Ethnographic text does not sit well with designers and development engineers. Even in the truncated form of bullet-point insights, text hardly works to encourage innovation. At EPIC2007, we introduced the Danish proverb ‘Cut it out in cardboard’ to encourage a discussion of ethnographic insights as visible and tangible material. We claimed that rather than convey ‘findings’ in a rational argument, design ethnographers can provoke engineers to reframe their perception of technology by the choice of ethnographic material they produce. We will bring our own examples such as video card games, interactive sculptures, and site plan models.

The workshop addresses the challenge faced by researchers in obtaining insights from marginalized groups such as, low-income youth and the technologically unconnected. These groups which have few opportunities to articulate their needs and opinions are usually presented with services and business models which may not be in line with existing norms, beliefs, and values.

This workshop will provide participants with tools with which to analyze critically the relationship between ethnography and the stories that corporations tell about consumers. Historically, companies’ brand communications presented an idealized view of corporate values, such as “quality,” “value,” and “trustworthiness.” Today, companies are increasingly using the context of customers’ real lives as a powerful source of brand “content” (e.g. Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign).

The challenges of ethnographic praxis intended for business-development at the base of the pyramid

Base of the Pyramid, Emerging Markets or developing countries.

With recent years unprecedented growth in a number of countries that used to be uniformly labeled “the developing world” large international corporations have become increasingly interested in the business opportunities in these countries.

A Creative Exploration of Methods for Researching Individuals’ Perceptions of, and Responses to, Climate Change

In addition to being the site for EPIC 2008, the city of Copenhagen is gearing up to host the UN Summit on Climate Change in 2009. One year after our community of researchers has gathered to ponder the potential significance of an ethnographic perspective for industry innovation, an international cohort of politicians will convene in Copenhagen to set out our nations’ official positions on climate change and outline the framework for corrective and sustainable action that will succeed the Kyoto Protocol and lead us into the next, critical decade.

Summary and goal

In recent years it has become more common to apply designerly and co-design approaches in design research as a means for generating and making sense of field data simultaneous with exploring new possibilities.

Design research and the applied methods share some of the characteristics to designing. One of the big challenges is to create fruitful dialogues about needs and design solutions that do not yet exist. It is not commonplace to plan user studies and design activities that make the invisible new design visible and valuable for future users. The benefit of experiential approaches is the process of co-exploring and the possibility of shared experiences offering the co-design team a common basis.

Storytelling has been praised as a key tactic for positioning the value of an ethnographic approach in industry, and video in particular is often readied to service this ploy. With their immediacy and tactile-like qualities, video clips are framed to breathe ‘life’ back into the fragments of reality collected in the field. With their light, color, movement, voices and faces, video tales have a potential for ‘stickiness’ and easily lure audiences. But there is an undertow, a sticky situation, to this trend of positioning visual storytelling as value creation; at least within the current conventions that largely dictate its industrial application. We view this as the trouble of moving from thin specificity - i.e. the visual NOW - to the more illusive and thicker sociocultural abstractions beyond the frame. Thomas and Salvador have referred to this as ‘the allure of the individual’ while MacDougall, referencing Nichols, has termed it ‘the problem of the person’ in ethnographic film. But are there ways around such obstacles?

Many ethnographers working in industry today are asked to inform the design of and strategy for consumer products. In the course of our work, many ethnographers are asked to follow a three-step process when it comes to the “design” of consumer products: 1.) observe human experiences, 2.) draw conclusions about observed behaviors and interactions, and 3.) translate these insights into a tangible product or service.

Approaches to sustained interaction between design of technical artifacts and sites of use

This workshop invites people interested in developing approaches that enable ongoing and sustainable connections between the design of technical artifacts (be they products or services) and the sites of use. We invite people who are directly involved in creating new technologies but have a strong ethnographic and user research affinity, as well as ethnographers and user researchers with a desire to embrace technical constraints and opportunities that drive innovation.

A Roundtable Discussion of Emerging Concepts and Themes Toward a Research Agenda

The mobile or remote work trends that have generated transformations in the global economy have also created major shifts in conventional workscapes and lifescapes. The forces of globalization and the ever-increasing functionalities of information and communication technologies now affect virtually every human being, in every region, in every country regardless of the state of development. As capital moves outward from established centers of economic and political power, and as work becomes untethered from places of production, is redistributed, outsourced, in-sourced, and off-shored it becomes increasingly invisible. New marketscapes and econoscapes have altered the rhythm of the global economy that now, like a giant beast, inhales and exhales through integrated supply chains, financial channels and consumerism in all of its forms. Technologies have increasingly divorced task from place and have made possible the de-territorialization of work with social and cultural consequences. It is not just knowledge work that has become elusive but the work that produces the items we use day-to-day has also become mobile, unbounded and independent of particular localities.

The rich world of human behavior is fascinating to observe, yet often difficult to interpret. Underlying goals and motivations lay masked beneath behaviors, essentially hidden from sight until our analysis illuminates them. Similarly, the meaning and opportunities inherent in the findings can be elusive for those who are responsible for taking them forward into organizational action. How can we bring clarity and insight to these areas through tools that are inherently visible? By using the analog favorites of pen & paper.

Often, analysis and synthesis can seem like a black box for external stakeholders such as clients. Even the team and partnering disciplines can get lost within the data, and experience difficulty in making the process explicit and thus more shareable.

In this workshop we will lead a discussion to share and explore best practices in making analysis and synthesis more "visible" in an ethnography-based innovation or new product development project. We will address process, as well as how to communicate process and results, from the perspectives of both internal teams and external consulting organizations.

In this workshop we wish to shed light on the crossing between physical worlds and abstract products and processes ‘hidden’ and/or difficult to conceive for those people performing the actions and/or using the products. The cases to be presented at the workshop belong to the field of intelligent housing.

Charrettes are used in design and other fields to intensely focus group attention on a particular problem or project. In this workshop we will explore the charrette as a vehicle for facilitating creative thinking specifically where problems involve transdisciplinary and/or cross-functional collaboration. Our focus will be on exploring solutions for homelessness in Copenhagen.