The Long View: Collective Wisdom on Where We’ve Been and How Ethnographic Practice Evolves to the Future
The pandemic, layoffs, AI, inflation/deflation, climate change…these days there is plenty of upheaval. In times like this, it’s important to bring long views...
A Right to Ephemerality
Seems that everyone’s recording everything all the time – so much so, that people and some governments are asserting a “right to forget”. But the act of...
Skillful Strategy, Artful Navigation & Necessary Wrangling
This paper addresses three main issues: the fixation on the individual in corporate research, the emic need to privilege and represent relationships driving the...
Designing the End
We consider implications for the active, intentional design of the endings of products, services, institutions and other structures and processes pervading our societies....
Heroic Complexity in Strategic Innovation
I posit that strategic innovation – the act of carrying an idea through to execution – is an act of destruction as much, or perhaps more so, then it is...
ICT4D => ICT4X: Mitigating the Impact of Cognitive Heuristics and Biases in Ethnographic Business Practice
With more than five billion people, large corporations have expressed non-trivial interest in “emerging markets” as potential future sources of revenue. We in...
Models in Motion: Ethnography Moves from Complicatedness to Complex Systems
Since the 90’s, one of ethnography’s values has been about the reduction in the risk of developing new products and services by providing contextual information...
Video Utterances: Expressing and Sustaining Ethnographic Meaning through the Product Development Process
In this paper we discuss the use of short, specific videos to communicate ethnographic data throughout the product development process. Ethnographic videos...
Thoughts on Representation
I have a great job! I feel privileged to do it. In fact, my kids think my job is so great they think I go on vacation whenever I travel....