Critical challenges in energy transitions are social and cultural - not just technical and economic. This paper...
Tag: civics
Innovation Teams, Mundane Innovation, and the Public Good
Article 2 in the series Data, Design and Civics: Ethnographic Perspectives The windows were dirty when I arrived on the fifteenth floor of City Hall. I had been hired as the Los Angeles’ Innovation Team’s in-house social communication researcher. My official title was “Design and Data Research...
Human-Centered Research in Policymaking
Article 5 in the series Data, Design and Civics: Ethnographic Perspectives "[Aims] such as unslumming slums, catalyzing diversity, nurturing lively streets, are unrecognized today as objectives of city planning. Therefore, planners and the agencies of action that carry out plans possess neither...
Ethnography of Civic Participation: The Difficulty of Showing Up Even when You Are There
Article 3 in the series Data, Design and Civics: Ethnographic Perspectives The days of gathering in the forum are long gone. Today, the sphere of American civics is teeming with new forms of participation—from emergent advocacy organizations like MoveOn.orgi and shifting information paradigmsii to...
Career Pivots: A Day in the Life of Researchers Working in Government and NGOs
Increasingly, governments and NGOs are employing ethnographers and UX professionals, including a good number of...
Navigating Frictions in Civic Tech
Civic tech is a growing field and an increasingly critical space for service delivery and participation in public...
Becoming Digitally Resilient: Understanding the Gap between Online Government Services and Low Ability Users
In the Netherlands, approximately 2.5M people struggle to use technology in their daily life and are unable to use online governmental services independently. People with low digital literacy are increasingly...
STAND Where You Live: Activating Civic Renewal by Socially Constructing Big Ethno
This paper explains how STAND Chattanooga became the world’s largest community visioning process in 2009. Behind its public success, the authors relate the underlying ‘research story’ of how 26,263 viewpoints were achieved by changing course in midstream and adopting more ethnographic methods of...
The City as Organization: Ethnography for Alternative Futures
In this case study we use ethnographic outcomes from the study of the employee population of IBM, to inform new experiences for improving civic engagement in the resident population of Austin, Texas. In doing so, we experiment with a technique in speculative ethnography that uses research insights...