This paper explores recent developments in anti-work theory to identify key learnings for ethnographers in industry. It focuses in particular on how anti-work perspectives allow us to rethink the managerial...
Genre: Paper
Cultivating Resiliencies for All: The Necessity of Trauma Responsive Research Practices
This paper is an exploration of trauma, how and why it can surface during ethnographic and qualitative research, and the importance of anticipating its potential presence. We present a model to help plan for and...
Toxicity v. toxicity: How Ethnography Can Inform Scalable Technical Solutions
While a number of scholars have studied online communities, research on games has been mostly focused on the business, experience, and content of gameplay. Interactions between players within games has received less attention, and toxic behavior is a newer area of investigation in academia....
Hybrid Methodology: Combining Ethnography, Cognitive Science, and Machine Learning to Inform the Development of Context-Aware Personal Computing and Assistive Technology
The not-too-distant future may bring more ubiquitous personal computing technologies seamlessly integrated into people's lives, with the potential to augment reality and support human cognition. For such technology to be truly assistive to people, it must be context-aware. Human experience of...
Human-Centered Data Science: A New Paradigm for Industrial IoT
Few professions appear more at odds, at least on the surface, than ethnography and data science. The first deals in qualitative “truths,” gleaned by human researchers, based on careful, deep observation of only a small number of human subjects, typically. The latter deals in quantitative “truths,”...
Back to the Future of Work: Informing Corporate Renewal
This paper describes the results of a multi-year ethnographic study of how knowledge workers integrate new technology into their work practices. We studied mobile and remote workers who use smartphones, tablets, cloud computing, and social networking to support their work. Study findings describe...
Detroit is a Blank Slate: Metaphors in the Journalistic Discourse of Art and Entrepreneurship in the City of Detroit
This paper presents an investigation of metaphoric language in the contemporary discourse of Detroit’s “renewal.” News articles from local and national news sources from 2009-2011 provide evidence of critical and provocative metaphoric constructions found in the gentrification discourse of...
Framed by Experience: From User Experience to Strategic Incitement
Ethnographic and other related practices in industry focus – for a variety of historical reasons – primarily on studying the experiences of individuals/institutions as consumers/users. We suggest that this framing limits our work to descriptive forms of knowledge, and renders invisible larger...
The Sound of Friction: How to Do Things with Listening
This paper assesses listening from an ethnographic perspective and demonstrates its value and applications across...
Fluid Friction: The Case for Friction in Public Safety Design
I Don’t Know What To Do… The moment she heard the beep come through her headset, Tess switched gears immediately. Moments earlier, she’d just wrapped up a non-emergency 101 call with a man who had found himself face to face with a weasel in his back garden. She and her colleagues had been shaking...