Almost a decade ago, after I successfully transitioned from a post-doc in academia to an industry job at Facebook, I started receiving emails and LinkedIn messages asking for advice. The situation in academia was (and continues to be) dire: after the 2008 recession, the number of tenure-track jobs...
https://player.vimeo.com/video/1038669025?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479 Working in an organization as large as Shell and as a Senior User Researcher, I have been thinking about how to land my work more effectively. Last year I worked on strategies of communicating...
Researchers across all industries have endured periods in which their business value was questioned. In industry terms, research is a cost center, so throughout economic downturns, research has often felt the brunt of company downsizings. This held true for researchers in tech during recent (and...
A VR headset floats in empty space, then a man straps it onto his head. A series of clips flash before our eyes: a guy wearing a jetpack jumps off a building, a pair of arms dodging a horde of zombies, two giant figures looking over a miniature island, C3P2O and R2D2. A voice off-screen introduces...
Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research by Mario Luis Small and Jessica McCrory Calarco August 2022, 230 pp, University of California Press This book is a must-read for any researcher, even those who specialize in quantitative methods. It aims to be a...
The future, of course, is inherently unpredictable. As the EPIC2021 theme Anticipation begins, “There are no future facts. Yet we humans constantly create potential futures.” People create futures when they begin to see alternate possibilities and situations where their decisions—and those of...
For almost 85 years, Consumer Reports has been detecting and anticipating shifts in consumer need for products and services so that we can guide consumer choice with rigorous research and testing. When the COVID-19 pandemic started to peak in March 2020 in the U.S., our ability to access the 63...
Some years ago a renowned UK-based charity invited me to help them understand why their legacy donations had flat lined for two years. The conventional wisdom had been that charitable donations had decreased as a result of the financial crisis in 2008. But when a statistical analysis showed that...
In the months since the Covid-19 pandemic began disrupting everyone’s lives, people and organizations worldwide have adapted quickly for the sake of survival. This is a matter of long-term intellectual interest for ethnographers – but also, sometimes urgently, of short-term solvency. Some jobs, we...
We support the protesters. Black lives matter. Working at my desk in the past few days, a fairly constant thump of helicopters and aggressive wail of sirens has forced me to parse space in new ways. Here, in the US, the rights of protestors to claim space is contested by presidential rhetoric and...