Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
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…
Michael B Griffiths is Director of Ethnography at Ogilvy & Mather, Greater China, Associate Research Fellow, White Rose East Asia Centre, and External Research Associate, Centre for International Business, University of Leeds, UK. He is also the author of the…
“The material world is a world of social potential. Social scientists should be better equipped to engage with materials and objects through ethnographic, critical, analytical, presentational and collaborative skills. Designers, artists, engineers, architects and curators should be better equipped to…
Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork Richard E. Ocejo (Editor) Routledge, 2012, 272 pages (Amazon link) The only collection of its kind on the market, this reader gathers the work of some of the most esteemed urban…
A Sustainable Building Promotes Pro-Environmental Behavior: An Observational Study on Food Disposal by Wu DW, DiGiacomo A, Kingstone A PLoS ONE 8(1): e53856. doi:10.1371 – January 2013 In order to develop a more sustainable society, the wider public will need…
Zach Hyman is based in Chongqing, China on a year long ethnographic dive into creative practices of vehicular design among resource-constrained users. After four months in the field, Zach shares with Ethnography Matters his first field update. His observations on…
Anthropologist Donna Flynn directs Steelcase’s WorkSpace Futures, a 19-member independent research group within the global office design company, that is responsible for “thinking into the future”: understanding the trends shaping the ways we work and sharing that intelligence with Steelcase…
This ECAR research bulletin describes an anthropological ethnographic analysis of student practices relating to the use of information technology on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) campus. Using EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) studies as benchmarks, this imaginative research examines…
In her work anthropologist Nancy Fried Foster applies anthropological principles to the study of the university’s libraries and their users. By focusing on the work that people are doing inside these spaces, they can identify needs and imagine new solutions…
While digital ethnography is an established field within ethnography, we don’t often hear of ethnographers building digital tools to conduct their fieldwork. Wendy Hsu wants to change that. In the first of her four-part guest post series on Tricia Wang’s…
Ethnography can be used to inform important health and policy decisions. But there are few public case studies that illustrate the value of ethnography for this specific context. When Erik Bigras of EthnographyMatters learned about The Asthma Files, a project…
The fall 2011 issue of AnthroNotes (pdf) starts off with an article by Genevieve Bell, senior cultural anthropologist at Intel. She describes her latest research project, designed to understand how cars around the world can serve as windows into the…
Judd Antin is a social psychologist and user experience researcher who studies motivations for online participation at Facebook. In 2011, he was named an MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35. Prior to joining Facebook as a user experience researcher, he…
The people from Ethnography Matters, an ethnography group blog that is celebrating its first year anniversary today, interviewed their new regular contributor Nicolas Nova. He joins the all-woman team of Tricia Wang, Heather Ford, Rachelle Annechino, and Jenna Burrell. Nicolas…
Pulled from store shelves after a month, the first high-profile wearable activity tracker was a humiliation for Jawbone. Now, the Up is back, and anyone vying for a stake in wearable tech should pay close attention to the product’s resurrection,…
Advancing Ethnography in Corporate Environments: Challenges and Emerging Opportunities Edited by Brigitte Jordan Left Coast Press November 2012, 224 pages [Amazon link] Abstract In this innovative volume, twelve leading scholars from corporate research labs and independent consultancies tackle the most…
Although there are many tablet deployments in schools worldwide, there is a glaring lack of serious research on what actually happens in the classrooms with these devices. In fact, there is so far no aggregated evidence that tablet technology significantly…
While digital ethnography is an established field within ethnography, we don’t often hear of ethnographers building digital tools to conduct their fieldwork. Wendy Hsu wants to change that. In the first of her three-part guest post series on Tricia Wang’s…
Digital Anthropology Edited by Heather A. Horst, Daniel Miller Berg Publishers, Oct 2012 328pp Anthropology has two main tasks: to understand what it is to be human and to examine how humanity is manifested differently in the diversity of culture.…