Advancing the Value of Ethnography

Genre: PechaKucha

Robots and the Fallacy of Agency

Robots and the Fallacy of Agency

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,...

Confessions Across Digital Distances

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

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

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

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...

A Dirty Perspective On A World Too Clean

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....

Shopping as a Modern Quest

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

<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...