Dhanabir Sharma

Intelligences

Enacting Scales: Reflections from an Anthropologist Working in Asia’s Ad World

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TIFFANY TIVASURADEJ Ogilvy [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 conference theme for EPIC2020 is all about scale. For many, scale will probably evoke images of sizing up, moving forward, getting better. But does scale carry the same meaning in all contexts? Could scaling back be the key to enacting scales successfully? And is it possible to enact scales when ethnography and the broader topic of anthropology are unheard among those around you? Reflecting on my own experience working in Thailand and China and my encounters with other design and business anthropologists working in Asia, I share an honest career narrative about enacting scales. My PechaKucha speaks truthfully about the struggles in applying ethnography, and inspires with...

Intelligences

Repurposing Risograph Machines: The Allure of Small-Scale Printmaking in the Era of Big Data

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JOYCE S. LEE University of California, Berkeley [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—Paper documents are increasingly being replaced with digital files, infinitely replicable for seemingly no cost. Yet I've always felt the pull of paper, with a personal affinity for physical books and a background in magazine production. Through my recreational publishing practice, I learn of the “riso” or risograph, a duplicating machine increasingly adopted by Bay Area artists and technology corporations alike. Upon first glance, most risograph models resemble familiar Xerox machines, with their boxy, gray exteriors, protruding buttons, and hinged tops that cover glass beds for scanning. Through my own experiences and interviews with subject...

Intelligences

Toxicity v. toxicity: How Ethnography Can Inform Scalable Technical Solutions

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JAMIE SHERMAN Intel Corporation ANNE MCCLARD McClard LLC [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] While a number of scholars have studied online communities, research on games has been mostly focused on the business, experience, and content of gameplay. Interactions between players within games has received less attention, and toxic behavior is a newer area of investigation in academia. Inquiry into toxicity in gaming is part of a larger body of literature and public interest emerging around disruptive and malicious social interactions online, cyberbullying, child-grooming, and extremist recruiting. Through our research we reaffirmed that toxicity in gaming is a problem at a global scale, but we also discovered that on a micro scale, what behavior gamers perceive as toxic, or how toxicity is enacted in gaming is different depending on cultural context amongst other things. The generalized problem at scale, and its particular manifestations on the micro level raise...

Intelligences

Sustainability: Addressing Global Issues At A Human Scale

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LEE RYAN More Things Considered LOUISA WOOD More Things Considered [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] Our tiny provocation is that the word “sustainability” is not sustainable. Just using it is sabotaging our efforts to build a better future for the planet. Despite decades of global sustainability discourse, the world is still going to hell. What's gone wrong? Our paper is about willful ignorance and complicity at a global scale; the benefits of small talk; and a better, more effective word than sustainability. Article citation: 2020 EPIC Proceedings pp 300–321, ISSN 1559-8918, https://www.epicpeople.org/epic [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Become a member to access our video library. Learn More. [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] FREE ARTICLE! Please sign in OR create a free account to access our library—the leading collection of peer-reviewed work on ethnographic practice. To access video, Become an EPIC Member. [/s2If] [s2If...

Intelligences

From the Space Station to the Sofa: Scales of Isolation at Work

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JO AIKEN University College London/ETHNO-ISS (NASA) ANGELA RAMER HKS Architects [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] Since March 2020, many employees around the world have been forced to work from home due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have experience in working in isolation and confinement. This paper focuses on a comparison of astronauts on the ISS and Earth-bound architects and interior designers restricted to working from home (i.e. their sofas) due to the pandemic. Isolation at work emerges as a complex phenomenon characterized by the measured and perceived distances between physical, social, and temporal spaces. By examining the scale-making activities of NASA and HKS, analogs provide a possible means for studying and predicting the complex dimensions of isolation. The work ecosystem is a useful tool in conceptualizing and operationalizing the employee experience to design the future of work and...

Intelligences

Empathy, More or Less: Scaling Intermediary Experiences of Emotion and Affect in Innovation

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LORA V. KOYCHEVA Technical University of Munich [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] Questions of scale permeate current approaches to empathy in applied human-centered work—and especially design thinking—but they have remained largely unquestioned. What is more, empathy has become an empty signifier, and empathizing is often a near-formulaic and pro-forma endeavor. To catalyze a reworking of the concept, in this paper I synthesize what has been said so far of empathy and its role in design and innovation, and I take stock of what these contributions point to. I ask: “How can we think of empathy as a scalar phenomenon and thus re-scale it in innovation?” I offer some illustrative, if unresolved, tensions with empathy I have had in my own ethnographic work with a robotics start-up, and I conclude the article with a series of provocations with the hope they will be taken up further. Keywords: empathy, ethnography, design thinking, robotics Article citation:...

Intelligences

There’s No Playbook for Praxis: Translating Scholarship into Action to Build a More Ethical Bank

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JEFFREY GREGER Varo [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] The US banking industry has a long history of excluding, exploiting, or simply ignoring low-income communities, recent immigrants, and racial minorities. In this paper, I share my experiences creating a community of practice where employees of a rapidly-growing banking startup can identify and confront the ethical challenges facing the financial technology (fintech) industry. This community is informed by insights from four years of activism and anthropological research that I conducted with small teams of service designers and ethnographers developing financial services for and with low- to moderate-income communities around the world. Through this research, I identified three institutional logics—insularity, decontextualization, and technological hubris—which limit efforts to build a more inclusive, equitable banking system. These logics hold the potential to lead well-intentioned organizations, and...

Intelligences

The City as Organization: Ethnography for Alternative Futures

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JORDAN SHADE International Business Machines Corporation, A Functional Democracy HAL WUERTZ International Business Machines Corporation, A Functional Democracy [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] In this case study we use ethnographic outcomes from the study of the employee population of IBM, to inform new experiences for improving civic engagement in the resident population of Austin, Texas. In doing so, we experiment with a technique in speculative ethnography that uses research insights from a variant population with a variant challenge for in-depth explorations of a possible future. We demonstrate, first, that while in speculative thinking big ideas can be imagined, transposing ethnography enables a richer exploration of possible futures, and thus, further depth in ideas. And second, that by combining speculative thinking with existing ethnography, researchers and design teams can unearth bold experiments and jump start a design process that drives quicker...

Intelligences

Growing Communities: How Social Platforms Can Help Community Groups Achieve the Right Scale at the Right Time

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CALEN COLE Stripe Partners CAROLYN WEI Facebook [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] Supporting communities on its platforms has been a part of Facebook's core mission since 2017. Early understandings of the needs of groups and organizers largely centered around groups that began on Facebook itself. This paper is the result of ethnographic research conducted in 2019 to better understand the needs of different types of groups and the corresponding ways that technology platforms do and could support them. The initial orientation towards online groups led to the recognition of the difficulty of managing fast-growing groups but failed to consider whether groups might want to avoid growth in members altogether. We found in our research that many groups in fact did want to avoid or limit their growth in numbers. For these groups, growing as a community meant different things: offering more to existing members, raising awareness, or promoting the group to an outside...

Intelligences

Ghost in the Machine: How Taxonomic Metadata Allows for Scaling Ethnographic Insights Into Search Algorithms

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AMANDA KRAUSS Duo Security (formerly Indeed) ALEXANDRA TEODORESCU Indeed LEORA YARDENAY Indeed [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] This case study explores how we personalized search results by turning ethnographic insights into taxonomic metadata, which in turn allowed us to use quantitative methods to assess business impact. The first part of the case study focuses on the problem we were trying to solve – creating better search results for nurses – and using ethnographic interviews to understand how nurses approached looking for jobs. The second part of the study dives more deeply into how metadata works, and why it was the perfect partner for capturing our ethnographic findings and making them into a scalable and measurable part of the design process. The third part of the study details how we tested and scaled our designs in the live project, and why we believe others might benefit from using a similar approach. Keywords: mental models, taxonomy,...

Intelligences

Software Quality and Its Entanglements in Practice

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JULIA PRIOR University of Technology Sydney JOHN LEANEY University of Technology Sydney [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] Effective software quality assurance in large-scale, complex software systems is one of the most vexed issues in software engineering, and, it is becoming ever more challenging. Software quality and its assurance is part of software development practice, a messy, complicated and constantly shifting human endeavor. What emerged from our immersive study in a large Australian software development company is that software quality in practice is inextricably entangled with the phenomena of productivity, time, infrastructure and human practice. This ethnographic insight — made visible to the organization and its developers via the rich picture and the concept of entanglements — built their trust in our work and expertise. This led to us being invited to work with the software development teams on areas for change and improvement and moving...

Intelligences

DIYing along with DIYers: Juggling with Scales During a Home-Improvement Research

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GUILLAUME MONTAGU _unknowns [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] As a team of researchers was asked by a French home-improvement retailer to redefine their strategy, they designed and carried out an ethnographic and quantitative research to identify new business opportunities. But no sooner had they set foot in field, they were struck not only by the richness and complexity of such ordinary activities to the point they asked themselves if these practices were even measurable? Scaling from ethnography to quantitative research was not as seamless as they expected, they had to find their way to deal with two sets of data that belong to different scales if not ontological worlds. Are these two scales really strictly separated? Can't there be a way to combine them and to make them coincide? Based on the study of DIYing practices, this case study presents an attempt to integrate ethnographic and quantitative research and the challenge of resolving the scale differences...

Intelligences

Scaling Out (Not Only Up): Distributed Collaboration Models to Get Work Done

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ALICIA DORNADIC MindSpark NIKKI LAVOIE MindSpark SHEILA SUAREZ DE FLORES 10 10 10, Eco.tter ELVIN TUYGAN MindSpark [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] In this catalyst, we the authors describe the benefits of ‘scaling out’: reaching out beyond one's organization to bring in external partners to accomplish UX research. Organizations scale out their research efforts in order to cover more ground, draw from more specialties, or conduct more research more quickly than they would be able to alone. As opposed to growing an in-house team to meeting research needs (‘scaling up’), scaling out can be a more inclusive approach to generating user insights, where the voices of diverse research partners throughout the world are brought together to produce powerful UX research outcomes. A case study example of work with suppliers and clients illustrates scaling out. Collective intelligence pushes scaling out even further, as it counts research participants, users...

Intelligences

Where Can We Find an Ethics for Scale?: How to Define an Ethical Infrastructure for the Development of Future Technologies at Global Scale

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IAN DULL ReD Associates FANI NTAVELOU BAUM ReD Associates THOMAS HUGHES ReD Associates [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] Despite companies facing real consequences for getting ethics wrong, basic ethical questions in emerging technologies remain unresolved. Companies have begun trying to answer these tough questions, but their techniques are often hindered by the classical approach of moral philosophy and ethics – namely normative philosophy – which prescribe an approach to resolving ethical dilemmas from the outset, based on assumed moral truths. In contrast, we propose that a key foundation for ‘getting ethics right’ is to do the opposite: to discover them, by going out into the world to study how relevant people resolve similar ethical dilemmas in their daily lives – a project we term ‘grounded ethics’. Building from Durkheim's theory of moral facts and more recent developments in the anthropology of morals and ethics, this paper explores...

Intelligences

Who Gets to Define Success?: Listening to Stories of How People Value Firefox to Redefine Metrics and Revive a Decommissioned Product

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GEMMA PETRIE Mozilla Firefox JENNIFER DAVIDSON Mozilla Firefox [s2If is_user_logged_in()] DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] Challenging measures of scale is possible through listening to stories of how people value a product, and envisioning ways to measure success beyond typical metrics like Monthly Active Use (MAU) or Daily Active Use (DAU). Understanding what people value is somewhat complex for a product like Firefox because people might use Firefox every day without thinking much about it. In this case study, we detail how we used Futures Thinking and participatory design methods to elicit stories of how people value Firefox. This case study demonstrates that a relatively small number of meaningful ethnographic insights can be powerful enough to influence business strategy. By creating the space for listening to stories and encouraging stakeholder involvement, we were able to make the case to save one of our mobile browsers, Firefox Focus, despite its lack of scale. Keywords:...