In anticipation of our annual conference, and in loving memory of two incredible EPIC people who championed this format—Paul Ratliff and Suzanne Thomas—we’re sharing just a few of our favorite PechaKucha presentations.
PechaKucha are performances of 20 image-rich slides that show for 20 seconds each. At EPIC, they are a creative and reflective format for sharing unique insights, perspectives, juxtapositions, and provocations about ethnographic work.
It is really hard to choose just a few performances to highlight here. So take this as an invitation to explore our library – the most important body of work on ethnographic practice in business and organizations – and ponder a PechaKucha proposal of your own for our next conference!
Collateral Revelation
PAUL RATLIFF
Our work of investigating experience is rarely directed at personal transformation. The impact we seek to create is not specific to our participants or intended for them alone, if at all. We don’t go into the field to midwife individual discovery or revelation, and this may be why we don’t notice how often it happens. We change people. We change their minds, their behaviors, their understanding of themselves. We use the tools of our trade – curiosity and empathy, questioning and watching and listening – to cultivate the conditions of discovery that serve our objectives. But what gets discovered and by whom is not bound by our intent, and what results can be surprising. This Pecha Kucha uses the experiences of participants and practitioners to examine our role as incidental change agents and explore what this says about the value of our work.
Paul Ratliff was an ethnographer and design strategist.
Indian Classical Dance: The Foundational Element in My Practice of Ethnography
VYJAYANTHI VADREVU
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 trained to keenly observe every physical and emotional nuance of an item. Furthermore, we are taught symbolism and theory to deepen our interpretation of dance. This dance foundation has shaped my connection to every aspect of ethnography: from practice to analysis to presentation.
Vyjayanthi Vadrevu is the founding ethnographer/strategist of Rasa.nyc, and a trained Bharatantyam and Odissi dancer.
Trapped in Traffic: A Story about Finding Connection on the Go
NORA MORALES, EPIC2014
While spending long hours of her everyday commuting in Mexico City traffic, capturing urban moments with her mobile camera lens and sharing them through social networks, the author reflects on emotions, inequality, beauty and time. How can someone be present and absent at the same time?, in this overwhelming traffic of people, machines, information and ideas ‘on the move’. How does each object or character defines it’s own cultural geography and tempo, constructing a new pervasive mode of mobilized social inclusion and exclusion. Is this a way to avoid boredom? Or has she found a way to connect in this mobility paradigm by opening a door that has not yet been completely explored.
Nora Morales is an information design professor and researcher at Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City.
Robots and the Fallacy of Agency
STEWART ALLEN
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, we are shaped and fashioned in the course of our lives by many different environments. This presentation challenges the notion of agency itself through an exploration of a recent project we conducted on service robots and human interaction. I raise questions on the nature of our humanness and the idea of ‘humanity’ as a special, protected class. If we set aside humans as special and unique, we tend to then dehumanise and downscale everything that is non-human, setting the stage for our current malaise where our environment is objectified as a resource to be used up as quickly as possible. I conclude that a shared and sustainable world is one where the qualities of life are accorded to all things, human and non-human alike.
Stewart Allen is Global UX Research Manager and Team Lead – Ecommerce at Ocado.
Microbes that Matter
CARRIE YURY
While COVID-19 has made the world hyper vigilant about sanitization, I take a bottoms-up perspective on the threats of a microbe-starved world. Telling the story of Clostridium Difficile, I walk us through how—just as in ethnography—context is everything for microbes. Using different examples from the biosphere, I examine how microbial metaphors matter, and I make the case that understanding microbes in the context of larger environments and ecosystems can help move us toward life centered design. This Pecha Kucha uses microbes as a contextual metaphor to argue that it is our responsibility to change our perspective; to decenter the human, and start designing for the health of the entire ecosystem, not just one of the players. The Pecha Kucha includes a set of experience principles for life-centered design.
Contextual Breathing
APRIL JEFFRIES
Context cannot be ignored. The ability to pull back, observe and listen deeply balanced with internal analysis and reflection has significant impact on our individual and societal health. Myopic views that ignore or distort what is happening around us have resulted in a social, cultural and political bipolar effect that occurs within a narrow spectrum of isolation. Extreme swings from close-minded tribes to secluded self dialogue, wreak havoc on our broader needs for transcendence and compassion.
A study of middle-class moms in America, found a pull toward insular communities in unexpected places. Hostile or challenging political arguments were increasingly infiltrating conversations in venues ranging from Facebook to book club. Emotional eruptions in previously “safe spaces” caused retreats to like-minded groups. Women who may have otherwise enjoyed open curiosity or stimulating debate, in these situations, were ill-equipped to handle feelings of rejection and separation. Political behavior was a result of stress and a deep sense of loss.
The rhythmic balance of convergence and divergence is as necessary as breathing, to fairly assess external realities and form rational individual opinions. Ethnography is a prime opportunity to build this context. Revealing non-judgmental stories of those unlike ourselves, we draw back from the myopic focus, which initiates a return to the center with deeper understanding and empathy.
April Jeffries is Global President at Ipsos.
Ghostly Spectres: On Ethnography and Identity
ES BRAZIEL
Taking Avery F. Gordon’s definition of a ghost as a social figure making the unknown apparent as a departure point, the piece dives into the “ghosts” silently present in an ethnography on how parents view gender in media. Through utilizing the image of an ethnographer as a “ghost hunter,” I track what traces of the social spectral remain invisible to everyday life. Occupying the subject position of “ghost hunter” and “ghost” – the subject of research, and subject being denied research – I assert why business ethnography cannot afford to remain objective when personal and political struggles are on the line.
Es Braziel is a Staff Experience Researcher, Inclusive Research, at Adobe.
A Thrice-Told Truth
EVAN HANOVER & MARTA CUCIUREAN-ZAPAN, EPIC2016
“But what do anthropologists do? What kind of special knowledge do you have access to?” This question was posed during one of the salons at EPIC2014 and cuts to the heart of the value of non-academic anthropologists. We contend that there is not one answer, but a series of possibilities, each a pathway – to knowledge with its own consequences and import. To explore these, we take inspiration from Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon and Margery Wolf’s methodological critique A Thrice-Told Tale. Both of these explore the benefits and limits of perspective by recounting a single story through different lenses. Similarly, we will take a single empirical field observation from fieldwork done on a Caribbean cruise ship.
From this starting point, we will frame the same story through three different lenses commonly used in our work: as a user insight, a strategic implication, and as inspiration for innovation. We will emphasize the kinds of “knowledge” that each creates and consider what that may mean for our roles as anthropologists. We see that by applying the ethnographic method to business challenges, anthropologists make no claim on a singular, special knowledge, but rather are positioned as translators between what is true of a user’s experience and what could become true within an organization.
Evan Hanover is the Director of Research at Conifer Research. Marta Cuciurean-Zapan is a Director at IDEO.
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