Overview This tutorial offers a solid foundation in the art of observation as a field research method for human-centered design and innovation. An expanded, hands-on version of Mike Youngblood's popular EPIC...
Tag: methods
Tutorial: Getting Started with Sensor Data
Overview Activity trackers, instrumented environments, and other kinds of electronic monitors offer new possibilities and new challenges for ethnographic research. They provide a trace of what goes on when the...
Tutorial: Agile for Researchers
Overview Agile is taking the design world by storm, and requiring teams—including researchers—to rethink how we communicate, plan, and act. But is it possible, or even desirable, to apply agile methodologies to...
Book Review: The Field Study Handbook, by Jan Chipchase
Jan Chipchase has done something few of us would dare: write down his trade secrets and give them away in a book. In The Field Study Handbook he shares hard-earned lessons from running ethnographic research projects across the world. At face value the Handbook delivers on its promise. It lays out,...
The Automation of Qualitative Methods
Introduction Anthropology and its methodologies cannot easily be automated. However, both design and engineering based organizations are attempting it. I argue that this is based in part on historic legacy systems, a misunderstanding of the ethnographic toolkit, and an over-reliance on the...
Biomimicry: Learnings from ‘The Field’
PechaKucha—The natural world is full of researchers – from the smallest of butterflies scoping out the perfect leaf to land on to the largest of elephants retracing the steps of their ancestors to find food and water. Every creature on earth is in a perpetual state of learning to adapt to the many...
Tutorial: Structuring Analysis for Innovation
Tutorial Instructors: COURSE MATERIALS Clicking on the following links will automatically download course materials in PDF format. Context Mapping Template Methods Evaluation and Definition Template Guiding Criteria Definition...
Paco – Applying Computational Methods to Scale Qualitative Methods
For several years we have been building and using an open mobile research platform, called Paco, that enables the scaling of qualitative research through quantitative, computational techniques. The platform provides a mechanism to design and deliver remote research instruments to mobile devices in...
Building a Useful Research Tool: An Origin Story of AEIOU
It is awfully nice not to have to invent a basic tool over and over again. For ethnographers, coding and categorization is work that has to happen whether you are studying housework or neurosurgery, with novices or experts, in an exotic location or in suburban Ohio (no offense to my friends and...
Models of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Models
This is a piece about certain types of objects. Those objects are models. I want to suggest that models are objects that are central to the various practices in which EPIC People are engaged for three reasons. Firstly, they help manage situations of uncertainty. Second, they are tools for...