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 »
Tagged with Dundee …
Field Notes: Microwaveability QMB Staff Lounge Observations
On Thursday from 12 pm to 1:30 pm, I observed various individuals interacting with the microwave in the staff lounge in the Queen Mother Building on the University of Dundee campus. The staff lounge is a bright room with a southern exposure on the third floor of the Queen Mother building. The southern wall, composed … Continue reading »
Seeking Feedback on Microwave Prototypes
We are down to the last stretch for our HCI project redesigning the microwave for universal accessibility without relying on language. Here are two of our most recent prototypes! Here’s a quick description of what is common to both prototypes: There are two variables you can adjust on a microwave–power level and time. For our … 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 »
The Story of the Samosa
There was being and nonbeing, there was none but God. In the old, old times, there was a king, guardian of the throne of wisdom. This king’s only child was a beautiful daughter, as fair a girl as had ever walked the earth. Her hair was as dark as the sky at midnight, framing a … 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 »
Tom Inns’ Toolkit
Edit: Somehow I left out the last paragraph of my essay. Now it’s fixed! For the last four weeks in Tom Inns’ Strategic Design Thinking class, we have been practicing various tools. We have covered a different tool each week, and at the end we were asked to write an essay on them, explaining how … 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 »
How To Be An Ethnographer
I’m going to take a moment to be brutally honest here. I didn’t plan to be an ethnographer. Really, I didn’t even know what an ethnographer is. For the entire eight months that I have been planning this insane venture, I have been telling people that design ethnography is about looking at how people interact … Continue reading »
