Desire, Icon, Fetish, and Discrimination

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been mulling over the perception of quality in pop culture things.  Starting from the base in Wood’s “How Fiction Works” (cannot get that book out of my way of understanding the world, now that it is there), that things with a “single register” are less rich to ‘read.’

I think that there is a connection in that notion to Bourdieu’s ‘doxa’ description (from Outline of a Theory of Practice) in that the use of a ’single register’ implies either a choice or an unawareness of the full range of possible registers.  So, the producers of “America’s Got Talent,” for example can really think that

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The ‘Style’ paper from EPIC ‘09

“Let’s bring it up to b flat” — What Style Offers Applied Ethnographic Work

Cantare amantis est “Only he who loves can sing”   St. Augustine

WORKING WITH STYLE

How hard is it to convey the essence of the work we do?  I’m talking here about particular instances of work, work in projects, in cases, in fieldwork and findings, more than the more generic process, method, and overview blurbs and slideshows that get used to ‘sell’ or introduce the work.  It’s hard.  We rely, often, on close collaborations and shared experiences to bridge across organizational boundaries and disciplinary backgrounds.  We don’t expect folks to “get” the work by reading a report, and probably

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The Origin of Cool Things

A professor of mine used to say that good theories give you something to think about, but great theories give you something to think with.  What want to give you here is not a description of what users are or twenty-seven nifty observations I’ve made over the years, but a set of concepts, ideas and methods to look at users with.

By cool, I do not necessarily mean the latest Phillipe Starck table lamp, or the 3DO video game.  I’m more concerned with things like the wheel, or McDonald’s restaurants, of Federal Express of Good Grips kitchen tools – things that are so right that they become nearly invisible, part of

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Uncertain Answers

If you ask the rhetorical question, “Why do you do research?” the answer you are most likely to get is, “To find an answer.” And there lies the heart of the problem: thinking that a definite answer is either possible or desirable. I think that it has been tremendously important that business has become, over the past decade or so, increasingly ‘consumer-centric.’ I think knowledge about consumers’ everyday lives is absolutely critical to the success of any product, any company.

But somewhere along the way, the issue has become muddled. Understanding consumers has far too often been reduced to identifying ‘needs’, and market research has become a kind of dreaded

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DMI 2006 on Brands & Longitudinal research

At brand conferences, the usual case story goes approximately like this: 1) first,  look how bad this was. 2)  Next, the thoughtfully arrived at new strategy.  3) then usually there’s story about the tussle with the client or a sr. manager or an outside agency, and then, fourth and finally, here’s how  spectacular the new brand looks.

Often these are great stories.  Inspiring.  Fabulous work.  But as the theme of this conference suggests, there also seems to be something missing—the need for innovation is real.   I’m going to talk today about some of the changes in first, perspective on what brands do, and second, in the way we approach research, that

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The Pulp/ACME Ecology

A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.

Cicero

We work in an interesting field, a decidedly fertile one.  A field where social scientists, designers, business people, and ‘liberal arts majors helping mankind’ (as my sister’s business card used to say) come together to understand the experience of the mundane as well as that of the esoteric.  A field where understanding the underlying structures and sources of these experiences is as important as attempting to imagine where they’ll go in the future.  It is compelling and provocative on its own merits, but moreso when we give over the work we do to our

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on Service design @ Emergence

Constant, yet ever changed

Contemplate upon a river, says the old zen master – always the same, yet never the same.  Just keep that image in mind, think about studying a river, really understanding a river, as we talk about service design.

A service is a product

A service is still, in some important ways, a product.  And all products are—also in some important ways–  tools.  A service – like a phone or potato peeler or a Prada bag – is something that people use to accomplish something.  Whether those things accomplished are what was initially envisioned is not in any way a given.

Services are plastic

But on the other hand, one of the

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On practices

“The most rudimentary behavior must  be determined both in relation to the real and present factors which condition it and in relation to a certain object, still to come, which it is trying to bring into being.  This is what we call the project.”

Sartre, Search for a method, 1963

Introduction
I know that it is customary in talks of this nature to present some current, preferably path-breaking work.  And we are doing one thing that is pretty cool, but at the moment its path is muddy, incompletely cleared, and god only knows where it is going.

But that weird place where you’ve got equal measures of “there is some really great stuff here”

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