Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Social networks of mobile money in Kenya Sibel Kusimba, Harpieth Chaggar, Elizabeth Gross, & Gabriel Kunyu Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion University of California, Irvine With mobile money technologies, people use mobile phones to send money to friends…
Some time ago, we suggested to Todd Harple, an anthropologist at Intel, to consider doing his 10 week sabbatical here in Turin at the International Training Center of the International Labor Organization (a United Nations structure). His sabbatical is now…
In the wake of Big Data, ethnographers can offer thick data, says Tricia Wang. In the face of the derisive mention of “anecdotesâ€, we ought to stand up to defend the value of stories. “Lacking the conceptual words to quickly…
Click on image to view slideshow On Wednesday evening about 20 guests and 30 Experientia staff maxed out our little conference room to attend our very first Talking Design lecture and listen to Intel anthropologist Todd Harple, who spoke about…
In the last post of the EthnographyMatters Ethnomining edition (edited by Nicolas Nova), David Ayman Shamma @ayman gives a personal perspective on mixed methods. Based on the example of data produced by people of Egypt who stood up against then…
Interactions Magazine is no longer the influential voice in the interaction design community that it used to be a few years ago. Lots of the reason why has to do with the fact that the bulk of the articles are…
The latest contribution to Ethnomining, the April 2013 Ethnographymatters edition on combining qualitative and quantitative data, edited by Nicolas Nova, is by Rachel Shadoan and Alicia Dudek who present an interesting case study, based on visualizations, involving an on-line role-playing…
Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow’s Customers by Jan Chipchase Harper Collins Publishers April 2013 256 pages (Amazon link) A global-innovation expert offers a new perspective on how consumers think and how to develop products…
The April 2013 EthnographyMatters edition is edited by Nicolas Nova, consultant and researcher at the Near Future Laboratory, and is about combining qualitative and quantitative data. In his introduction, Nova writes: “While ethnography generally draws on qualitative data, it does…
On 11 April, Experientia president Michele Visciola will be a guest speaker at the Town Re-coding seminar (pdf), a Turin event to discuss perceptions, tensions and actions for change in the physical and social spaces of cities. The Italian-language seminar…
Rebekah Rousi, a researcher of user psychology and PhD candidate of Cognitive Science at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, describes on EthnographyMatters how the combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection was fruitful in her analysis of elevator usage. “A…
In an insightful blog post, Reboot principal Panthea Lee asks if open government initiatives make citizens more informed and engaged, and make governments more accountable to their people? What impact have open government initiatives had so far? Reboot is a…
Open government initiatives offer new, often technologically enabled avenues for civic participation. But which populations have the access and motivation to use these channels? Frequently, programs and platforms privilege certain groups over others. An ethnographic study of participatory budgeting in…
Ellen Isaacs (personal site), a user experience designer and ethnographer at PARC, spoke on January 28 at TEDx Broadway about the power of ethnography and how it might be useful in inspiring the future of Broadway. As per usual with…
methods@manchester is a website created by the University of Manchester to highlight and explain research methods in the social sciences. Many sections come with lecture videos and reading lists. Readers will be particularly interested in the sections on collaborative approaches,…
Opening up the Stories to Action edition of Ethnography Matters is Panthea Lee’s @panthealee moving story about a human trafficking outreach campaign that her company, Reboot, designed for Safe Horizon. In David Brook’s recent NYT column, What Data Can’t Do,…
Last September, social anthropologist Nora Schenkel had the opportunity to interview Brigitte Jordan, described by Cat Macaulay as one of the “godmothers” of design ethnography. Schenkel interviewed her on how she transitioned as one of the first from academically grounded…
In this thoughtful piece for Ethnography Matters, Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) discusses the ways in which the internet has transformed the relationship between the writer and the people about whom he or she writes. Sarah has written extensively about open access to scholarly…
Since its inception, the EPIC conference has brought together a dynamic community of practitioners and scholars concerned with how ethnographic thinking and methods for understanding the contemporary social world are used to transform design, business and innovation contexts. Presenters and…
Nicolas Nova went skiing and saw a lot of GoPro cameras on people’s heads. He got intrigued, and wrote an Ethnography Matters column where he questions informal urban bricolage, weird cameras, curious gestures and wonders about their cultural implications. “Head-mounted…