Curator: Izabel Barros (Steelcase)

Hyper-skilling: The Collaborative Ethnographer
Will Reese, Hideshi Hamaguchi and Donia Anoushiravani (Ziba)

We have to acknowledge that time, budget, and resource pressures will always be present and will impact ethnographic work. As “de-skilling” threatens ethnography—disrupting an integrated, holistic approach and output—we must seek new work practices beyond those of the lone ethnographer. We advocate and have implemented a model of collaborative practice, which interconnects a cross-disciplinary team’s knowledge domains to generate insight effectively and powerfully. This model, which we will call hyper-skilling, focuses on assembling knowledge and communication with other key perspectives such as branding and marketing strategy, historical analysis, trends forecasting, and in many cases design and engineering. Each plays a key role in determining a course of action for a company.
We also argue that the team model is more reflective of the corporate setting and closer to the conditions in which an ethnographer will be asked to practice in the corporate world in the future. Intended or not, academic environments tend to promote isolation of the individual practitioners, and atomization of their work within specialized theoretical contexts. If academies can better teach and implement such a team model, ethnographers will be better prepared to address challenges that they face as individual practitioners in industry.

Back to the Future of Ethnography: Internal User Research at a Consumer Internet Company
Andrea Moed (Yahoo)

The Advertising Products research team at Yahoo! is building an internal research practice within a well-established customer insights organization that is largely optimized for consumer research. While our fellow researchers observe the fleeting interactions of millions of casual users with our websites, we study our fellow employees: their experiences with the specialized toolset of online advertising, and how those experiences shape the service that our business customers ultimately receive. Adopting methods such as task-oriented interviewing and extended observation, we are reconnecting with a tradition of ethnographic inquiry in the workplace that is largely unknown at consumer Internet companies.
This paper describes how we have re-learned and built company support for this approach to user research. I describe our work with two populations, advertising salespeople and analysts, highlighting the structural challenges to conducting this research and demonstrating its value. I conclude by reflecting on a larger question our work has raised: how qualitative research can help a company bridge the gap between product design capacity and the ability to produce great services.

Ethnography, Corporate Strategy, and the Cartography of Knowledge in a Global Organization:
Jay Dautcher & Mike Griffin (Ricoh Innovations Inc.)

Our organization teams qualitative researchers with prototyping engineers for research projects on workplace technologies using a 4-step process (Ethnography–Analysis-Intervention–Measurement).  Typically, a project's research focus, prototype approach, metrics and reporting emerge in relation to the strategic needs of a specific internal group we identify as a research stakeholder.
We recently adopted a more lightweight inquiry process to investigate how people live with digital services, without specifying a research stakeholder. Here ethnographic analysis led directly to our developing a model of the relationships people create with services. 
We believed our model could benefit groups with different strategic goals in our company — designers, product planners, salespeople, corporate planners – but realized we faced two challenges.  First, we needed new storytelling and social media tools to disseminate our message.  Second, we needed better tools to find out who in our organization of 75,000 globally-distributed employees might value our findings.
In response, we initiated an internal project investigating and mapping out social networks of knowledge exchange and strategic influence in our company.  We foresee using this strategy map to guide our future efforts to recruit and market our findings to a more diverse audience in our company.

Toward Industrialisation of Ethnography
Takanori Ugai (Fujitsu)

Recently many companies provides ethnographic research as their part of services and more customers are going to use their servicees.
The customers often require the assured measurable outcome but the providers sometimes fail it.
Such customers are buying an industrial product and not an art.
This paper explores a way to expand business using ethnography as an industrial service or product.
Capability Maturity Model Integration(CMMI) framework is an approach for improving processes that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes. Maturity levels are defined in CMMI, which are "Level1: Initial(Chaotic)", "Level2: Repeatable",
"Level3: Defined", "Level4: Managed", and "Level5: Optimized".
The framework like CMMI that measures a process is suited to measure ethnography or ethnographic activities as an alternative of measuring the outcome.
A matured process will make customers to have an assured outcome.
In this paper, a case of a large software development company is showed as a "defined" organization and examples of less matured process will be also described from literatures.
Finally an image of a managed organization will be weaved.

Practice at the Crossroads: When Practice meets Theory
Melissa Cefkin, Ph.D. (IBM Research)

Consumer practices, work practices, not to mention management, design and research practices. The notion of “practice” remains core to much of what ethnographers in industry examine, expose and aim to inform. In this paper I ask: while we study practice(s), while we may frame our research and analysis with sensitivity towards rendering visible the richness or particularity of practice, what have we really learned about practice? In part aimed at considering whether and how the work performed by ethnographers in industry advances or critiques theories of practice as explored by Bourdieu and others, I begin from the fact that we are “there” at behest of our business counterparts to have an impact and affect change. So the question shifts from not only how we use and understand concepts of practice to how it frames the expectations of our business partners and stakeholders. What I have found is that there is both productive overlap and significant slippage between our (theoretically buttressed and anthropologically-resonant) notions of practice and the (action-oriented, practical ones) of our business counterparts.
Drawing on material ranging from the popular press to theoretical examinations to published empirical studies and my own research, this piece is intended as a reflective rumination on the notion of “practice” at the cusp of theory and business to appraise its value, present and future, to both theoretical and business interests.