PechaKucha Presentation What if I told you, that humans are not very special? That the very qualities that make us human are not pre-given features but are rather properties generated by our participation in the world at large. In this view, humans are not mere expressions of blueprints. Rather,...
Genre: PechaKucha
Confessions Across Digital Distances
PechaKucha Presentation Digital environments can expand the distances between people. While this is often challenging, it can also be leveraged to do great things. This PechaKucha explores how we can take this negative divide between people and flip it on its head to discover more powerful...
The Story As Evidence: It’s Yours, It’s Mine, It’s Theirs
PechaKucha Presentation I've been reflecting on my role in the use and abuse of evidence — in the past as a radio producer and more recently as a writer in a design research company. Storytelling is held aloft as something businesses need to do more of — and be better at — but often the narratives...
Diagnosing the World Pulse
PechaKucha Presentation This PechaKucha explores the ethics of interpreting data by employing an extended metaphor of data as the lifeblood of the connected world. It begins by exploring two distinct viewpoints on medical pulse diagnosis, starting from the perspective of the acupuncturist...
Invisible Evidence: Our Disconnection with Broadband Connectivity
PechaKucha Presentation When our broadband connectivity at home stops working, it’s a crisis. When it does work it is magic, an invisible miracle most of us don’t understand. Our evidence for whether it is working great or barely working at all, is scant, murky and elusive. The telecommunications...
Indian Classical Dance: The Foundational Element in My Practice of Ethnography
PechaKucha Presentation Do we really understand how we became practitioners of ethnography? In this talk, I go through a re-discovery of the links between my lifelong training in Indian classical dance and the elements this has instilled in my current practice of ethnography. In dance, we are...
A Dirty Perspective On A World Too Clean
PechaKucha Presentation We live in a world where we tend to categorize, quantify and measure a wide array of everyday aspects - from kWh consumption in our homes to Facebook-likes. We argue that this urge to categorize and standardize is problematic as we run the risk of oversimplifying reality....
Using Your Feet: Subverting the Structure of Meetings to Help Teams Go Further Faster
PechaKucha Presentation—Meetings are a central part of how we work as commercial ethnographers. We meet with our clients to plan our projects and share our findings. We meet with our informants to explore and understand their worlds. However the cultures and practices that inform meeting behaviour...
Shopping as a Modern Quest
PechaKucha Presentation As Ethnographic Practitioners in Industry, shopping behavior is a frequent topic of our research. We take on the role of the consumer's advocate, arguing for products that bring value. Or decry the rise of consumerism as the focus of modern life, as exemplified by the drive...
<Place Label Here> Our Use of Labels at Work
PechaKucha Presentation—A label can be accurate and inadequate at the same time. A fish is a fish, but it's also a sea-dwelling, scale-covered, egg-laying, underwater-breathing creature. Many of us believe in the power of words to change the way we think about something. But are we always aware of...