EPIC2014 Workshop by Anna Avrekh, Kathy Baxter, & Bob Evans At the EPIC 2013 Keynote, Tricia Wang observed that, if you are not working with “Big Data,” the implication is that your data are “small.” Although the number of data points or participants may not be in the millions or ever...
Genre: Perspective
Equity & Research Operations: Generation Focus Founder Joanna Beer
Generation Focus is an EPIC Equity Partner, providing direct support to EPIC Equity Council programs that advance equity and create collaborative spaces for our community to embed equity within our work. Generation Focus is also a customer research firm that provides strategic Research...
What’s Next versus What’s Valuable: Perspectives on the Value of Ethnography in a Future-Focused World
Ethnographers operating in the future-focused context of business consultancy face a core challenge. Our approach is holistic and human-centric, “based on the researcher sharing time and space with the people he or she wants to understand, establishing relationships with them and thereby...
Seeing the World at Scale and in Depth: A Journey with Big and Thick Data
When I was studying economics at university one of our professors introduced us to Jorge Luis Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science”, a one-paragraph story. It imagines an empire so enthralled by cartography that larger and larger maps of the place are built by successive generations until a map on...
Our ‘New Normal’—The Sensory Landscape
Sanitization has been a key word during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sanitization not just in terms of cleanliness, but also in terms of the revised interactions people have had with each other and with the environment around them. COVID-19 has created a Sanitized Landscape – supposedly free of germs in...
Feedback Fatigue: Redesigning the Research Process for Sustainable Insights
When you think of running a diary study, we guess that Confluence isn’t the first research tool that comes to mind. Confluence is best known as a tool for knowledge management and team collaboration and not a platform to host a diary study, but with limitation comes creativity. In an effort to...
When the Insights Matter, Humans Matter
Connecting with other people is at the heart of ethnographic research – understanding their perspectives, preferences, and behaviors helps organizations create and align offerings with consumers. Research relies on clear communication to optimize participant experience and develop meaningful...
Where is Remote Research? Ethnographic Positioning in Shifting Spaces
“There’s a lot of talk about us ‘being there’, and what that means for our practice and what that means for the type of work that we say we do. The ground has shifted. How do we respond to that? It’s not just, ‘Oh, we’re temporarily working remotely, let’s just gather some new tools.’ We’re...
What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?
Book Review: What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa? Edited by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga 256 pp, MIT Press "Imagine a positive Africa—creative, technological, and scientific in its...
How to Scale a Culture of Human Understanding
IBM is big. We have around 350,000 employees including 20,000 design and user experience professionals, and only a fraction of them are experienced design researchers. Many of you reading this also work in or with large enterprise organizations and, as you know, at that scale it can be easy to get...