The pandemic has disrupted everything from the global flow of goods and services, to the actions that individuals can take in their daily lives. It has changed, for now at least, the ecosystems in which we work—impacting both how we think about ethnographic activity and how it is might be used. In...
Tag: scale
Toxicity v. toxicity: How Ethnography Can Inform Scalable Technical Solutions
While a number of scholars have studied online communities, research on games has been mostly focused on the business, experience, and content of gameplay. Interactions between players within games has received less attention, and toxic behavior is a newer area of investigation in academia....
On AI Natives and the Business of AI
Pizza robots, pandemic trackers, altered carbon, the perfect tiktok lineup, that instagram lipstick filter, that racist sensor that filtered the victim, national citizen trackers, my deepfaked face on Okoye's body while I slay Kill Monger's men....We live in an AI world. Nascent and frivolous as...
Personal Reflections on Scale from the Business World
Hi everyone, my name is Adam Singer. I’m a Strategist at Gemic and I’m new to the world of ethnography. Gemic is a strategy consulting firm founded by anthropologists that embeds anthropological and social science theory and methods into the core of its work. It uses these tools among others to...
Ethnography Taught Me to Fight Climate Change. But to Have Impact at Scale, Ethnography too Must Change
In the spring of 2019 I met Klara, a fashion blogger based in Malmö with a growing reputation in sustainable design. Klara was a classic millennial of the type I had been studying for years: ambitious, anxious, confident and concerned about her future job security. In the course of a long...
Post-Human Centered Design: Working Responsibly at Scale
https://vimeo.com/419104899 Overview Human-centered design has driven a two decade renaissance in product development, providing a transparent framework that exposes rationale, demystifies process, and provides more reliable outcomes than many other approaches to innovation. The cycle of empathy,...
Place Making and Sustainability
Sustainability & Ethnography in Business Series, Mike Youngblood, Editor Place making offers us a largely untraveled pathway to thinking about sustainability. These two relatively high order concepts—'place making' and 'sustainability'—are conventionally located in separate domains of...
Scaling Empathy through IBM Design Research
As consultants we practiced the basics of design thinking and user centered design for years with a range of organizations. However, upon joining IBM and learning to apply the IBM Design Thinking mindset, we both realized this way of working differed from our past experiences. This difference is...