Dhanabir Sharma

Intelligences

Leveraging Speculative Design to Re-Imagine Product Roadmaps

Posted by  • 0 Comments

SANYA ATTARI Facebook Inc. CHARLEY SCULL Facebook Inc. MAHBOOBEH HARANDI Facebook Inc. [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] Businesses often have strategic visions for the future of a product space; however, identifying and building toward preferable futures is a daunting task, especially when designing for complex systems, e.g., Digital advertising platforms that include multiple complex interfaces and internal organizational structures. Moreover, because businesses need to iterate on products quickly, often in a reactive manner, many businesses, and consequently researchers, struggle to go beyond short-term needs to tackle long-term solutions; that is, they mostly react to immediate needs and changes rather than taking a proactive strategic approach towards building a favorable future. Speculative design as a methodology to support proactive strategic thinking helps set a pathway to explore a variety of future states with participants, in our case business...

Intelligences

The Ballast in Anthropology’s Ship: How a Universal Psychological Structure Can Provide Stability and Flexibility in Anthropological Field Work

Posted by  • 0 Comments

BEN DOEPKE IX [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] After a year of new social and cultural constraints, ethnographic approaches have had to quickly evolve. This is the story of how one research method, which enlists the help of close personal contacts around a participating respondent to gather interviews, artifacts, and locations, spotlighted the need for deploying a universal psychological structure (UPS). Even from emic perspectives, the influence of personal bias is uncontested, but how do we account for it? A UPS helps, but how can a structure allow lived experience to flow through it while not altering the experience itself? We can anticipate that parameters around our discipline will continue to shift, challenging some of its most revered principles. How...

Intelligences

Investigating a Gestational Care Facility: An Ethnographic Exploration of Bio-technological Possibilities through a Retro-speculative Lens

Posted by  • 0 Comments

OSHIN SIAO BHATT Design Academy Eindhoven [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] PechaKucha Presentation: This story outlines the use of a fictional ethnography to delve into the theme of human-technology interface, with assisted reproduction as its focus. Drawing from my ethnographic experiences around reproductive technologies and clinical spaces at large, the narrative imagines a world where technologies that assist in processes of conception and birthing have become increasingly inventive as well as readily available. The story, drawing on both existing as well as retrospeculative techniques, studies, and theoretical concepts, explores the notion of a child-to-be as symbolic of the idea of birthing futures. The speculative ethnography of a clinical facility...

Intelligences

Holidays and the Anticipation of Ritual

Posted by  • 0 Comments

ROB MURRAY IBM [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] PechaKucha Presentation: COVID-19 disrupted so much. It also disrupted rituals, holidays and events on an incredible scale. Many of us lost track of time without these expected markers. But 2021 is all about a new perspective. I found myself anticipating and wanting to engage with rituals as never before. January 2021 was the beginning of a journey to reestablish ritual and patterns of time. I chose to note and celebrate and anticipate simple holidays. This is new territory for me as I did not celebrate holidays to any degree pre-2021. They were noted but I did not really participate. That has changed. The curious researcher in me is on a journey to explore and embrace holidays and ritual. I now anticipate holidays...

Intelligences

Our Advocacy for Their Change

Posted by  • 0 Comments

AMANDA ROSENBERG Workday [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] PechaKucha Presentation: Our practice is due for an update. As researchers, we practice advocacy on behalf of people impacted by product development decisions. In a time when many of us are striving for more inclusivity, interrogating our approach to advocacy reveals how we can begin to break down the ways we enable – and could enable – change on behalf of whom we’re researching. Sparked by the events of 2020, this talk is a reflection on historical and current advocacy practices outside of research. The talk explores why an update to the research practice matters and how we can go about it. Amanda Rosenberg is a UX Researcher at Workday, a mom to the cutest rescue dog, and an avid practitioner...

Intelligences

Intuition: Thinking through Loopholes

Posted by  • 0 Comments

LAURA REISS [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] PechaKucha Presentation Intuition, contrary to common sense, is not a natural gift. Intuition is born out of experience and it can be a valuable tool for researchers. But what has intuition to do with anticipation? To anticipate we usually rely on understanding current behavioral patterns and extrapolating them. Intuition is great at recognizing patterns and by trusting it more we can become even better researchers. As with any other skill in order to follow our intuition, we need to practice, to be exposed to a lot of fieldwork, to listen to a lot of people, so that we can not only notice what stands out of the common but give the right value to it. When we learn to use our intuition as a research tool, anticipating...

Intelligences

Who Deserves to Be Observed?: Wrestling with the Avant-Garde

Posted by  • 0 Comments

LETIZIA NARDI InProcess LOLA BILLAUD InProcess [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] PechaKucha Presentation—What happens when the “mildly militaristic jargon of marketing” (2004, Sunderland, Taylor, Denny) seeps into the dialectic process of structuring applied research and blurs the meaning of its stakes? This provokingly titled PechaKucha stems from our experience of recruitment conundrums, ones in which notions of “avant-garde” were used in framing, shaping, or reorienting our approach towards the people we were supposed to observe, analyze and report on. We resurface from these case studies and attempt to scratch the glossy coat that blankets these notions as we approach the range of theories that try to define who’s “deserving” of observation....

Intelligences

Anticipating Shared Futures: Emotion, Connection & Relationships

Posted by  • 0 Comments

SARAH HEFFERNAN NCAD / Deloitte Digital [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] PechaKucha Presentation—Unprecedented. Unprecedented. Unprecedented. How often did we hear that word at the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic? But was it really unprecedented? We’ve been warned for years that a pandemic was imminent. We know the world has been devastated by them in the past. So why did we declare Covid-19 unprecedented? And why wasn’t there a shared anticipation of it? Reflecting on an idea that was first sparked while working as a bungy jump operator, this PechaKucha explores how facts, figures and predictions are not enough when it comes to helping people anticipate and embrace the unthinkable. This discovery is layered with the grief I experience for a way of...

Intelligences

Microbes That Matter

Posted by  • 0 Comments

CARRIE YURY Fjord [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] PechaKucha Presentation—While COVID-19 has made the world hyper vigilant about sanitization, I take a bottoms-up perspective on the threats of a microbe-starved world. Telling the story of Clostridium Difficile, I walk us through how—just as in ethnography—context is everything for microbes. Using different examples from the biosphere, I examine how microbial metaphors matter, and I make the case that understanding microbes in the context of larger environments and ecosystems can help move us toward life centered design. This Pecha Kucha uses microbes as a contextual metaphor to argue that it is our responsibility to change our perspective; to decenter the human, and start designing for the health of...

Intelligences

On Being Well in a Time of Hell

Posted by  • 0 Comments

MIRA SHAH Spotify CHLOE EVANS Spotify CAMIE STEINHOFF Spotify [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] PechaKucha Presentation—For the past year, people around the world have adjusted quickly to unforeseen constraints presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. Upheaval during the pandemic has resulted in a deep sense of grief leaving people in an unpredictable cycle of losing control and attempting to regain it. But, guess what? Researchers also have been experiencing the highs and lows of the pandemic and haven’t been immune to the fulcrum of loss and unexpected buoyancy. In sensing the importance of the moment, a group of researchers came together to learn how people around the world were adjusting and coping, and to anticipate how adaptations in contexts, habits,...

Intelligences

Reimagining Livelihoods: An Ethnographic Inquiry into Anticipation, Agency, and Reflexivity as India’s Impact Ecosystem Responds to Post-Pandemic Rebuilding

Posted by  • 0 Comments

GITIKA SAKSENA LagomWorks ABHISHEK MOHANTY LagomWorks [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] The COVID19 induced lockdown in India and consequent migration of workers severely affected the economy. When the migrants returned to urban areas, newer challenges surfaced around the scale and nature of jobs on offer, as well as the skills and aspirations of workers. In this paper, we follow a social impact project focused on livelihoods and post pandemic rebuilding, to explore the trails of ethnography and how its engagement along multiple networks shapes its possibilities as a research method that helps foreground emic perspectives. In doing so, we analyse agencies and social relations from the field, and their role in shaping project imaginaries. Anchored in original, long-term participatory ethnographic research, our paper thinks alongside Appadurai (2013) to surmise that anticipation is imbricated in the coming together of a grounds-up ‘ethics of possibility’...

Intelligences

“Do Not Fear Mistakes—there Are None”: Ethnography as Improvisation

Posted by  • 1 Comment

KATHERINE METZO Lowe's Home Improvement, Elemental Research [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] PechaKucha Presentation: I use the iconic album, Kind of Blue, to re-frame a conversation around ethnography and innovation. Moving fast and breaking stuff is not how ethnography brings value to the business. Rather, we use our craft to move nimbly through the complex terrain of “users” in much the same way as jazz musicians improvise. We are grounded in our craft through practice, but technical mastery is not enough. Bounded by structures and constraints, we move nimbly because knowing the rules allows us to creatively push against boundaries. And ethnography never exists in a vacuum, even if we’re the only anthropologist in the room. Instead, we riff off those...

Intelligences

Anticipating the Unanticipated: Ethnography and Crisis Response in the Public Sector

Posted by  • 0 Comments

CHRISTINA CHEADLE Stripe Partners HANNAH PATTINSON Surrey County Council [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] This case study emphasizes the importance of ethnographic research in the public sector, specifically regarding emergency preparedness and crisis-response. In the summer of 2020, Surrey County Council in England commissioned a mixed-method Community Impact Assessment to better assist and serve their residents during the Covid-19 pandemic. Stripe Partners conducted the place-based ethnographic work, helping discover insights that led directly to strategy change. The ethnographic and quantitative research went hand-in-hand and led to rich and meaningful insights that were able to confidently convince decision makers to create change. Our ethnographic work validated many of the quantitative findings, while simultaneously providing the depth that allowed them to accurately and most usefully allocate resources for change. We researched how local communities...

Intelligences

Change the Category, Change the World: How Research and Great Storytelling Drove a Headline-Making World First for Supermarkets

Posted by  • 0 Comments

JENNIE LENG Independent [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] PechaKucha Presentation—The butterfly effect – a small change that has big ripples. This is what Jennie Leng created when she persuaded NZ’s largest supermarket to change its language from “sanitary products”. Phrases like “sanitary products” and “feminine hygiene” are ubiquitous around the world, but these euphemisms have connotations of dirtiness, and perpetuate the idea that menstruation is embarrassing and shameful. Jennie used context, anecdotes and quantitative research to build a case for the supermarket to change their language – and they went for it! Countdown Supermarkets now uses the phrase “period care” in all of its digital channels and have rolled the label out in...

Intelligences

Reconfiguring Home: Seeing Remote Work and School through Mothers and Their Children

Posted by  • 0 Comments

CHLOE CHANG VINAY KUMAR MYSORE [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Join EPIC to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] PechaKucha Presentation—What happens when we include children as equal participants? In a project to identify design opportunities to support working mothers during a time when schools have closed across the U.S. in response to COVID-19, we crafted the research to create space for children to voice their needs. What we heard offers opportunities for all parties involved—the designers, the researchers, and the moms who participated. Chloe Chang is a design strategist and researcher who advocates for social justice and equity as the best outcome of any design process. With a background in communication and human-centered design, they work to translate complex narratives and system needs into...