This case study by a pan-African UX research and design agency offers key insights for companies attempting to...
Tag: positionality
Researcher Positionality and Identity Validation: A Case Study in Organizational Friction over the Framing of a Demographic Questionnaire
This case study offers strategies for navigating internal frictions within research teams faced with sensitive...
Framed by Experience: From User Experience to Strategic Incitement
Ethnographic and other related practices in industry focus – for a variety of historical reasons – primarily on studying the experiences of individuals/institutions as consumers/users. We suggest that this framing limits our work to descriptive forms of knowledge, and renders invisible larger...
The Real Problem: Rhetorics of Knowing in Corporate Ethnographic Research
This paper explores discourses of the ‘real’ in commercial ethnographic research, and the transitions and transformations those discourses make possible and impossible. A common strategy to legitimize industrial ethnography is to claim a special relationship to ‘real people’, or argue that one is...
Building Ethical Tech Through Subjective Research
There are myths and misconceptions around the objectivity of quantitative research and the neutrality of tech and the two are linked. At best they lead organizations to embrace half-truths, and at worst they result in discrimination. By embracing our humanity and using our own subjectivity to critically examine the ways we research, we can prioritize our work in a way that aligns with ethical values and brings humans to the center.