Advancing the Value of Ethnography

Genre: Perspective

A Right to Ephemerality

A Right to Ephemerality

Seems that everyone’s recording everything all the time – so much so, that people and some governments are asserting a “right to forget”. But the act of recording at all in any instance also is, significantly, an act of control: the more recording, the more control such that “recording everything”...

Studying In and Studying Out

Studying In and Studying Out

An EPIC 2014 Workshop: Studying In and Studying Out: Linking Organizational and Consumer Ethnography The big idea here is this. Most anthropologists are working either in the organizational space or in the consumer space and no one is looking at the interface between these two cultural domains....

You too can collect big data!

You too can collect big data!

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...

Facebook Advertising Research Around the World

Facebook Advertising Research Around the World

As Facebook approached its tenth birthday earlier this year, we took the opportunity to assess our progress thus far—and to gear up for all the work we still have to do—when it comes to pursuing our company’s mission to make the world more open and connected. Facebook is used in nearly every...

Ethnography Injection at a Google UX Sprint

Ethnography Injection at a Google UX Sprint

In May 2014, 180 Google employees participated in a UX sprint week in the Bay Area focused on innovating game­changing advertising and commerce solutions. Those participating in the sprint were designers, researchers, product managers and engineers. By the end of the three day sprint, the...

Creating Business Impact

Creating Business Impact

I recently joined one of our teams in their team room during a visit from a top executive. The room would be recognizable to many readers—walls covered in post-its and flip chart sheets. The executive was immediately skeptical of the post-its. At the end of the session, he didn’t leave the room...