place

Intelligences

Tutorial: Spatial Ethnography – A Place-Based Approach to Research

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Tutorial: Spatial Ethnography - A Place-Based Approach to Research
Learn frameworks and techniques to understand how people engage with their physical and material environments and illuminate opportunities for innovation. Instructors: GEMMA JOHN, Founder & Director, Human City / University College London) & SOPHIE GOODMAN, Director of Research, SEC Newgate [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Please sign in or become an EPIC Member to access video. [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Become an EPIC Member to access video: → Learn about Membership → Browse Video Library [/s2If] Overview This video has been edited to protect the privacy of participants in the live tutorial. Understanding how people use and engage with their physical surroundings adds depth and dimension to your ethnographic analysis, enabling you to design better products and services. This tutorial introduces you to new tools and frameworks that not only allow you to record how well a space performs from the perspective of the people who use...

Talks

Space and Place in the Digital Age: Space as a Service

An EPIC Talk with , Lyft [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] Approx 55 min [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Please sign in or become an EPIC Member to access video. [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Become an EPIC Member to access video. Learn More. [/s2If] Overview As the world has shifted to digital everything, the practice of mapmaking—or modeling and communicating spatial…

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Perspectives

Where is Remote Research? Ethnographic Positioning in Shifting Spaces

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by JENNIFER COLLIER JENNINGS & RITA DENNY, EPIC “There’s a lot of talk about us ‘being there’, and what that means for our practice and what that means for the type of work that we say we do. The ground has shifted. How do we respond to that? It’s not just, ‘Oh, we’re temporarily working remotely, let’s just gather some new tools.’ We’re actually responding to a shift in the ground underneath us. And we still want to be able to ask questions in depth and gather data in a way that makes meaning for us.” —Nichole Carelock Ethnographers are recalibrating the spaces we inhabit with people. We can’t physically go into homes, workplaces, stores, cars, hospitals; we’re adjusting interview protocols to online environments, exploring software for remote diary studies, and creating virtual workshops. But as we onboard new tools for ‘being there’ with people, let’s think about what it means to be there in the first place. For decades ethnographers have pushed businesses and organizations to pay attention...

Intelligences

Confessions Across Digital Distances

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JESS SHUTT Salesforce PechaKucha Presentation Digital environments can expand the distances between people. While this is often challenging, it can also be leveraged to do great things. This PechaKucha explores how we can take this negative divide between people and flip it on its head to discover more powerful insights. By looking at a range of studies focused on sensitive subjects, we explore how technology has the power to create a safer environment for vulnerable participants. While technology is an often underutilized research tool, these technology enabled environments can lead to richer data and insights. As a result, we, as researchers, can create the space needed to share some of our most intimate stories. Jess Shutt has dedicated her career to studying & creating technology to help democratize complex processes & systems from finance to consumer robotics. Her current work as the Lead User Researcher of Einstein at Salesforce focuses on applying these concepts to artificial intelligence. 2018 EPIC Proceedings,...

Intelligences

Map Making: Mobilizing Local Knowledge and Fostering Collaboration

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NORA MORALES UAM Cuajimalpa, México SALOMON GONZALEZ UAM Cuajimalpa, México [s2If is_user_logged_in()] Download PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] Participatory mapping—the production of maps in a collective way—is a common activity used for planning and decision making in urban studies. It started as a way to empower men and women, usually from rural vulnerable communities threatened by climate change, degradation of their landfills or any other conflict related to access to their land. It has been considered a fundamental instrument to help marginal groups represent and communicate their needs within the territory and augment their capacity to protect their rights. (FIDA, 2011). Why is it that in some cases participatory mapping works and in others fails? Why do these initiatives not trigger local action? Or even end up being counterproductive, when authorities use the map made by locals, to validate their points, causing conflict instead of negotiation? As a research team of designers...

Intelligences

Doing Ethnography in AirSpace: The Promise and Danger of ‘Frictionless’ Global Research

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photo of author doing field research in Shanghai, taking photographs, supported by a local translator
TOM HOY Stripe Partners [s2If is_user_logged_in()] Download PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] ‘AirSpace’, according to Kyle Chayka, is the increasingly homogenized experience of the western(ized) business traveller, driven by major tech platforms (including Google, Airbnb and Uber.) As international travellers, ethnographers must account for the impact of AirSpace on their research practice. After delineating the concept of AirSpace the paper posits three dangers ethnographers must negotiate: (1) The cost of control: AirSpace offers researchers control, but can narrow the scope of research (2) The risk of superficiality: AirSpace provides shortcuts to cultural understanding, but can limit deeper comprehension (3) The assumption of equivalence: AirSpace provides shared reference points, but can create the illusion of equivelance with research subjects. By exploring these three dangers the paper invites readers to reflect on their own research practice and consider how to utilize the benefits...

Perspectives

Place Making and Sustainability

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by MICHAEL DONOVAN, Practica Group LLC Sustainability & Ethnography in Business Series, Mike Youngblood, Editor Place making offers us a largely untraveled pathway to thinking about sustainability. These two relatively high order concepts—'place making' and 'sustainability'—are conventionally located in separate domains of knowledge and ways of knowing. Place making is essentially the fluid filling in of geographic spaces with experience, social value, and meaning. It’s the kind of thing that cultural geographers, anthropologists, and historians are likely to ponder. Sustainability is harder to corral. Leaving questions of perspective and authority aside for a moment, what are “we” trying to sustain? Species? The ecosystems in which such species thrive? Or the natural places—those culturally mediated spaces (forests, rivers, bays, coral reefs)—in which such “systems” are embedded? How about places at further remove from “nature” and the protective eye of naturalists and environmentalists—neighborhoods,...

Intelligences

Have You Heard? Using Place-Based Ethnography to Construct a Word-of-Mouth Campaign in the Bottom of the Pyramid

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JENNIFER GIROUX ReD Associates ZUNG NGUYEN ReD Associates [s2If is_user_logged_in()]Download PDF[/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] Case Study—The “bottom of the pyramid” concept has promised companies that they can simultaneously create wealth and social impact when serving the world’s poorest customers. In reality, companies have faced multiple challenges when trying to acquire and retain customers in the “bottom of the pyramid”. This case study captures the journey of one such company that is operating low-cost private schools in slums and remote villages in an African country. Despite delivering a solid educational quality, the company was facing retention issues, and was struggling to maintain a healthy student population. Leadership diagnosed that a word of mouth marketing campaign would be important to increase acquisition and retention; but it did not know where to start. By designing a place-based ethnographic approach, ReD was able to gain the customer centric insights needed...

Perspectives

“Culture Matters More than We Think”: Eric Weiner / A Profile

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EPIC Profiles Series by TAMARA HALE, Effective UI EPIC2016 Keynote Speaker Eric Weiner is a veteran foreign correspondent and New York Times best selling author. In an interconnected, technology-driven world, does culture still matter? Can there really be “best practices” to be drawn from the vast range of human experiences? These are some of the questions driving Eric Weiner’s influential writing and thinking. I spoke with Eric about his career trajectory and the inspiration he has drawn from the discipline of anthropology. His award-winning journalism and critically acclaimed books, The Geography of Bliss, Man Seeks God and The Geography of Genius all use cross-cultural and historical comparison as a strategy to make key concepts intriguing for the general public. After writing his first two books, explains Eric, “I realized that I’ve really been engaging in amateur cultural anthropology.... I believe that culture matters more than we think.” Eric’s interest in culture, his deep appreciation for cultural differences...

Perspectives

What Is a Product? How a New Definition is Leading Us toward a Place-Based Design Process

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by MEGAN NEESE, Future Lab, Nissan Motor Ltd. The Product Company Identity Crisis I have always worked at or with OEMs (original equipment manufacturing companies) in the industrial design and product development industry. The work has ranged from very large products such as sleeper cabins for long haul trucks and farming equipment down to very small products in the consumer electronics industry, but consistently, the emphasis has always been on products. The very nature of being an equipment maker requires expertise in integrating parts, components, and systems into physical objects. Product development processes have always been structurally similar, focused on integration and related at some level to Stage Gate or Six Sigma. They reflect the constraints of manufacturing, in which decisions are cascading to ensure forward momentum and reduce last-minute changes that could have unforeseen ricochet effects on years of decisions that have already been made. And they work—so long as you don’t consider software, data, automation, or...

Intelligences

Ethnography inside the Walls: Studying the Contested Space of the Cemetery

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ANNIKA PORSBORG NIELSEN and LINE GROES [s2If is_user_logged_in()]Download PDF[/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] This paper discusses the merits and challenges of user-centered urban development projects, and what it means to apply an ethnographic approach to the study of urban spaces and the way people use them. We draw primarily on an ethnographic project carried out in two cemeteries in Copenhagen. The project focused on the involvement of local citizens – both everyday users of the cemeteries, as well as locals who do not use these urban spaces. We discuss the challenges and opportunities of ethnography in a complex space such as a cemetery, and consider additional ways to incorporate citizens into projects that have a direct impact on their lives. We conclude with a discussion of the project learnings and their implications for future urban planning.[s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Become a member to access video. Learn More. [/s2If][s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Free Article: Please...

Intelligences

Place and Small Businesses: Reflections on Ethnographic Research in and on Place

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JOSH KAPLAN [s2If is_user_logged_in()]Download PDF[/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] This paper examines the often taken-for-granted role of ‘place’ and geography (cities, neighborhoods) in business ethnography, using research on small business as a case-in-point. Most studies of small businesses tend to focus directly on businesses themselves, eliding from consideration the social and physical environment in which they are situated. Yet especially for businesses that operate in an actual physical location, place infuses all they do: how they organize their operations, what they care about, the way they are perceived by customers and potential customers, the reputations they develop, where they cluster, and the kind of communication they engage in.[s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Become a member to access video. Learn More. [/s2If][s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Free Article: Please sign in or create a free account to access the leading collection of peer-reviewed work on ethnographic...

Intelligences

If These Walls Could Talk: The Mental Life of the Built Environment

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NEAL H. PATEL [s2If is_user_logged_in()]Download PDF[/s2If] Renewing Henri Lefebvre’s unfinished and overlooked science of ‘rhythmanalysis,’ I propose physical space becomes meaningful to us to the extent that it provides refuge from the ravages of time—specifically, the intersecting rhythms of everyday life. In other words, we develop affinity with space based upon its restorative function. Conflict between overlapping rhythms is mentally exhausting. There are cognitive costs associated with the work day’s intrusion upon our sleep cycle, or extension into our evening leisure time. I will contend that we love our local bars, coffee shops, and hangouts because they are intermediary spaces, situated between cycles, thereby easing our transition and restoring our mental energy. I conclude with some examples of these dynamics at play in the urban life surrounding two peculiar Polish sausage stands on South Side of Chicago.[s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Sign in or create a free account to access this content and over 400 articles—the...

Intelligences

The Luminosity of the Local

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MICHAEL DONOVAN [s2If is_user_logged_in()]Download PDF[/s2If] This paper seeks to capture the local in Locavore—both its concrete and symbolic character. Locavore is a kind of nascent identity that emerges from constellations of social relationships, self-defining “food communities”, made up of consumers and farmers and chefs, and food writers and environmentalists of various stripes. These communities live in the blogosphere, tweets and other media as well as through face-to-face relationships and transactions. At their core are representations of the local—in foods, dishes, recipes, meals, places, and persons. Place-bound identities that in some theoretically interesting ways transcend place. Drawing on classical anthropological theory and recent studies in cultural geography, we explore ways in which the local is invented and given representational power in the creation of face to face and digital communities. Implications for branding, marketing and understanding the continued power of place-bound identities in the very...

Intelligences

The Built Environment: Exploration toward a New Paradigm

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DOROTHY DEASY, ERIK LUCKEN, WILLIAM DOWELL, GRETCHEN GSCHEIDLE and LAURA LEENHOUTS [s2If is_user_logged_in()]Download PDF[/s2If] For most businesses, group work is the way in which ideas are given voice. In this study, ethnographic research was conducted to explore group work and the environments in which it occurs. The research provides context for architects and designers who are conceiving improvements or reinventing the ways the built environment (e.g., furnishings, décor and architecture) influences the outcome of group activities. The research took place in two phases; phase one sought to develop a set of observable hypotheses and phase two sought to validate the hypotheses through observation. In the first phase “embedded reporters” were recruited from Herman Miller and Gensler staff to serve as observers of their own group work and to report on idea flow, knowledge transfer, size of groups, reasons for working together, stage of process, etc. During the second phase of the study, an ethnographic researcher shadowed a “hub”...