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...
Tag: government
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...
How Friction Led to a More Intentional Stakeholder Feedback Model for a Federal Research Program
This paper describes the evolution of the “intentional” model for stakeholder feedback that mitigates risk and...
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...
From Users to User Ecosystems: Applying Systems Thinking to Ethnography
User research typically focuses on intentional moments of contact between individuals and a product or...
Changing the Perspective of Government
Case Study—This case study highlights the value of ethnography in changing a client's perspective. New Zealand's productivity has been deceasing, and the government wants to reverse that trend. Empathy's government client believed that macro-level forces were having a major impact on the...
Introduction to “Data, Design, and Civics: Ethnographic Perspectives”
This post introduces the series "Data, Design, and Civics: Ethnographic Perspectives" edited by Carl DiSalvo. With all of the civic hackathons, civic tech meetups, and civic innovation teams bustling around the world, you’d think we'd have the challenges of government and civil society figured...
The Way to Design Ethnography for Public Service: Barriers and Approaches in Japanese Local Government
This paper introduces various barriers hindering the introduction of ethnography in support of public service design improvement in Japan, and discusses ways to overcome these barriers. Service design approaches using ethnography are gaining popularity in the public sector, especially in Europe....
Change Agent: Lessons on Power and Failure from Eight Years of Systems Research & Policy Design
PechaKucha Presentation Drawing on nearly a decade of research and design engagements with U.S. federal and municipal governments, I'll describe a gap between intended outcomes of government policies and the lived experience of people affected by those policies. I'll discuss how that gap arises...