EVAN HANOVER
Conifer Research
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Humor is no mere “sense;” it is a social and cultural practice that enables each one of us to construct and recognize novel meanings and connections within our lives and worlds. The idea that humor relies on incongruity that defies our expectations has been around for millennia, but the mid-20th century work of Arthur Koestler elevated humor to be creatively on par with other artistic and intellectual feats. In this PechaKucha, I link my personal fascination/obsession with humor to Koestler’s concept of ‘bisociation’ – the connection of two seemingly unrelated or incommensurate frames of reference – to tell the story of how I became the ethnographer I am today. Beginning with my discovery...
Intelligences
Resilience: Lessons from a Period of Disruption
Dhanabir Sharma • 0 Comments
TRACI THOMAS
Boston Consulting Group
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What happens when the research lens is turned inward? As a Strategic Designer, I spend most of time planning for research to engage with people so I can better understand their needs and behaviors and turn research insights into actionable solutions. In this PechaKucha, I share a personal reflection of what resilience means to me and the insights I gleaned based on my own experiences during the pandemic. It’s a visual story about a journey of pain and loss, but also strength through discovery, experimentation, and adaptability.
George Floyd protest in Nubian Square, Boston. May 2020. Photo by Traci Thomas
Traci Thomas is a Principal Strategic Designer at the Boston Consulting Group....
Intelligences
The Myth of the Pipeline Problem: Creating a Diverse and Thriving Team
Dhanabir Sharma • 0 Comments
SHAKIMA JACKSON-MARTINEZ
Senior Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at AnswerLab
with support from Kristin Zibell, Director of Products and Services at AnswerLab
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Corporate leaders issued countless statements decrying racism and investing in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in 2020. As a result of the pandemic and the ongoing racial reckoning that year, the overlap between societal events and corporate commitments became sharply visible. But the actions on those commitments, less so.
Focusing on DEI sparks all sorts of biased statements from colleagues like, “There are no Black/Trans/Women researchers,” “We don’t want quality to suffer,” and “There’s no pipeline, these folks just aren’t...
Intelligences
Social Resilience: Shifting from an Individual to a Shared Social Model for Building Resilience
Dhanabir Sharma • 0 Comments
JENNY RABODZEENKO
Allstate
KELLY COSTELLO
Panorama Innovation
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Through Designing Your Future workshops at Cook County Jail in Chicago as part of WIND (Women Initiating New Directions) programming, we have had the chance to connect with incarcerated women awaiting trial. From these interactions with women who, despite tremendous life adversity, are extremely resilient, we have realized that the notion of resilience is a double-edged sword. While heroic, the myth of individual resilience, in the context of criminal justice, may simultaneously allow society to abdicate responsibility for those in jail.
In this PechaKucha, we propose a reframe, from individual to social resilience, which holds us all accountable. Through understanding...
Intelligences
Resisting Resilience: An Anthropologist’s Paradox
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NADYA POHRAN
University of Cambridge
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Resilience can be a tremendous asset to any individual’s ability to carry on despite difficulties. At the same time, revering resilience without a healthy amount of respect for emotional vulnerability—by which I mean the intentional choice to tap into our emotional beings and allow ourselves to deeply experience the emotions that arise in us doing our fieldwork and analysis phases of ethnographic research—can be a hindering block to doing good anthropological work. Drawing upon three examples from my personal work as an anthropologist—one from academic research in interreligious relations, one from a healthtech start up context, and one from doing ethnographic work in corporate settings—I...
Intelligences
With the Phone in the Field: Making the Ethnographic Toolbox Resilient to Change
Dhanabir Sharma • 0 Comments
SIGNE HELBO GREGERS SØRENSEN
Alexandra Institute
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The characteristic smell that makes you think of a summer cabin and the warm feeling when touching a wooden surface. It was such sensory insights that we hoped to obtain during a study with the aim to explore people’s experiences of living in wooden houses. But then the COVID pandemic hit. Instead, we had to find ways of entering people’s homes through digital means and at a distance. One day during the study we received a message from one of the informants via the app that was used to collect snapshots of their homes:
“ (..) But I see no reason in showcasing my private home on video and if you can’t proceed without it, I’m done with your silly study…”
With...
Intelligences
“Buy Now, Pay Later” as Resilient Credit
Dhanabir Sharma • 0 Comments
RACHEL AALDERS
Australian National University
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Buy now, pay later (BNPL) products like Afterpay and Klarna promise to disrupt and democratise traditional finance by providing a fairer and more empowering financial product. Yet critics argue these products encourage overconsumption that people can ill-afford, with late fees that can quickly add up.
But what if we viewed these products not as emerging and disrupting, or as predatory and targeted, but instead saw them as part of a resilient credit industry – one that has learnt, adapted and evolved with changes in norms, regulations and technology?
Understanding these products as part of an ongoing, resilient credit industry helps us move beyond criticism and hype, so we can...
Intelligences
Beneath the Hype: Self-Ethnography to Explore the Human Possibilities within NFT Technology
Dhanabir Sharma • 0 Comments
JAKE SILVA
Meta
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This presentation narrates my journey as a skeptical researcher into the emerging world of NFTs. After unexpectedly moving into this much-hyped space, I use the resilience that curiosity fosters to overcome my skepticism of it and explore the human possibilities within. Through continuous questioning and learning how to code my own NFT from scratch, I realize their promise as a new medium for unbounded human expression. I then frame this self-discovery as a revelation and triangulate it with examples of NFT artistry captured during fieldwork. Finally, and counterintuitively, I question the veracity of my own revelation and argue that continuous questioning, even of our own work, strengthens our resilience as...
Intelligences
Becoming Digitally Resilient: Understanding the Gap between Online Government Services and Low Ability Users
Dhanabir Sharma • 0 Comments
YONI LEFEVRE
STBY bv
DOROTA GAZY
STBY bv
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In the Netherlands, approximately 2.5M people struggle to use technology in their daily life and are unable to use online governmental services independently. People with low digital literacy are increasingly feeling left behind by the digitalisation of society. Even though this group is very diverse, what they have in common is getting stuck at some point when they are in a digital environment, e.g. when filling in digital forms.
The Dutch government wants to provide more effective and appropriate help by designing more accessible online services and offering different types of support. To support this, STBY was commissioned to do qualitative research to better understand the experiences...
Intelligences
Research and Design in Controversial Spaces
Dhanabir Sharma • 0 Comments
STEFANI BACHETTI
Motorola Solutions
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Research within public safety and law enforcement in America highlights important issues and considerations for designers and researchers. Within this industry exists controversial points of views and high stakes consequences. How do we as researchers balance empathy in spaces where points of views don’t just differ, but actively clash? Who should we consider to be our true users within a product life cycle, and how do we ensure we are designing for the future rather than the present state of the world? This PechaKucha surfaces some of the strategies employed by the research and design teams at Motorola Solutions in a holistic effort to navigate these challenges.
Photo credit: Motorola...
Intelligences
Theory Instruments as Tangible Ways of Knowing
Dhanabir Sharma • 0 Comments
JESSICA SORENSON
Department of Design and Communication, University of Southern Denmark
METTE GISLEV KJÆRSGAARD
Department of Design and Communication, University of Southern Denmark
JACOB BUUR
Department of Design and Communication, University of Southern Denmark
MARY KARYDA
Department of Sociology and Environmental Economics, University of Southern Denmark
AYŞE ÖZGE AĞÇA
Department of Design and Communication, University of Southern Denmark
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While ethnographers and the data they produce already play a role in affecting industry practices, there is potential to integrate anthropological ways of seeing and knowing into a shared transdisciplinary design praxis. In a series of design research experiments, we have taken a pragmatic and playful approach to physicalizing theory. The result is a set of ‘Theory Instruments’ that transform theory into tangible interaction. Theory Instruments scaffold knowledge production...
Intelligences
Rehearsing Imagined Futures: Creative Performance as a Resilient Process among Refugees
Dhanabir Sharma • 0 Comments
NICOLE ALEONG
University of Amsterdam
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Cultivating resilience while navigating uncertainty is crucial for refugees. In the Netherlands, after receiving asylum and the right to work, refugees are often urged to adapt or evolve in hopes of successfully integrating into the Dutch economy. How do forced migrants who pursue work in creative enterprises help us rethink the relationship between forging new lives and uncertain futures? In this paper, resiliency of refugees is presented as a process of creative performance and experimentation. Efforts taken by refugees to explore, or ‘self-potentialize’, new future creative pathways suggest that resilience is overly simplified when defined as a pursuit of resistance to integrate and conform into established creative industries. The stories of two refugees living in Amsterdam showcase how resiliency is future-oriented, processual (Pink & Seale 2017), and connected to the preservation...
Intelligences
How a Government Organisation Evolved to Embrace Ethnographic Methods for Service (and Team) Resilience: The Case of the Canadian Digital Service
Dhanabir Sharma • 0 Comments
MITHULA NAIK
Canadian Digital Service, Treasury Board Secretariat, Government of Canada
COLIN MACARTHUR
Universita’ Bocconi
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Government websites and online services are often built with limited input from the people they serve. This approach limits their ability to respond to ever changing needs and contexts. This case study describes a government digital team built from the ground up to embrace ethnographic methods to make government services more resilient.
The case study begins by tracing the organisation’s origins and relationship to other research-driven parts of its government. Then it shows how the organisation’s structure evolved as more projects included ethnography. It describes various approaches to locating skilled researchers within bureaucratic confines, as well as what responsibilities researchers took on as the organisation...
Intelligences
Designing and Envisioning a More Resilient Social System: How to Start from What’s Good to Create Something Better in Public Services
Dhanabir Sharma • 0 Comments
SOFIA CARVALHO
With Company
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Segurança Social (Portugal’s Social Security System) offers multiple service channels to the people. However, they were not perceived as a whole because the assistance was not standard, depending on the channel or person answering – leading to cumulative problems that could take months to resolve.
We faced the complex nature of a big governmental organization. Our research made us more aware of people’s general reluctance towards public institutions as they tend to expect poor quality service. We used the information from field research to create four prototypes that would bring tangible results to citizens and impact the institution’s culture in the long term.
Segurança Social has always been about resilience: the organization itself and the people it serves. Despite its flaws and fragilities, it’s the social system that allows many to thrive. That’s why we envisioned the system’s...
Intelligences
Dismantling Stereotypes: Taking an Inside-Out Perspective to Building Better Representation in Advertising for Unilever
Dhanabir Sharma • 0 Comments
STEPHANIE BARRETT
Quantum Consumer Solutions
SIDDHARTH KANORIA
Quantum Consumer Solutions
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Equality, inclusion, and representation are increasingly acknowledged as core tenets of prosperous countries, cities, and organizations. We know that equality is essential, and we also know equality must be enacted on all fronts. Brands and other social organizations are increasingly recognizing their role as social stakeholders, committed to building a society in which both people and their businesses can thrive in the long-term. Quantum Consumer Solutions and Unilever have partnered on this program of four projects to understand and reduce stereotypes and improve representation. We used a mixed-methods approach, including semiotics, qualitative research, expert interviews, springboards, and internal organizational change to improve inclusivity in communications, pack, and products. Readers can expect to learn why we recommend an ‘inside-out’ approach that combines organizational change...