Reply by Melissa Cefkin Manager, Discovery Practices, Accelerated Discovery Lab, IBM Research
A great and perennial question that does not lend itself to one answer. The EPIC community is rich and varied in terms of the contexts of their work. In turn, what ‘works’ or is even feasible in these varied contexts varies. This applies to the kinds of “communicative acts” as well as anything else. For instance, what I needed to do as a consultant was very, very different from what I need to show and do in my technical research lab. For me powerpoints are de rigor (one comes to think of them as a prosthetic over time – people can’t talk without them). However the genre of the powerpoint is quite different from those I created as a consultant, for instance. And white papers in my environment are rare (perhaps seen more as ‘marketing speak’ and more appropriate to the business lines vs. ‘us’ in research, where demonstrating scientific rigor counts more). So without knowing from where you speak, a bit of a risky question to try to answer.
One thing I can say is EPIC folks have been rather diverse in their approach to communicating – powerpoint, as you say, but also theater, podcasts, video, essays and more. Here is a smattering of those presented and discussed as a part of the conference in prior years. This is just a smattering – what do others have to add?
- PowerPoint and the Crafting of Social Data. Nina Wakeford. EPIC 2006.
- Ethnographic findings in the organizational theater. Jacob Buur and Rosa Torguet. EPIC 2013
- Verfremdung and Business Development: The Ethnographic Essay as Eye-opener. Anne Line Dalsgaard. EPIC 2008
There are a whole host of explorations of the use of video throughout the years of EPIC, as well as a number of people who’ve examined the impact and forms of engage they’ve had over the course of much of their work (Donna Flynn and Tracy Lovejoy’s “Tracing the Arc of Ethnographic Impact” from 2008, to name just one.) Outside of the rich EPIC proceedings, I’d be foolish not to remind of the gem of the chapter in Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter (excuse the shameless plug and reminder!) by Nafus and anderson, “Writing on Walls”, on the use of project rooms – a richly examined look at communicative processes and the role of space and particular practices in using that space as part of the ethnographic work.
Different people in the community will have different suggestions depending on where they locate themselves. I open it to others to add additional comments. Great question.
Great references here! I would also add more explicitly (though it is embedded in Melissa’s response) that it is not only from where you speak, but to whom you are speaking, and what are your goals in communicating. I am also in a research based corporate environment, though throughout my tenure there has been an increasing mandate to have a business impact. The communicative acts to others in the EPIC community vary greatly from those to technologists, or then to folks in business units, or for that matter the C-Suite.
The various volumes of EPIC proceedings, as Melissa points out, really speak for the growth of knowledge in the group. There’s great literature put forward by research practitioners and academic scholars interested in questions of practice, of which Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter stands as an excellent example. These are communication statements of great importance, as important as the communicative acts of everyday corporate practice.
Beyond the location of the communicator, as Alexandra remarks, there is also the question of ‘to whom’ is the communicative act directed to. There is the question of the medium (ppt., white paper, etc.) that cannot live without the question of the message and its intended audience.
Presenting to engineers, one shouldn’t ignore the language of requirements and how one’s ethnographic message can talk to that logic. Presenting to brand strategists one shouldn’t ignore the language of brand attributes/experience even if the communicative act of an ethnographer should provide a lot more than a reading of attributes to make itself meaningful. Presenting to marketers, one should probably bear in mind the potential for one’s material being read/listened to, through ideas of the marketing mix, or its contemporary equivalents. Then there’s the challenge of presenting a communicative act to an audience that might be as mixed as engineers, designers, strategists and marketers all in the same room, at the same time. I like to believe that in this situation the work of the ethnographer (or the work of ‘ethnography’) is also very much about creating a common referent across different groups, disciplinary traditions and power positions inside a corporation. Whatever the medium (ppt. white paper), it should help to create that common referent, or missing link. Unless it does so, it probably fails the goal of creating strategic business changes in the long term.
For the people in the community informed by the human sciences, anthropology in particular, culture is often the missing link. Culture is what can simultaneously speak to the engineering language of requirements, the strategy language of attributes, the design language of experience or a language informed by ideas of ‘marketing mix’; culture is also a way of letting the language of “consumers” speak to all these different groups and in the process, translate the latter to the former. Although “culture” is likely to carry on containing many of the answers are work is found on, forums like this and Anthrodesign are absolutely crucial to ensure that an idea of culture doesn’t get too comfortable with itself in the practice of corporate work and in the communicative acts that stem from that practice. Great question indeed. Keep them coming!
P.S. I meant ‘our work is found’, not ‘are work is found’. The joys of multitasking:) !
An excellent provocation! I’m enjoying the nice synergy between this post on communicative acts and mine on immersion tools. One point I lightly touched on in my post was that work created to ‘inform’ others is harder to transfer… by that I mean that framing ethnographic output as ‘communication’ puts it at a disadvantage from the start. (This would be a worthy topic for an essay of it’s own)
As Melissa outlines, this community has a long history of exploring alternative outputs that defy easy categorization as communication. My own approach has been to design analysis and synthesis tools that let us travel the “last mile” with our clients and stakeholders to co-author the ethnographic output, but a multitiude of other approaches (ethnographic fiction, project rooms, performance) fulfill some of the the same function, to engage the ‘audience’ emotionally as well as intellectually and force them to think “with” our insights rather than “about” them.
I agree with everything Melissa said – as well as Alexandra, Pedro, and John’s responses. This is a great provocation.
I’d also chime in a conversation I had at a conference with Social Theory at Chicago that suggest one end of the spectrum. After about 3 hours of fending off drowsiness and watching these guys “present” which is to say “just get up and read” paper after paper, which was, excruciatingly boring. I approached one of my old professors and said, “you guys desperately need Powerpoint.” To which I got the reply, “Never. If you can’t understand what’s going on, you shouldn’t be here.” I was floored to hear that.
I use Powerpoint in all my talks, but primarily to entertain and to be understood. I think talks should be entertaining, because entertainment reduces pretense, and pretense is an obstacle to learning. I am very concerned with being understood, and equally concerned with the rigor of ideas and the belief that ideas should be rigorous.
So in all of my talks I always try to crack wise and make analogies because these are tools to facilitate learning. I did not come up with this approach, I got it from Stephen Hawking. I attended one of his lectures in Atlanta and, despite the complexity of what he was talking about, he had colorful charts and graphs with jokes and references to the Simpsons that made it accessible.
Going back to that conference at Chicago – I think the attitude that, “if you can’t get it you shouldn’t be here, is” a great recipe for extinction. Social Theory survives because there is such a thing as tenure, but it remains this insular, irrelevant little clique that takes itself very seriously. And the world moves on.
But when Theory people wonder aloud why so few sociologists go into theory, or why there is an apparent and unsatisfactory divide between theory and methods in the social sciences, they fail to recognize that it is because they do not desire to be understood. They want to be wizards, masters of an esoteric science, becaue that brings you status in the academy.
Yet we live in an era where protecting and hoarding are increasingly outmoded models in both business and social interaction. We put ourselves “out there” in social networks to reach people on the peripheries of our social worlds, we grow networks, we open source software, we compete over ecosystems, not individual products. Ours increasingly is a competition over visions of the world, not singular instances within one world. Being cross compatible is therefore crucial. Being understood is a form of cross-compatibility.
We are in a unique position to know that as research/practicioners know that because being understood pays our bills. It is a potentially useful way to ground our work – that it must be relevant to an audience that needs to use it for something. I think that’s part of the value we bring to social science and why I am more active here than in virtually any other research community.
I think that this sort of argument