Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Just about every automaker in the world is enlisting experts from a variety of fields outside engineering and design to help them develop autonomous vehicles. One of the best known is Nissan’s Melissa Cefkin. Her official title is principal researcher-Human…
Ethnography for a data-saturated world Edited by Hannah Knox and Dawn Nafus Manchester University Press October 2018, 296 pages This edited collection aims to reimagine and extend ethnography for a data-saturated world. The book brings together leading scholars in the…
As part of a new approach to user interfaces, Amy Wilson, Head of Product at SAP SuccessFactors, pulled designers together with behavioral scientists with backgrounds in cultural anthropology. The goal was to help the designers better understand the way most…
Last week IKEA launched its fifth Life at Home global research report. Every year, the company sets out to understand more about what makes a better life at home by connecting with thousands of people where they live. Ever since…
Left to Our Own Devices: Outsmarting Smart Technology to Reclaim Our Relationships, Health, and Focus By Margaret E. Morris MIT Press, November 2018, 192 pages Unexpected ways that individuals adapt technology to reclaim what matters to them, from working through…
Moments when the experience of a blistering day turns public attention to the expertise of climate scientists brings Hannah Knox, associate professor of anthropology at University College London, to explore some of the thorniest of questions we face in the…
Datafication and data fiction: Narrating data and narrating with data Paul Dourish, Edgar Gòmez Cruz Big Data & Society Journal Sage Publications, July 4, 2018 Creative Commons Attribution, Non Commercial 4.0 License Data do not speak for themselves. Data…
New York based writer Carrie Neill interviews tech ethnographer Tricia Wang on why the digital age means everyone (even non-researchers) should understand “thick data”. Any modern person who calls themselves an ethnographer or a qualitative researcher needs to be both…
Ethnographic Thinking: From Method to Mindset by Jay Hasbrouck Routledge Press, December 2017 140 pages This book argues that ethnographic thinking – the thought processes and patterns ethnographers develop through their practice – offers companies and organizations the cultural insights…
James Ingram, chief executive officer of visual content creation company Splashlight, explains why we need digital anthropologists to handle handle, interpret and apply cultural analysis to data and arrive at consumer insight. Making sense of copious amounts of data in…
In the spring of 2017 the Danish Business Authority and MindLab, a Danish policy lab, developed a methodology to quickly identify costly regulations and how they could be improved, by combining the Standard Cost Model (SCM) method (a quantitative methodology…
Design and anthropology have been seen together with increasing frequency over the last few years, but how do design and anthropology fit together in relation to industry? And, how does this pairing create insight? The team of This Anthro Life…
The Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) published some months ago a three-part podcast series on the intersection of ethnography and design. The series, produced by Tariq Rahman and Katherine Sacco, was based on the conference Ethnography and Design: Mutual Provocations,…
EPIC is the premier international gathering on ethnography in the business world. Its latest edition, EPIC2017, took place in Montreal in October 2017 and had the theme of “Perspectives”: perspectives explores the vantage points that create and constrain ethnographic practices.…
In this paper, Julia Katherine Haines, user experience researcher at Google, argues for the value of multi-dimensional ethnography. She explores the potential for ethnography to venture beyond sites, into different dimensions. As an example of work moving in this direction,…
This Anthro Life is a round-table, open format discussion of an anthropological take on the people, objects, ideas, and possibilities of everyday life around the world. They are hosted by Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins and there are nearly 100…
A few months ago a new channel Workplace Anthropology Matters popped up on Youtube that profiles workplace anthropologists, whose work directly influence their own workplace processes. The video series is part of a workshop in the Business Anthropology Matters initiative,…
“Customers are really the most unpredictable, the most unknown, and the most difficult-to-quantify thing for any business,” said Tricia Wang, ethnographer and co-founder of Sudden Compass, in an interview during the IBM Data Science for All event in NYC. She…
For all the intricate technology required for autonomous cars — the sensors to replicate eyes and ears, the computers and algorithms to serve as the car’s brains, the high-definition 3-D maps to guide them — there’s another factor that computer…
Another EPIC conference come and gone, and no, we’re not using “epic” in the way under-10s use it about cool things on the internet. EPIC is the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, one of the most important annual events for…