Now that they are beyond the initial start-up phase, it is time to take a critical look at ride-hailing systems such as Uber and Lyft. This ethnographic case study investigates these systems from the drivers’ perspectives and also addresses the ethnographic techniques and general approach that we...
Tag: transportation
Hearing Through Their Ears: Developing Inclusive Research Methods to Co-Create with Blind Participants
This paper recounts research into the orientation and mobility experiences of people who are blind or visually impaired, and describes the novel sonic research method I developed for this purpose. “Participant Phonography,” as I call the method, aims to empower research participants with low or no...
Designed for Care: Systems of Care and Accountability in the Work of Mobility
In this paper we explore the idea of a system of care through a city transit system. We argue that a systematic orientation to care is central to what makes a transit system work for people. Further, we suggest that this care orientation is recognized as such, even though it is not apparent in...
Rejected!: Design Research, Publics and the Purging of New Technologies
PechaKucha Presentation A challenge for design research today lies in naming, knowing and accounting for people who are not direct users of our technologies, but who are nonetheless affected and compelled to interact with them in daily life. This Pecha Kucha takes us to the streets of Bogotá,...
Doing Ethnography in AirSpace: The Promise and Danger of ‘Frictionless’ Global Research
‘AirSpace’, according to Kyle Chayka, is the increasingly homogenized experience of the western(ized) business traveller, driven by major tech platforms (including Google, Airbnb and Uber.) As international travellers, ethnographers must account for the impact of AirSpace on their research...
A Dirty Perspective On A World Too Clean
PechaKucha Presentation We live in a world where we tend to categorize, quantify and measure a wide array of everyday aspects - from kWh consumption in our homes to Facebook-likes. We argue that this urge to categorize and standardize is problematic as we run the risk of oversimplifying reality....
To Have and Have Not: Exploring Grammars of Sharing in the Context of Urban Mobility
This paper explores cultural differences in the practices of car sharing in the context of urban mobility. Challenging the all too frequent and often uncriticial uses of the term “sharing economy”, we argue for a more granular representation of practices that occur when “sharing” meets “economy”,...
Autonomous Individuals in Autonomous Vehicles: The Multiple Autonomies of Self-Driving Cars
We take the polysemy at the heart of autonomy as our focus, and explore how changing notions of autonomy are experienced and expressed by users of self-driving cars. Drawing from work-practice studies and sociomaterial approaches to understanding technologies, we discuss how driving as a task is...
Ethnography First! Promoting Sustainable Lifestyles through Locally Meaningful Solutions
Sustainability & Ethnography in Business Series, Mike Youngblood, Editor When we think of technology and innovation responses to global warming, we tend to imagine grand solutions that address the problem on a massive scale. For many ethnographers, designers in industry and other solution...
Developing Socially Acceptable Autonomous Vehicles
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...