Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Keith Hart is Professor of Economic Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Goldsmith’s, University of London. He has contributed to the concept of the informal economy to development studies and…
Rachel Carmen Ceasar (@rceasara) is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Medical Anthropology Program at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco (California, USA). She writes about the subjective and scientific stakes in exhuming mass graves from the Spanish Civil War…
Mario Campana (@mariocampana), a PhD student at City University London’s Cass Business School, researches the growing trend of local currencies – of which there are currently over 3000 around the world. He recently presented at EPIC, where in a Pecha…
Tricia Wang interviewed Daniel Miller, the anthropologist at the heart of the Facebook ethnography kerfuffle, and published the transcript on EthnographyMatters. Dr. Daniel Miller (@dannyanth) is Professor of Material Culture at the Department of Anthropology University College London and a…
Experientia has lately been doing a lot of work on mobile OSes, from feature evaluations of some of the more interesting new arrivals, to comparisons of some of the classics. We have also conducted user research into people’s behaviours and…
Qualitative 360 Asia Pacific 2013 took place in Singapore in November 2013, and some videos are now available: Winning with shoppers via qualitative research [23:57] Michael Biscocho, Consumer and Market Knowledge Manager, Procter & Gamble • Leveraging qualitative techniques to…
Energy usage and conservation can be a seemingly mundane part of an individual’s daily life on one hand, but a politically, ecologically, and economically critical issue on the other. Despite its importance, there is a startling lack of insight into…
In 2006 a major European brewing company we’ll call BeerCo was faced with falling bar and pub sales and, despite muscular market research and competitive analysis, couldn’t figure out why. Customers liked its core product, a standard lager, and store…
Talking to Strangers: Chinese Youth and Social Media by Tricia Wang Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology, University of California, San Diego, 2013 Professor Richard Madsen, Chair Abstract The sudden availability of social media and open-market capitalism is creating new spaces…
Alex “Sandy†Pentland, a professor of computational social sciences at MIT Media Lab and others like him are now convinced that the great academic divide between “hard†and “soft†sciences is set to disappear, since researchers these days can gather…
Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector By Sam Ladner Left Coast Press April 2014, 200 pages [Publisher link – Amazon link] > Download free sample: pdf – kindle Abstract – Ethnography is an increasingly important…
Tricia Wang (see also previous post) just published her interview with Leisa Reichelt, Head of User Research at UK Government Digital Services. Tricia introduced it with a kind reference to me (thank you!): “>We are excited to interview Leisa Reichelt…
Sociologist and ethnographer Tricia Wang has posted the notes of “The Conceit of Oracles: How we ended up in a world in which quantitative data is more valued than qualitative data,” her inspiring and much appreciated opening keynote at the…
As part of a European Union-funded study on social media (make sure to check also the UCL site and blog on the same project), the Department of Anthropology at University College London is running nine simultaneous 15-month ethnographic studies in…
A new study carried out for Thinkbox by COG Research and designed to help the advertising community understand the context of multi-screening (watching TV and simultaneously using an internet-connected device such as a laptop, smartphone or tablet). Using a combination…
Professor Alex Stevens of the University of Kent, did quite an unusual ethnographic study – focused on understanding how UK civil servants use evidence in policy making, and in the process comes to some quite political conclusions: “Based on participant…
What will the workplace of the future look like? Will it even exist as a physical space? Ever since networked computers first became widespread the idea of the virtual organisation has been touted, yet most of us still work in…
Journalism and anthropology both purport to observe and analyse human behaviour and experience, albeit in different ways and over extremely divergent timescales. And they both serve up their findings to the wider world in order to give it greater understanding…
Michael Ohler, Phil Samuel and Mark McMurray of BMGI argue in Industry Week that focusing on human behavior and personal experiences can help you discover unmet customer needs and gain a deeper understanding of your customer. “Ethnography does not start…
Last year, I posted about the very interesting PhD dissertation by Alice E. Marwick (downloadable here). Based on ethnographic research of the San Francisco technology scene, she explains how social media’s technologies are based on status-seeking techniques that encourage people…