Curator: Armin Moehrle (Toca)

Innovation in collaboration: Using an Internet-Based Research Tool as a New Way to Share Ethnographic Knowledge
Beth Di Leone, Elizabeth Edwards (Toca)

Ethnography in a business setting is only successful if it is a cooperative, communicative endeavor. Research teams must be able to share knowledge effectively with one another and with the client. This communication establishes a mutual knowledge base, shared context, and a strong trust from which to conduct analysis and develop well-founded business recommendations.
In the absence of effective communication, time may be wasted, analytic quality can suffer, and the client may lose faith in the value of the project or the value of ethnography in industry.
This paper will address the subject of transmissivity by exploring a new way to share ethnographic knowledge, both locally and remotely. The paper will first define three key needs for knowledge sharing in collaborative ethnographic research. It will then describe an internet-based video storage and annotation system that enables global and continuous information exchange.
The paper will ultimately show how a web-based knowledge-sharing tool can give all team members and client partners direct, first-hand experience of participant data, to facilitate communication and enrich contextual understanding. This enhanced shared understanding among dispersed teams can lead to better, faster analysis and relevant results, the most important deliverables to demonstrate the value of ethnography in industry.

The Power of Participant-Made Videos: Intimacy and Engagement with Corporate Ethnographic Video
Alexandra Zafiroglu, Susan Faulkner (Intel Corp.)

Video footage powerfully evokes the daily lives of our research participants for stakeholders. In the last few years a new, transmissive part of our Do has driven our video documentation practice in a fresh direction – our research participants share their everyday lives by filming themselves. We give participants Flip Video cameras to record themselves doing activities they normally just talk about when we are there. Instead of talking head interviews or footage of participants pointing and telling us how they do a particular activity, the participant videographers carefully orchestrate how they want to represent themselves while simultaneously sharing moments that are much more intimate and mundane than our presence as researchers in their homes generally allows.
These participant-generated videos engender powerful, often highly emotional, reactions from viewers who experience a stronger connection and identification with participants and their experiences than we have ever achieved with researcher-shot footage. Reactions have ranged from shock, discomfort, and offers of Freudian psychological analyses to laughter, immediate recognition and discovery. Through several video examples from recent fieldwork we explore the reasons for this heightened reaction, and raise questions related to representation, authenticity, intimacy and the role of the ethnographer in the age of YouTube, social networking sites, and reality TV.
What is the ethnographer’s role when participants share their lives in videos we request that are stylistically similar to online user-generated content? What is that ethnographer’s ‘Do’, and what role does she play in editing, framing and presenting these videos? How do participants conceptualize what they are creating?

Mastering the Past to Inform the Present: "Ethnography of Ethnography" and Qualitative Meta-Analysis for Business
Josh Kaplan (Yale University), Alexandra Mack (Pitney Bowes)

Ethnography and ethnographic mastery are generally assumed to require original research: new fieldwork and an influx of new data.  This paper suggests that mastery might profitably include reflection on and analysis of past work, not only in the form of literature reviews but as a basis for generating new and actionable insights. We offer a reflection on the potential, and potential pitfalls, of meta-analytical approaches to past projects, taking as a point of departure an effort to consolidate data from more than ten previous research projects conducted over a six-year period by the research division of a Fortune 500 company. The meta-analytic method we adopted was triple-pronged: 1) analysis across multiple projects aimed at generating insights with a greater degree of empirical support; 2) re-analysis based on new questions outside of the original projects’ scope; 3) an ethnography of in-house ethnographers, which made possible higher order reflection on ethnographic practice in the company and in the field more generally.
In work environments in which researchers are increasingly called upon to do more with less, our approach provides flexibility and adaptability to environments inhospitable to marshalling resources to new original research.

Living Avatars Network: Fusing Traditional and Innovative Ethnographic Methods Through a Real-Time Mobile Video Service
Denisa Kera, Ph.D. (National University in Singapore)
Connor Graham, Ph.D. (Independent Researcher)

This paper presents a study of new technologies enabling access to the sensory feast of places by 'wired up' flanêurs, real-time as well as remote 'native' description and interactions and situated oral histories excavated through 'being in a place'. We describe an inter-disciplinary research project examining the cultural heritage of Singapore and the use of geo-location technologies incorporating social networking platforms as a medium for interactive heritage walks. The goals of the project are to engage both locals and nonlocals in experiencing Singapore from a first person perspective, giving them a wider understanding of the ethnic and cultural diversity.
The Living Avatar Network (LAN) supports sharing experiences and realities in real time through making it possible to 'walk in someone's shoes' through a living avatar, re-experiencing someone's memories of a certain place. Here we describe the approaches deployed in evolving a prototypical service - 'traditional' ethnographic style methods with the access to the real-time, lived character of 'local' experiences offered by digital photo streams and real-time video. More broadly, the project acknowledges the potential availability of the experience of being in a place and culture to be widely available through Web 2.0 technologies and people spending more time 'living digitally'.

Becoming the subject: A Comparison of Ethnographic and Autoethnographic Data for New Product Development
Keren Solomon (Independent consultant)

As companies become more interested in innovation, design, and the creation of experiences, they are increasingly utilizing ethnography as a way to understand their customers and potential customers. However, for most companies ethnography is still conducted in the classical sense, with researchers observing and talking to subjects in order to draw out insights about the ³other.² Few consider the use of auto-ethnography, that is, having people deeply and rigorously study themselves in order to produce a richer description of the problem space and of how new products might potentially solve those problems.
This paper draws on two research projects conducted by the author, compares the data collection methods and research results obtained with both ethnographic approaches, and suggests some ways in which using a dual approach could lead to more insightful research results. It also raises questions about how we as researchers can increase our understanding of and respect for what it really means to be a research subject.

Acknowledging Differences for Design: Tracing Values and Beliefs in Photo Use
Connor Graham, Ph.D. (Independent Researcher)
Mark Rouncefield, Ph.D. (Lancaster University)

This paper explores links between ethnographic approaches, technology design and use and beliefs and experiences. We document some recent empirical work on the use of photographs amongst Chinese families; pointing to some differences with previous empirical studies from predominantly Western cultures and tentatively linking Chinese photo work to some rather broader cultural values that may develop some ‘sensitivities’ for design.
For some time ethnography has been interested in ‘values’ in methodological approaches and concerns. The notion of ‘values’ is also repeatedly called upon in ethnographic studies of (technology for) the home. In this appeal these studies tellingly echo Peter Winch’s sentiments regarding how, in general, social life can be understood only through a strong understanding of beliefs and values. It would be hard then to disagree with general arguments for ‘value-sensitive’ design but we are less than convinced by the assumption that we know exactly what values are important, or exactly which should somehow find their way into design. This paper documents and explicates photo work amongst Chinese families, linking the families’ own explanations and comments about these practices to much wider sets of social and cultural values and reflecting on the potential influence of these values on technology design.