PechaKucha Presentation—What happens when the “mildly militaristic jargon of marketing” (2004, Sunderland, Taylor, Denny) seeps into the dialectic process of structuring applied research and blurs the meaning of its stakes? This provokingly titled PechaKucha stems from our experience of...
Overview Ethnographers tend to be uneasy about survey research. Some of us shun it because it seems “reductive” of human experience; others are intimidated by complex methods and analytics that weren’t part of...
Dana Sherwood is a New York–based artist whose work lies on the border of the domestic and the wild. Exposing the fact that nature exists everywhere, and highlighting multispecies interaction while forging new pathways of communication, Sherwood’s work underscores the blurring of boundaries...
Overview This tutorial will give you a framework for understanding the important role of analysis in human-centered design and teach 4 key methods for practicing analysis. The framework proposes a model for...
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...
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,...
As our lived reality becomes ever more mobile and networked, society and business has adopted cultures and practices to embrace the creation of temporary interstitial ‘pop-up’ environments. These spaces, which can take the form of work environments (e.g. the UK Innovation Charity Nesta’s...
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...
Ethnography is closely associated with the core qualitative methods of interviewing and observation. But ethnographers in business often work with a broad range of other methods, from video and diary studies to...
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...