The ethnographer’s reading list

Ethnography Matters has embarked on a new series called “The Ethnographer’s Reading List” with UX professionals discussing their summer reading. Here are the latest three instalments:

Nicolas Nova
Nicolas Nova, who holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL, Switzerland), is a consultant and researcher at the Near Future Laboratory, and and editorial consultant for the Lift Conference. He also teaches user research in interaction design at HEAD-Geneva and ENSCI-Les Ateliers in Paris. This summer he is spending the months of July and August in California for a visiting researcher’s residence at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, working on a project about rituals and gestures of the digital everyday. Because of that topic, the books he has bought for the summer are quite influenced by this project. They’re not about methodologies, but more about case studies concerning design, material culture, ethnography and architecture.

Christina Dennaoui
Christina Dennaoui, who did graduate studies in anthropology, media, and religion at the University of Chicago, is now working as a digital planner and strategist for a digital marketing agency in Chicago. Christina, who can be described as a social theorist working in industry, also runs the Modern and Im/Material Things blog. Her shelves are full of work that relate to her professional work in digital strategy and planning. Although there is no grand theme uniting all of the books on her list, there are a few sub-themes worth calling out: archiving and identity, personal branding, quantifying individual interests, and the meaning of “strategy.”

Elisa Oreglia
Elisa is a PhD candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information. She studies the circulation and use of mobile phones and computers in China, especially in the countryside. Her summer reading deviates from the usual goal-driven reading of the rest of the year.