This case study examines the use of iterative prototyping to raise concerns important to adolescents and...
Tag: participatory design
The Transformative Power of Friction: Inclusive Community Centered Visioning in Manhattan’s Chinatown
This case study discusses how friction plays a transformative role in reshaping relational dynamics within the...
Who Gets to Define Success?: Listening to Stories of How People Value Firefox to Redefine Metrics and Revive a Decommissioned Product
Challenging measures of scale is possible through listening to stories of how people value a product, and envisioning ways to measure success beyond typical metrics like Monthly Active Use (MAU) or Daily Active Use (DAU). Understanding what people value is somewhat complex for a product like...
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...
Tutorial: Participatory Visual Research—Getting the Most from Collaborative Methods
Overview Participatory visual research methods like Photovoice open up opportunities for collaborative sense-making and advocacy. In these methodologies, data and knowledge are produced not only as an end...
Market Creation Through Community Engagement: Combining Ethnographic and Business Thinking to Bridge Life-Changing Technologies to Emerging Economies
Emerging technologies such as drones, sensors, mesh networks and IoT have significant potential to bring new life-changing services and benefits to places where infrastructure and ICT access is still limited. Nevertheless, many companies have already failed in the attempt to bring new solutions to...
Futures in Things: Locating the Promise of Infrastructures in Public Libraries
Public libraries in the U.S. and around the world are rapidly changing due expanding technological and social needs of their communities. The Covid-19 pandemic has intensified the debates about the future of public spaces and public services. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study of...
“Understanding the World through Engagement”: Jeanette Blomberg, A Profile
EPIC Profiles Series How can risk-taking propel an ethnographic career? Just ask Jeanette Blomberg, who is no stranger to professional risk-taking. Her career journey, including major contributions at foundational tech giants in Silicon Valley, has centered on making participation in various forms...
Participatory Design: Re-evaluation as a Socio-material Assembly
This paper aims towards a critical re-evaluation of Participatory Design processes based on a completed collaborative research (2015) in rural China. The study involved two complementary disciplines; the Applied Social Sciences and Design and their corresponding research methodologies; Action...
Working for Social Change
No matter the source of your employment, whether in the commercial sector or academia, we all want our work lives to add up to something positive. Yet it is easy to wonder how this or that project actually affected the world for better or worse. What can we do to make the next project better? How...