Category UserResearch

Boston’s human-centered research to design middle-income housing

In Boston, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is conducting ethnographic, human-centered research to design middle-income housing that reflects people’s lived experiences, reports the Stanford Social Innovation Review. This includes intensive planning sessions in which residents, designers, and policy…

The complexity of plastic bags

As societies face increasingly complex problems, design is emerging as the tool to solve some of Asia’s biggest issues. Through field trips with designers skilled in human-centered design, the team behind Ethnographers’ Field Guide to Innovation, a new series on…

Innovative PhD dissertations at Harvard use ethnographic methods to understand organizational culture

Three innovative PhD dissertations have been published at the Harvard Business School’s Doctoral Program on Organizational Behavior that use ethnography and qualitative research to understand and map organizational culture: Curtis K. Chan Chan’s research (The Double-Edged Sword of Organizational Culture:…

Great engine, but the fuel seems poor. Discussing insight development in corporate marketing

The September issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) contains a lengthy essay, entitled Building an Insights Engine, on how Unilever has created the organizational capabilities to “transform data into insights about consumers’ motivations and to turn those insights into…