Artifacts

Many offices contain so-called "clutter" (Kirsh, 2001; Malone, 1983). In my artifact submission, "clutter" takes the form of papers scattered throughout horizontal surfaces in an office. My submission consists of: 1) Real "clutter" transplanted from an office environment and 2) a diagrammatic illustration that models how the "clutter" serves as a information organization system that enables the "organization" of both vague and well defined categories. I propose that piles are theme based ("labeled") categories containing document-objects that fall along perceptually similar dimensions.

In the fall of 2008, Context-Based Research Group conducted a cultural study on the impact of the economic crisis and what it might bring for the future of consumerism. As consumer anthropologists our goal was to document this critical juncture for our culture. As marketers, our goal was to illustrate how this cultural shift will impact our behavior as consumers. What Context saw during this research was a culture swept up in the early stages of a traumatic event. Clearly the American Dream was crumbling, but just as clearly, we saw a new dream beginning to take shape.

Reverse Alarm Clock is designed to keep young children (2-4 years old) from waking their parents in the middle of night by telling time in a way that children can understand, using visual elements, such as stars, moon and sun, and audio elements, such as wakeup songs. The sky display has three states: bedtime when the stars and moon are on, in-between when only stars are on, and wakeup when sun is on, giving the child the ability to make good decisions, like leaving bed only after the in-between state.

"Two Churns" is a pair of artifacts: one aged oak barrel with a protruding hardwood handle and one hemispherical iMac computer with a chrome handle. Referencing an interpretive object at a living history site, the wooden butter churn sports an "authentic" old-time logo on its side, which reads, "I Cannot Believe It's Not Butter". This churn, it seems, is the absurd antecedent to today's mass-market faux butter. The Apple computer references a churn only in proximity to its surreal sibling through formal similarities.

For research to have an impact in any organisation it needs to circulated. Creating outputs that travel well is all important to developing what we call "ethnographic liquidity" -- the ability of research to be converted into something of value by its audiences. However, the impact of ethnographic research in the context of large organisations, and beyond, can often be impaired by issues of circulation. One of our own responses to this issue of liquidity has been to focus on high quality, printed material: booklets.

new experience, based in London, conducted ethnographic research into the router setup experience for leading UK telephone-and-broadband provider TalkTalk, and then developed a user guide based on the research findings. The research involved in-home observation of 20 customers setting up their broadband wireless router. The findings led to a number of key recommendations that are being implemented, including the need to develop a new setup guide.

This information packet was developed for the Black Standards Society, a fictional secret society. The packet includes a personal letter, the organization's history, mission statement, and three letters to be sent on the society's behalf addressing issues such as black neighborhoods, rap music and black leadership. The organization was founded in the 1820s to establish a code of conduct for blacks as a way to bolster the abolitionist argument. Members reason that if blacks are exemplary citizens, their acceptance by white society is guaranteed.

We present a sketchbook of conceptual designs generated during a six-week qualitative study examining how Charismatic Pentecostals use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to support their religious practices in São Paulo, Brazil. Imagining these speculative design concepts complemented our fieldwork in the following ways. First, sketching these design concepts helped us frame our research findings in material terms.

Is hot chocolate masculine or feminine? When is it appropriate for men to drink hot chocolate? A digital story by Joanne Mendel and Jan Yeager of Cheskin Added Value illustrates how visual media is analyzed to interpret evidence of narrative discourse in the culture. The plethora of imagery available in the public domain is our raw material for identifying cultural cues.

Guapovideo.com was built to liberate video research data from the desktop and make typical research video workflows readily accessible and easy to use. Early users of Guapovideo.com were consistently surprised with how it changed their relationship to video research. We are interested in fostering a dialog about what happens when our video research data is more accessible and shareable.

This ongoing thesis is been conducted in collaboration with a Non Government Organization (NGO), Hope 2 One Life, working in Uganda. In his thesis on Designing for the other 90%, Amit will examine how Non Governmental Organizations (NGO) can become successful business models and tap the fortune that lies in the bottom of the social pyramid as well as continue to empower people. The study uses the Bio-sand filter as a case study to analyze this concept and challenge the existing NGO model.

Experts say that 22% of U.S. electricity production can be produced with wind power by 2030. This is a plan that can help break the U.S. free from the economic strangle hold of foreign oil and reduce our countries tremendous dept. This plan is based on studies for monumental-scale wind power in the U.S. wind corridor. We can't argue that monumental wind turbines themselves are efficient in producing electricity, but we can argue that the distribution of energy is not.

The Empathic Concept Design Process translates ethnographic research findings into a business concept for a comprehensive customer experience by combining existing tools including "Persona", "B/D/A Framework", and "Metaphor". An effective combination of well known tools provides a visible structure and enables us to work with clients without a background in ethnography / design.

At SPARC, Mayo Clinic's embedded research and design group, we've seen decision makers sometimes experience a discomfort associated with the chasm between compelling research and implemented solutions. Once they have a clear understanding of needs and the problems they are anxious to see possible solutions, however this work is often months away. In this example we sought to ease or eliminate this fear by moving quickly to user generated solution prototypes.

Young people from the millennium generation, or generation Y --that is, digital natives-- are now beginning to enter the job market. They are people that were born and grew up in a world where digital technologies were a "natural" part of their environment. We know from research that digital natives have a huge technological potential, and that they exploit digital media for thinking and learning in a different way. But how different? And how can employers identify their potential and leverage on it?

In this paper we present ethnographic personas. These are extensions of traditional data-driven personas but retain the richness of ethnographic findings combined with the memorability and ease of reference of single-sheet personas. Further they allow us to consider households, offices, and other constellations of users and technologies that richly interact with one another, as opposed to single isolated users.

In our view, appropriation is, preeminently, a natural skill whereby humans display their individual ingenuity on the face of social influences in everyday life. Our three-layered model of appropriation of ICTs in everyday life embodies this view. This model describes interactions between different elements in different layers that influence this process. The innermost or digital object layer conceptualises a technology in terms of its potential to be perceived as meaningful, relevant and trivial.

As ethnographers, we must be creative when selling ourselves, especially in today's economy with limited budgets to spend on extended ethnographic projects. To do so, we should prioritize the capturing of everyday experiences in a cost-effective manner that further informs other types of research while also ensuring the best experience for our informants. This artifact shows the role that computers, specifically blogs, can play in this process.

While global economy slides into recession, organizations face new challenges and opportunities; as ethnographers, we are not an exception. We operate in a very dynamic market, so we have to stay agile and be able to react to these opportunities. We must increase the efficiency in the implementation of research projects and the effectiveness in the mode we communicate the results. One way of doing so is to conceptualize and develop appropriate and visually rich materials that support and enhance our work.

The federal government uses personnel security investigations to determine whether an individual should be granted access to classified information. Investigations are the critical first step in safeguarding national security information. For this project, we are using ethnographic methods to understand specific challenges faced by investigators while conducting investigative field interviews.

Piipl is a web tool that lets you develop closer relationships with your end users by involving them directly in your design process. Create a private online community, build activities around shared user-generated photos and videos, and see all the results in one place as they come in!