the ways in which design practitioners are actively negotiating and redefining the...
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 future. Design fiction can influence the activities, people, and places in which ethnography is done, and ethnography can create design...
Tell Me Why You Did That: Learning “Ethnography” from the Design Studio
This paper questions the role and form of ethnography in the studio setting through a comparative analysis of interviews with service and brand designers, and the promotional rhetoric of the studio organizations in which they work. It proposes that the way in which designers practice ‘ethnography’...
The Missing Tool in the Design Leadership Toolbox: Integrating Conflict Management into Collaborative Design
Businesses often face the challenge of reaching out to people in contexts that are wholly different from the world they operate in and they are regularly attempting to create experiences for consumers that exist within complicated dynamics of social, economic, political, and cultural flux....
Business, Anthropology, and Magical Systems: The Case of Advertising
Magic is one of the oldest subjects of discussion and theorizing in anthropology. From time to time, anthropologists, as well as other scholars from other disciplines, have suggested that magic is not specific to “primitive” societies, but is alive and well in contemporary industrialised...
Iterating an Innovation Model: Challenges and Opportunities in Adapting Accelerator Practices in Evolving Ecosystems
Startup accelerators have expanded worldwide in recent years, fostering the development of technology startups and spreading Lean practices and Silicon Valley values to all corners of the globe. These accelerators clearly create value—for the teams whose development they foster, the products they...
The Local Ingenuity: Maximizing Livelihood through Improvising Current Communication Access Technology
This paper presents what it means for the low income, non user segment to have ‘technological voices’ and in turn ‘be heard’ socially and economically. It argues that the ICT liberates low income people to explore ways in which technology might help to support their livelihood. We draw on recent...
Changing Diabetes Care for Good
How everyone stands to benefit from a better understanding and use of patients’ perspectives and experiences of life with type 2 diabetes when designing and implementing treatment interventions. The current approach to diabetes management is flawed. Providers’ use of the concepts of...
Embed: Mapping the Future of Work and Play: A Case for “Embedding” Non-Ethnographers in the Field
This paper reflects on an experiment to combine an “ethnographic walking tour” with futures and foresight methods, as a means of enhancing and validating foresight exercises through the addition of valuable first-hand observation. The project, entitled Embed, was created to familiarize senior...