The internet is a many-splendored thing, and its advent and success has vastly expanded the reach of your average ethnographer. Information that we could once only access in face-to-face interactions can now be collected remotely, from across an ocean, across continents, across time and space. This is a great opportunity to learn more about people, … Continue reading »
Tagged with Design Ethnography …
What Ethnographers Do: Data Management
One of the greatest challenges for ethnographers is what to do with all of the data we collect. In addition to the physical notebooks full of scratch notes, we also have lots of digital data–from audio recordings of interviews to photographs taken during observations to the field notes we write up after an interaction with … Continue reading »
Quantitative: The First Patterns of Play Data Visualization
Ladies and gentlemen, the moment you’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived! The first data visualization of Plant Wars player interactions is finished! The data used in this visualization tracked Plant Wars in-game banking transactions, of which there are several varieties. A player can deposit money into a bank, transfer it to another player, … Continue reading »
Ethnography and The Bleedy Edge: Agile Deliverable Production and the Death of Perfectionism
Windows Movie Maker wouldn’t let me choose arbitrary starting and ending points for panning across a document. How frustrating: I wanted to be able to pan across our interview guides in a very specific way. No sweat, I thought. I will just switch to the studio Mac and use iMovie. In that instant, that split … Continue reading »
Field Note Experimentation
The least enjoyable part of being an ethnographer, my class mates and I have discovered, may be the writing up of field notes. The notes we take in the field, which we actually call scratch notes, have to be translated into something that is reasonably coherent and human readable. Pictures have to be added in … Continue reading »
Making Numbers Talk: Something Exciting in Design Ethnography
I have always refused to be constrained by the conventions of a genre, discipline, or society. Fitting neatly into such a compartment cramps my style, harshes my zen, and squashes my favorite lampshade hat. As a result, my journey from quantitative researcher to qualitative researcher has not been without frustration. In general, both communities seem … Continue reading »
Machu Pichu Pecha Kookie Introduction
This very short podcast is an introduction to me and my interests within design ethnography. It was quite a bit more difficult to make than I had expected! But three computers, three operating systems, four microphones, two video recording programs, eight video editing programs, and three file formats later, here it is, for your viewing … Continue reading »
And Now for Something No One Will Want To Read (Or, Design Ethnography: Like Anthropology, but Less Conflicted)
Design Ethnography: Like Anthropology, But Less Conflicted Academic anthropology is the unholy love child of natural science and colonialism, and is burdened with the resulting identity issues that one might expect from such a union. It is a discipline “severely divided and deeply troubled in its self-identity… torn and fragmented, [anthropology] has lost its professional … Continue reading »
Strategic Design Thinking Reflection
This is an essay I wrote for my Strategic Design Thinking class. It is a reflection on four assignments that we did that I will post as soon as I get them scanned. The first assignment that we did is described pretty well in the essay, but the second assignment is somewhat glossed over. Basically, … Continue reading »
Capability Scotland
If you’ve been wondering what I have been working on like a madwoman, now is your chance to see. These are the fruits of our efforts to make Capability Scotland’s volunteering more sustainable. Here is our group presentation, which I presented. I haven’t made a true slidecast with audio or anything yet, but here is … Continue reading »
