W2: Next-Gen Ethnographic Practice
Abstract
Under pressure from market uncertainties, companies across industries are struggling to anticipate changes in the socio-cultural landscape that will affect future business. In this climate, ethnographers are challenged to develop tools that help industry leaders envision and adapt to change.
This workshop exposes participants to tools that will help them envision future developments. These include a trends timeline, scenario map, and scenario table. Participants will learn about, discuss, and help develop these tools as well as learn techniques for mapping possible futures.
To enable common dialogue (and generate valuable new conference content), our domain will be ethnographic practice for innovation. Workshop outputs include a set of projections about the possible futures of global ethnographic practice for innovation-focused on outcomes with a high impact on ethnography's ability to affect innovation.
Workshop facilitators include a business strategist, an anthropologist, and a trends expert, all with deep experience helping companies develop relevant and meaningful products and services in the face of significant market uncertainties.
Structure
1. Overview, introductions.
This will include a “show and tell” of artifacts from previous studies to help participants understand the workshop endpoint, and how the tools can be applied in the innovation context. Then, attendees will separate into two teams.
2. Team A: Trends timeline.
Team A will populate a timeline highlighting the significance of key moments in the history of ethnographic practice for innovation (e.g., workplace observations at Xerox PARC lead to the Apple Mac GUI; studies in rural India lead Intel to develop the India Community PC), and identify triggers for change of practices, methods and roles.
This timeline will show where major shifts have happened in ethnographic practice, where the uncertainties are in the field as a whole, and what factors or drivers make those shifts impactful.
3. Team B: Scenario map.
Team B will populate a scenario map. This will plot possible future developments on a grid comparing relative certainty with estimated impact to industry, across the categories of Innovation Environments, Techniques, and Ethnographers' Roles.
For example, future Environments could include political system design (high impact / low likelihood) or neighborhood design (high impact / high likelihood); Techniques could include ubiquitous video surveillance and crowdsourcing (high impact / high likelihood); Role changes could include greater emphasis on philosophy vs. strategy (low impact / low likelihood).
4. Team A & Team B: Presentation and discussion; Scenario table.
Team A will critique Team B's map, applying its understanding of impactful shifts as a filter to identify the shifts most likely to be relevant and help develop scenarios likely to make a difference in industry.
Team B will build on the impactful historical shifts that Team A identified, adding future-facing examples to strengthen and show potential extremes in the identified trends.
The teams will then create a scenario table together. It will contain elements for several key stories, each story suggesting a dramatically different vision of the future with a qualitatively different set of impacts on industry.
Organizers
Hideshi Hamaguchi, Director of Strategy, Ziba
Hideshi Hamaguchi is a concept creator and business strategist. A lover of diagrams, Hideshi insists on using visual models to bring "simplexity" and “structured chaos” to the process of brainstorming, a practice which has helped him lead teams to the right business strategies and the best ideas across various industries. Business insiders on both sides of the Pacific consider him a leading mind in creative concept development, strategy-building and decision management.
He is a veteran of Panasonic Electric Works, Ltd. in Japan, and together with Toru Takasuka developed Japan's first corporate Intranet. His strategic insights have led to numerous awards, as well as path-breaking products, such as the first USB flash drive for IBM (the "DiskOnKey"), with Ziba, and the technology for digital rights management through flash memory cards (MDRM/ SanDisk).
He also served as the Director of the New Business Planning Group at Matsushita Electric Works, Ltd., as Executive Vice President of Panasonic Electric Works Laboratory of America, Inc., and as co-founder and COO of LUNARR.
Wibke Fleischer, Senior Trends Specialist, Ziba
Wibke Fleischer reveals drivers of change that shape emerging ideas and lifestyles. Formerly a senior consultant for Trendbuero in Hamburg, Germany, Wibke is an industrial designer whose forecasting work has helped numerous companies to design appropriately for the future, including clients such as Bayer, Braun, Dell, Deutsche Post, Li Ning, Procter & Gamble, Siemens, T-Mobile, and Wacom, to name a few.
Her expertise lies in drawing insights from observations about trends that will inspire innovation, and in creating future scenarios to ensure that products and services are appropriate to their time and can lead in the marketplace. Wibke keeps the public on top of emerging trends through her curation of an area on Ziba’s web site devoted to sharing new trends with design impact.
Wibke has taught trend research at the Akademie Mode und Design in Hamburg, and lectured at the Art Institute of Portland, IDSA, as well as at the Parsons New School for Design. She is a graduate of the University of the Arts, Berlin.
William Reese, Director of Research, Ziba
A PhD cultural anthropologist by training, Will is an expert on human cognition, motivation and behavior. He holds a doctorate in Cultural and Psychological Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego, and a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology from Swarthmore College.
At Ziba, Will is a research entrepreneur: he experiments with new methods for design research and mines the company's intellectual capital on projects with a critical consumer insights and trends focus. He has conducted research throughout the US, Europe, China, India and Japan, and has taught, lectured and written articles on the use of social science methods for industrial design.
His client list includes Baxter, Cardinal Health, Citi, Costco, Dell, Ethicon, GE, Graco, Guidant, Honda, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Kohler, Lexmark, Li Ning, Logitech, Lowe’s, Motorola, Nestle Purina, Nike, Precor, Proctor & Gamble (Actonel, Bounty, Charmin, Pampers, Puffs brands), RIM, Rubbermaid, Sirius/XM, Symbol, Tektronix, T-Mobile, Wacom, and many others.