Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
The 2014 edition of EPIC, the premier international gathering on the current and future practice of ethnography in the business world, will take place in New York next week. The draft proceedings have just been posted. Here is the table…
Ethnographic Fieldwork and Digital Culture – A Beginner’s Guide By Piia Varis Routledge February 2015 Abstract Ethnography, as a holistic approach to societies and cultures, can make a substantial contribution to the study of present-day online environments and our digital…
Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia By Dariusz Jemielniak Stanford University Press 2014, 312 pages Abstract With an emphasis on peer–produced content and collaboration, Wikipedia exemplifies a departure from traditional management and organizational models. This iconic “project” has been variously…
“As researchers focusing on Facebook’s advertising, we led research trips with a cross-functional team of product managers, marketers, and engineers to Indonesia, Turkey, and South Africa to develop a solid understanding of cultural differences across these countries. […] Forming a…
As healthcare shifts from the hospital to the home, design research must also morph to keep up, writes Shana Leonard. Who is the typical user of your medical product and what is the use environment? These used to be easy…
Wells Fargo, the world’s most valuable bank, learned to innovate around the customer. In 1999, Steve Ellis, who runs the bank’s wholesale services group, went to a conference where Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems described a completely new era of…
Carolyn Rose explains how ethnography can be used to improve food safety: If done correctly, ethnography leads to a holistic and unbiased understanding of current practices and the motivations that drive them. Looking specifically to learn the existing challenges, workarounds,…
Nursing Research Using Ethnography: Qualitative Designs and Methods in Nursing Mary De Chesnay, PhD, RN, PMHCNS-BC, FAAN (Editor) Pub. Date: 08/28/2014 372 pp., Softcover Springer [Amazon] Ethnography is a qualitative research design that focuses on the study of people to…
Simon Roberts of Stripe Partners continues his three part series on ethnography. In the first two posts in this series he examined ethnography as practiced in two different contexts – the (1) market research (MR) industry and (2) corporate R&D…
Core77 has drawn my attention to IKEA’s newly launched Life At Home report, which explores the home lives of people all over the globe, with a focus on the morning routines, habits and wishes of those who live in Berlin,…
Spending a weekend sitting in someone else’s house reporting when, why and how much they ate, drank, bathed, watched TV or used their mobile phone isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time, but for a marketer it is one of…
Foodborne illness is a major public health problem in the UK. Recent increases in cases of listeriosis in older people have focused attention on consumer food-related practices. Previous studies highlight poor relationships between what people know, what they say they…
Can looking at the hipster tell us something about the anthropologist and the academy? Alex Posecznick (anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania) explores the role of anthropologists in academia from a parallel hipster point of view. With his blog posts…
Handbook of Anthropology in Business Editors: Rita M. Denny and Patricia L. Sunderland Left Coast Press 752 pp. / May, 2014 In recent years announcements of the birth of business anthropology have ricocheted around the globe. The first major reference…
Three posts by Simon Roberts (?) explore the rise, fall and possible futures of ethnography in commercial settings. Ethnography, magpies and shiny things The first piece explores how ethnography fell victim of the enduring quest for fashion and the need…
Only a few years ago, the corporate view of retirement planning at San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Bank tended to focus on dollars and cents — how much an individual needed to invest, by when and for how many years,†write…
Nick Seaver, a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at UC Irvine, makes the case for the importance of “studying up“: doing ethnographies not only of disempowered groups, but of groups who wield power in society, like technology developers. This project…
For once a post in French! Hubert Guillaud of InternetActu describes some examples – mostly from the recent EPIC conference – of the great contribution of ethnography in focusing our gaze on real life practices, in pointing out that what…
A few weeks back I wrote that Rachel Carmen Ceasar (@rceasara) is running a short series on Savage Minds that features interviews with design researchers, ethnographic hackers, and field work makers with their take on anthropology and design. Besides her…
Genevieve Bell, Intel’s in-house anthropologist, sees constants in our behavior that could mean big bucks for businesses that find a way to capitalize on them. C|Net reports on her talk at the Mobile World Congress yesterday. “In this digital world,…