Workshops

Why is it that some business proposals – no matter how well researched with users and business developed – don’t seem to make it through the organizational jungle to become a real product, while others do? How shall we understand the innovative practices that we engage with our ethnographic work - in particular in a large corporation?

Emotion behind users’ unexpected behaviour can be a powerful source for innovation. Insights into the users’ subconscious, addressing questions such as “What he wants to be” or “How she wants to feel” in the context of products, service, business model or brand, allow us to deliver superior input to the design stage. When designers are able to ask and answer “For whom are we designing?” their ideas will become more target user-oriented and practical.

The workshop will give us all the unique opportunity to revisit our concept of service and together describe (co-create) an experience (service) of what we provide, focusing on the quality of interactions we engage with those that use our work. It will give us all the opportunity to discuss our daily practice, analyze and find outstanding solutions for a better and more apt role in the world today and tomorrow. Participants will jointly describe their current service flow (journey) present and by a series of exercises discover problem areas, opportunities, etc. The workshop is itself a service design co-creation exercise.

The proliferation of communication and internet-enabled appliances poses a real challenge for us as ethnographers, and meeting this challenge is central to our role as practicing ethnographers. On one hand, the very concept of the field has to be flexible enough to contain communities, symbolic systems and relationships that are not in any way apparent to the observer who is merely present in a physical sense. On the other hand, the proliferation of technology forces us to change the way we approach research in the field. It is easy to become lost in the growing number of data streams, especially when we fail to build in signals that allow us to know not only what is happening, but what kinds of meaning participants ascribe to their layered interactions.

In recent years, video has become more important to clients as part of the final report/final package of deliverables. Consequently, there is an implicit requirement for qualitative researchers to keep pace with improvements in video recording technologies and techniques. This workshop is designed to bring production tips to ethnographers who want to improve the visual look and sound quality of their fieldwork footage.

Film is a powerful medium for communicating deep and nuanced consumer/ user/corporate/societal insights. Ethnographic films produced in the tradition of direct cinema have the ability to speak for themselves; the film becomes the report. In the spirit of ethnography, direct cinema ethnographic filmmaking embraces an open research attitude and methodology. Willing to receive, accept and highlight even the most unexpected or contradictory insights, it may leave as many questions as it answers.

EPIC participants will be invited to play the role of potential patients and relatives in a workshop – as if they were taking part in a real workshop being conducted by Designit. This ‘workshop in a workshop’ aims to show EPIC participants how they can use workshops as a method to gain deeper, valuable understanding of users.

In Intel, People and Practices Research is the group that understands people. We are the group that people ask to help them understand what people are really doing. This translates into “usages”, and quickly moves from the present into the future. We are asked to lead and participate in brainstorms and other activities that attempt to construct further futures and to answer the question “what will people be doing in 2015, 2017, 2020…?”

The objective of this workshop is to demonstrate how multiple lines of evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, can be integrated to develop actionable, evidence-driven results.

There is an opportunity to use the technological devices and tools at our disposal to evolve and reinvent self documentation. By employing web-based self-doc tools, we can shift into another key set of benefits: Data uploaded to the web is sharable in nature and can create transparency as they engage clients in the process. They enable more real-time communication between researcher and participant, creating the opportunity to probe for further insight. Further, the growing presence of mobile technology enables people to be untethered from the home or desk for the first time, giving them (and us!) the opportunity to engage with this methodology in a highly mobile context.

In the current economy, many ethnographers are struggling to remain as part of their clients’ business equation as companies search for inexpensive, quick solutions to their business needs. The problem is, obviously, that quick fixes rarely work when discussing the complex issues ethnographers tend to uncover. The workshop is meant to provide ethnographers and the people they work with tools to turn ethnographic insights into innovation, ensuring that the insights you captured turn to ideas that result in actionable and profitable business plans.

One of the most persistent factors limiting the impact of ethnography in business is that research projects often stop with a cataloging findings and implications rather than generating opportunities that directly enable the findings. For social scientists, their specialty in mining deep insights from ethnographic data doesn't necessarily prepare them to create a divergent set of action items that can be executed across different facets of their business. Similarly, as designers increasingly become involved in using contextual research to inform their design work, they may find themselves holding onto a trove of raw data but with little awareness of how to turn it into design. How can designers and researchers work with ethnographic data to create new things for business to do?

Peter Drucker made this optimistic comment about change: "The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity." While this may generally be true, nothing puts a damper on entrepreneurialism more effectively than a good old fashioned recession. The potential for lost opportunity is, of course, especially high during periods of economic transformation. Exactly as markets, industries and economies are being re-structured, many entrepreneurial companies hunker down, focusing on strengths and cutting costs rather than embracing change as the mating ground of future growth. How do we leverage the convergences of a tumultuous marketplace and anxiety about the future, to craft meaningful strategies and research programs that help companies capture the future?

Analysis and synthesis are critical to the application of observational research techniques in a design context, yet are often underrepresented in literature and discussion. What discussion there is often centers on execution of individual methods and practices and the benefits they provide. These in-depth explorations of individual methods are invaluable to us as practitioners, but mastery of any individual method does not lead to mastery of the analytical / synthetic process. In this workshop, we will investigate the core purpose(s) individual methods serve, how they relate to each other and to the process as a whole. We will seek to establish and evaluate a strawman organizational model describing the analysis / synthesis lifecycle and the value of those activities through discussion of individual methods employed by our cross-disciplinary participants.