Case Study—Recognizing that the movement of cars on the road involves inherently social action, Nissan hired a team of social scientists to lead research for the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) that engage with pedestrians, bicyclists, and other cars in a socially acceptable manner. We...
Tag: software
Teaching Organizational Ethnography
In 2004 Fujitsu asked PARC to carry out an ethnographic investigation of their software business, focusing on their development processes, and while doing so to build an ethnographic capability in their own organization. One of our biggest challenges was to convince Fujitsu’s system engineers –...
In Praise of Theory in Design Research: How Levi-Strauss Redefined Workflow
In his 2015 novel, Satin Island, Tom McCarthy’s protagonist (known only as “U”) is a corporate anthropologist working for an outre design research firm whose work embodies all the absurd contradictions of late capitalism. The highly influential firm’s logo is “a giant, crumbling tower.” The...
Sustaining Stories: The Versatile Life of Sustained, In-house, Ethnographic Practice in a Global Software Company
Ethnographers, in a sense, play the role of story creators, storytellers, and, often, preservers of such stories. The narratives produced and the fieldwork from which they emerge make visible trajectories of practice—for both subjects and researchers— which can be traced both...
A Tale of Two Frictions: Building Ethical Software Solutions by Challenging Tech’s Obsession with Efficiency
The enterprise technology ethos of efficiency biases corporate software development towards seamlessness. What...