ethnography - Jimmy Breeze on Diigo

11 Dec 09

Most innovations are small, relatively simple, and fit comfortably into the established rhythm and competencies of the existing product delivery cycle.
Myth: Use ethnographic observational studies to discover hidden, unmet needs
7 more annotations...
- although the deep and rich study of people's lives is useful for incremental innovation, history shows that this is not how the brilliant, earth-shattering, revolutionary innovations come about.
- Take a look at the powerful inventions that have changed society and ask what role design research played:
  
  The Airplane
  The Automobile
  The Telephone
  The Radio
  The Television
  The Computer
  The Personal Computer
  The Internet
  SMS Text Messaging
  The Cellphone
  
  What role did design research play? What role did marketing research play? No role. All were driven by technology. In his recent study of technology, the economist Brian Arthur reached a very similar conclusion: technologies evolve from earlier technologies, driven by science, driven by engineering, driven by tinkerers of all sorts. Needs follow so slowly, that Arthur does not even cover them.
- Brand new ideas are strange and foreign. If developed within a company, they often do not fit. They compete for scarce resources with other, proven products. New ideas have to fit into the competencies of a company, they have to fit the product schedule, the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution chains. Any new idea that goes outside of the norm has introduced more barriers to success: the innovator's job is not over until all these other barriers have been taken account of, so that the entire system will work smoothly. Innovation is a systems issue; it is not about product or process: it is about the entire system.
- Often they had to be nurtured, tamed, modified, but over time, a small number found their niche: the technology launched the products. The products discovered needs. People slowly adopted them, leading to more changes in the products.
- The least interesting innovations to the university and company research community are the small, slow enhancements that gradually lower costs while improving performance. But in fact, not only is this where most product enhancement takes place, it is also where the research community can add the most value.
- This is where ethnographic observation can be powerful, discovering the difficulties people have in everyday use, the workarounds and hacks they invent that suggest product modifications. This allows existing products to be modified at low cost, low risk, yet making them ever more attractive, ever more valuable to the customer base.
- markets

14 Oct 09

American Ethnography | Becoming a marihuana user

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ethnography reading research

05 Oct 09

A new public services: Voices from the frontline | Society | guardian.co.uk

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services research innovation ethnography

29 Sep 09

Design Investigations: The Insight : Opportunity Deck

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design research ethnography visualization art tools

The deck consists of lists of questions that we can "ask" the data—questions that an anthropologist might ask, or a cognitive scientist, or an engineer, or a management consultant.
Students stand in front of the wall of data and work their way through the deck, each card acting as a lens through which they view the data. The deck is in two parts: an insight deck and an opportunity deck. The first part helps reveal important insights that might fuel design opportunities. We work slowly and methodically through the deck, making an effort to find—even force—connections between the questions and the data.
1 more annotations...
- Our aim is to present our clients with a robust set of insight : opportunity pairs, hooking each opportunity to the insight that inspired it.

Design Investigations: Analytical Toolsets

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design research ethnography visualization art tools

DESIGNING *for humans: Design Research at #IDSA09

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design research ethnography visualization

This focuses on providing tools for self-guidance, such as the diagram pictured above, that helps students choose the right generative method for answering particular research questions.
Bennett has also created an "opportunity deck" that assists students in analyzing research data from non-designer perspectives such as business and engineering (pictured below). For more information, see her blog, Design Investigations.

28 Sep 09

A special report on telecoms in emerging markets: : Beyond voice | The Economist

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economics development ethnography finance mobility phone

But Uganda’s traditional growing seasons are shifting, so he is worried about droughts or flash floods that could destroy his crop. Michael Gizamba, a local village-phone operator, offers to help using Farmer’s Friend, an agricultural-information service. He sends a text message to ask for a seasonal weather forecast for the region. Before long a reply arrives to say that normal, moderate rainfall is expected during July. Mr Makawa decides to plant his tomatoes.
Rice farmers who had trouble with aphids texted for advice and received a message telling them how to make a pesticide using soap and paraffin. A farmer with blighted tomato plants learned how to control the problem by spraying the plants with a milk-based mixture.
19 more annotations...
- More complicated questions (“my chicken’s eyes are bulging”) are relayed to human experts, who either call back within 15 minutes or, with particularly difficult problems, promise to provide an answer within four days. These answers are then used to improve the database.
- Farmer’s Friend is one of a range of phone-based services launched in June by MTN, Google and the Grameen Foundation’s “Application Laboratory”, or AppLab. As well as disseminating advice in agriculture, provided by the Busoga Rural Open Source and Development Initiative, the new services also provide health and market information. The Clinic Finder service points people to nearby clinics, and the Health Tips service explains the symptoms of common diseases.
- Lastly there is Google Trader, a text-based system that matches buyers and sellers of agricultural produce and commodities. Sellers send a message to say where they are and what they have to offer, which will be available to potential buyers within 30km for seven days.
- “There is a big shift from holding a phone to your ear to holding it in your hand,” says David Edelstein of the Grameen Foundation. “It opens the door to information services. It’s not the web, but it’s a web of services that can be offered on mobile devices.”
- Offering agricultural and health information is more difficult than offering a phone service, however, because such information must be localised and must take cultural differences into account. The answer is to work closely with local partners, says Mr Edelstein. Grameen is also experimenting with the idea of “community knowledge workers”—local people who can help others get access to mobile services, reading, translating and explaining text messages where necessary, just as village-phone operators provide access to basic communications.
- Reuters Market Lite, a text-based service that is available in parts of India. Its 125,000 users pay 200 rupees ($4.20) for a three-month subscription, which provides them with local weather and price information four or five times a day. Many farmers say that their profits have gone up as a result.
- Tata Consultancy Services, an Indian operator, offers a service called mKrishi which is similar to Farmer’s Friend, allowing farmers to send queries and receive personalised advice.
- Nokia, the world’s largest handset-maker, launched its own information service, Nokia Life Tools, in India in June. In addition to education and entertainment, it provides agricultural information, such as prices, weather data and farming tips, that can be called up from special menus on some Nokia handsets.
- Services to help farmers have been most widely adopted in China, where China Mobile offers a service called Nong Xin Tong in conjunction with the agriculture ministry, as part of its push into rural areas.
- China Mobile also runs a website, 12582.com, that sends farmers information about planting techniques, pest management and market prices. The service, which costs two yuan ($0.30) a month, sends out 13m text messages a day and has over 40m users.
- Mobile phones are also being used in health care. One-way text alerts, sent to everyone in a particular area, can be used to raise awareness of HIV; sending daily text messages to patients can help them remember to take their drugs for tuberculosis or HIV.
- The mobile service that is delivering the most obvious economic benefits is money transfer, otherwise known as mobile banking (though for technical and regulatory reasons it is not, strictly speaking, banking). It has grown out of the widespread custom of using prepaid calling credit as an informal currency.
- More simply, you could buy a top-up voucher for the amount you want to transfer (say, $10) and then call the village-phone operator or shopkeeper in your family’s village and read out the code on the voucher. The credit will be applied to the phone of the shopkeeper, who will hand cash to your family, minus a commission of 10-20%.
- These methods became so widespread that some companies decided to set up mobile-payment systems that allow real money, rather than just airtime, to be transferred from one user to another by phone.
- The biggest successes in this field so far have been Gcash and Smart Money in the Philippines, Wizzit in South Africa, Celpay in Zambia and, above all, M-PESA in Kenya, which has become the most widely adopted mobile-money scheme in the world.
- Making it easier, quicker and cheaper to transfer money has enormous social and economic benefits. Commissions are lower, and recipients no longer have to pay for transport to towns to make withdrawals. They can also take out funds more easily and frequently. In rural households that have adopted mobile money, incomes have increased by 5-30%, according to Olga Morawczynski, an ethnographer at the University of Edinburgh who has studied M-PESA in detail. It also saves men working in the city having to take time off to deliver the money to their families. The only drawback, say their wives, is that some men now visit home less frequently.
- M-PESA is also used as a form of savings account, even though it does not pay interest. Having even a small cushion of savings to fall back on allows people to deal with the unexpected, such as suddenly having to pay for medical treatment. “An awful lot of people climb out of poverty every year, but a lot drop back in because they have no savings, no buffer, so when something bad happens they have to sell assets and lose a lot of ground,” says Mr Christen. Poor people tend to save by buying livestock, which can get sick or die, or buying gold, which can be stolen, or investing in community-based schemes that may be fraudulent, says Timothy Lyman of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP). Mobile banking offers a more reliable alternative, he says, and could have economic benefits comparable to those of mobile phones.
- There were special factors that made M-PESA more likely to work in Kenya: the unusually high cost of sending money by other methods; the unusually large market share (80%) of Safaricom, the main mobile operator (an affiliate of Vodafone); the regulator’s decision to allow the scheme to proceed, even without formal regulatory approval; and, most intriguingly, the post-election violence in the country in early 2008. M-PESA was used to transfer money to people trapped in Nairobi’s slums at the time, and some people regarded M-PESA as a safer place to store their money than the banks, which were entangled in ethnic disputes. All this makes Ms Morawczynski think that Kenya’s success in mobile banking may not be matched elsewhere. “But I hope somebody can prove me wrong,” she says.
- some banks have realised that teaming up with a mobile operator to launch a mobile-money service will allow them to reach many more customers. After all, mobile operators have far more powerful brands and much greater reach than banks.

25 Sep 09

Isolation or Solitude? - Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect

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travel research ethnography

One of the pleasures of moving to a new city is properly, and I mean properly is getting to understand the commuting behaviours of its inhabitants. For all our immersive, shadowing of participants we only ever dip into their travel-to-'work mind-space, the insightful researcher needs to live through, have something at stake and be affected by the worst a commuting experience has to offer to truly understand the mentality of a city.

14 Sep 09

Index of /~comp3503/Resources/Ethnography/

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ethnography research qualitative

04 Sep 09

Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Enthnography: - Jan Chipchase - The Rise of the Super Fakes

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ethnography research

13 Aug 09

Simon Roberts

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people anthropology ethnography work

17 Jul 09

Digital Ethnography » Blog Archive » Toward a New Future of “Whatever”

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video anthropology ethnography technology internet

13 Jul 09

How Qualitative Research Changed Me: An Autoethnographic Narrative of Personal Growth

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qualitative ethnography research identity

udes of advanced Hebrew learners of diverse

backgrounds and beliefs in a Cana

I was truly interested in how participants used Hebrew

to negotiate a life in the Diaspora; more specifically, whether these individuals managed

to build a sense of comfort, satisfaction, and belonging in Canada with my assumption of

their deep connection to the Hebrew language and its indelible link to Israeli culture. If

their experiences were similar to mine, how did they minimize the discomfort of anomie I

had experienced?
13 more annotations...
- In my original dissertation
  
  proposal, I emphasized both the emic perspectives of my work because it was based on
  
  my insider knowledge of culturally specific ways of communicating (Trappes-Lomax,
  
  2004). However, I did not initially embrace the position of the emic or insider. I was
  
  unaware of my actual closeness of experience and attitude to the participants, and hesitant
  
  to fully acknowledge and embrace a strongly emic position that I thought could obliterate
  
  any perspective of an outsider.
- Although I shared their ability in the language, I did not
  
  share their cultural history or experiences. I could not contribute to conversations about
  
  army experiences, current television programs, or local politicians, and felt that I would
  
  never fully integrate in Israel as more than the token English-speaker. I also began to
  
  realize that building a life in Israel, away from the support network of my immediate
  
  family, would be difficult and unglamorous. I missed aspects of life in Canada in which I
  
  played the role of the insider who did, in fact, belong. I returned to Canada to complete
  
  university, postponing my decision to immigrate to Israel.
- included three months of participant-observation in
  
  the Hebrew class, individual interviews with 10 students and the professor, and one group
  
  interview to assess the social dynamics between the students, when discussing the place
  
  of Hebrew in their identity constructions
- I understood that the national labelings of “Canadian” and “Israeli” referred not entirely
  
  to nationality, but often to linguistic communicative ability. These two groups of students
  
  sat on opposite ends of the room, and chatted before, after, and often during class in
  
  English (among the Canadians) and Hebrew (among the Israelis).
- communicative oral
  
  proficiency divided the class between the Israeli haves and the Canadian have-nots who
  
  felt disadvantaged because their investment in acquiring oral proficiency yielded very
  
  small returns (Norton Pierce, 1995) of poor grades and little linguistic progress, evident
  
  in this exchange between students.
- If there’s a person, yes, and he doesn’t
  
  speak Hebrew and doesn’t have any connection to the language, yes? I
  
  don’t know, like, I don’t] I don’t control him, but I don’t really accept him
  
  to be Jewish. He’s Jewish, but like, I think that if you’re Jewish you have
  
  to know Hebrew. If you don’t then I’ll still accept you as Jewish, but the
  
  way I’m going to feel about you is different. I’m not going to feel the
  
  same connection with somebody that doesn’t understand the language.
- Hearing the “us” and “them” terminology, I became aware of continual “othering”
  
  occurring within the classroom, within this minority ethnic group of Jews in Canada.
- despite her
  
  assertion of Israeli identity in the social context of classroom discussions, her admission
  
  of being ostracized as a Russian in Israel displays a sense of not truly belonging when
  
  living in Israeli society.
- Although students placed themselves in an Israeli social group, acting as
  
  gatekeepers in excluding access to Canadian students, the professor similarly excluded all
  
  members of the class from her perceived circle of true, authentic Israeliness. Although
  
  many of the students moved to Israel at very young ages and emigrated as teenagers (for
  
  example, Marina lived in Israel from age 5 to age 17), Aviva viewed herself as different
  
  from her students and “othered” them as well.
- Simultaneously, they dealt with identities
  
  imposed by others and restriction to exclusive membership groups by gatekeepers who
  
  claimed to be “authentic” members.
- All of us clashed with one another in a fight to claim the Hebrew language as
  
  authentically belonging to us, and in doing so, instinctively excluded others from
  
  claiming the language. The “native speaker” is the speaker of the standard language, and
  
  vice versa- the standard language is the language that native speakers use. Elite speech
  
  communities decide who is a member for symbolic and imagined (not communicative)
  
  purposes (Davies, 2003).
- Similarly, national and religious groupings are imagined social
  
  communities (Anderson, 1991) in which members will never meet one another but feel
  
  solidarity among those they imagine to hold similar values and characteristics.
- As all of us
  
  claim ownership and appropriation of modern Hebrew, we use “othering” to help place
  
  and classify ourselves within social contexts. We clash with “others” within our own
  
  small minority community because, we believe, We are not Them.

07 Jul 09

Remote Presence - Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect

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research ethnography qualitative methodology resources

01 Jul 09

"The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online"

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facebook politics society twitter inequality idea ethnography anthropology

For decades, we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide." Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions.
As is the case in many situations, teenagers are a darn good indicator of broader trends. I'm an ethnographer. For the last four years, I've been traveling the United States, talking to American teenagers about their use of social media. During the 2006-2007 school year, I started noticing a trend. In each school, in each part of the country, there were teens who opted for MySpace and teens who opted for Facebook. (There were also plenty of teens who used both.) At the beginning of the school year, teens were asking "Are you on MySpace? Yes or No?" At the end of the school year, the question had transformed to "MySpace or Facebook?"
21 more annotations...
- Kat (14, Mass.): I'm not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever, and Facebook is all... not all the people that have Facebook are mature, but its supposed to be like oh we're more mature. … MySpace is just old.
- Teens - and adults - use social categories and labels to identify people with values, tastes, and social positions. As teens chose between MySpace and Facebook, these sites took on the frames of those social categories. Nowhere is this more visible than in the language that those who explicitly chose Facebook over MySpace.
  Craig (17, California): The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook. It was more cultured, and less cheesy. The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace.
- Early adopters matter - they shape services in the long-term. MySpace came out first and quickly attracted urban 20-somethings. It spread to teenagers through older siblings and cousins as well as those who were attracted to indie rock and hip hop music culture. Facebook started at Harvard and spread to the Ivy Leagues before spreading more broadly. The first teenagers to hear about Facebook were those connected to the early adopters of Facebook (i.e. the Ivy League bound types). The desirability of the site spread from those college-bound teens. As word of these sites spread, teens went to where their friends were. The origin points of these sites explain many of people's choices, especially when it comes to first adoption because people adopt the sites that their friends adopt. Yet, it doesn't explain why people some people left MySpace to join Facebook and others did not.
- Herein lies the reality that makes all of this quite messy to deal with. It wasn't just anyone who left MySpace to go to Facebook. In fact, if we want to get to the crux of what unfolded, we might as well face an uncomfortable reality... What happened was modern day "white flight."
- Those who deserted MySpace did so by "choice" but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.
- The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to everyone out there. And if we think back to the language used by teens who use Facebook when talking about MySpace, we should be truly alarmed. Those who are from privileged backgrounds tend to be far more condescending towards those who are not than vice versa. Many of us in this room come from privileged worlds where we want to "help" those who are not well-off.
- Unlike teens who are often straddling MySpace and Facebook, most adults are active on one or the other unless they have a specific professional or hobby-based reason to be on both. Many of you know people who joined Facebook in the last year. Well, numerous adults have also joined MySpace in the last year. My guess is that no many of you know adults who have recently created accounts on MySpace. Why? Because they probably aren't like you.
- In many ways, adult worlds are even more divided than teen worlds. Adults are less likely to know other adults who aren't like them than teens are. There's a concept in sociology called "homophily." It means birds of a feather stick together.
- One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics. And it makes many different realities much more visible than ever before. Racial divisions in American society should not shock anyone in this room, but the explicit-ness of them online can be quite startling.
- First off, when people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another and they do not communicate with one another. This can and does breed intolerance. Sociologists are obsessed with homophily because of the social and economic implications for such divisions. If you don't know people who are different than you, you don't trust them. Think about this in the context of the politics around gay rights. The #1 predictor for how someone will side in issues of gay rights is whether or not they know someone who is gay.
- When you choose MySpace or Facebook, you can't send messages to people on the other site. You can't Friend people on the other site. There's a cultural wall between users. And if there's no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so.
- people are already divided and we accept that people from different backgrounds inhabit different environments. We cannot expect technology to automatically integrate people and generate cultural harmony. Although most of you call these sites "social networking sites," there's almost no networking going on.
- In many ways, the Internet is providing a next generation public sphere. Unfortunately, it's also bringing with it next generation divides. The public sphere was never accessible to everyone. There's a reason than the scholar Habermas talked about it as the bourgeois public sphere. The public sphere was historically the domain of educated, wealthy, white, straight men. The digital public sphere may make certain aspects of public life more accessible to some, but this is not a given.
- I recommend each and every one of you to login to MySpace and try to make sense of it today. It will feel foreign to you because it's not your community, it's not your friends. Now imagine how people who aren't like you feel when they walk into Facebook or Twitter.
- if you look at Indian use of social media, you'll see a divide between Orkut and Facebook that plays out along caste and professional lines. Even if you're not working in the States, you need to account for social divisions. You just might have to look in different places.
- Divides also play out inside sites. Consider everyone's beloved Twitter. For starters, who uses the site represents a small minority of American (let alone international) online participants. Teens, for example, are not using the site. But even among those who are, they aren't part of one gigantic public space. Consider the discussion of the Iranian election. If you were in certain cohorts, you couldn't miss the green-ification of people's profiles, the discussions of #iranelection. But, even though said conversations were massively prolific, only a small percentage of the user base was even aware of this beyond the trending topic. Those who were following 50cent and Miley Cyrus were oblivious to these conversations. And, in a matter of moments, this became visible when Michael Jackson died and captured the attention of a much broader swath of users, nearly taking Twitter down with it. In your world, Iran probably matters more than Michael Jackson. But don't for a second think that this is universal.
- 1) Social stratification is pervasive in American society (and around the globe). Social media does not magically eradicate inequality. Rather, it mirrors what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible. What we see online is not the property of these specific sites, but the pattern of adoption and development that emerged as people embraced them. People brought their biases with them to these sites and they got baked in.
- 2) There is no universal public online. What we see as user "choice" in social media often has to do with structural forces like homophily in people's social networks. Social stratification in this country is not cleanly linked to race or education or socio-economic factors, although all are certainly present. More than anything, social stratification is a social networks issue. People connect to people who think like them and they think like the people with whom they are connected. The digital publics that unfold highlight and reinforce structural divisions.
- 3) If you are trying to connect with the public, where you go online matters. If you choose to make Facebook your platform for civic activity, you are implicitly suggesting that a specific class of people is more worth your time and attention than others. Of course, splitting your attention can also be costly and doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be reaching everyone anyhow.
- The key to developing a social media strategy is to understand who you're reaching and who you're not and make certain that your perspective is accounting for said choices. Understand your biases and work to counter them.
- The more that we rely on certain kinds of social media as the solution, the more we define a modern day "second class citizenship." We desperately need to address issues of access and media literacy to combat this, but we also need to re-engage around broader issues of inequality, intolerance, and social divisions. Technology isn't the savior, but it sure can highlight the work we need to do.

26 Jun 09

How to Kick Off an Innovation Project - BusinessWeek

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ethnography design research qualitative

24 Jun 09

Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect: Research Equipment Overview

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essential research ethnography

18 Jun 09

Intel Education: the innovator: Distinguished Lecturer: Genevieve Bell

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anthropology ethnography research qualitative interesting

17 Jun 09

The Blind Leading the Deaf - Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect

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ethnography anthropology research qualitative

For all the current buzz currently surrounding ethnographic / anthropological research - this isn't the only way to feel out what or how to design (in the broadest sense of the word), doesn't always provide value, and absolutely shouldn't be part of every design process - anyone who thinks otherwise isn't asking enough questions about what their client needs and hasn't factored in the skills of the team at hand. At it's worst ethnographic research is an expensive, time-consuming distraction that can take the design team (and the client they represent) in the wrong direction.

R&D 2.0: Fewer Engineers, More Anthropologists - Navi Radjou - HarvardBusiness.org

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anthropology ethnography future business work trends

In recent years, I have visited dozens of R&D labs of multinationals in India that are staffed with brilliant engineers and scientists, many of whom have PhDs in technical fields. They all represent version 1.0 of the global R&D model, still in practice, in which MNCs use low-cost but high-quality technical talent in emerging markets to crank out products and services that either get exported back to developed markets or are targeted to middle-class buyers in local markets.
But this 1.0 model will no longer be appropriate if MNCs like GE wish to cater their offerings to the 5 billion people who form the middle and the bottom of the economic pyramid in places like India, Brazil, and South Africa. Indeed, to effectively identify and address the explicit and unmet needs of the broader consumer base in emerging markets, I believe MNCs must adopt a new global innovation model. Let's call it global R&D 2.0.
3 more annotations...
- By having anthropologists study and interact with end-customers in their natural settings, Western firms can learn to tailor their business models and offerings to match users' socio-economic and cultural context.
- For example, Intel's People and Practices Research (PaPR) employs sociologists and ethnographers who spend months in emerging markets embedded in grassroots communities to identify the latent needs of local consumers. Dr Genevieve Bell, one of PaPR's anthropologists, traveled extensively across China and India observing people in their homes to find out how they use and what they want from technology. Her ethnographic insights shaped Intel's groundbreaking pricing models and partnership strategies for Chinese consumer market.
- o effectively lure low-income buyers into procuring their low-end goods and services, multinationals need the help of development economists who can concoct creative pricing and financing mechanisms, such as microcredit schemes. For instance, Whirlpool is working with development economists at RTI International and the University of North Carolina to create new microfinance models that will enable Whirlpool to cost-effectively commercialize its appliances to millions of low-income households within emerging markets like India and Mexico.

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