theory
This tag is associated with 6 posts
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
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
Good Work in Design Work: Values, Process, and Understanding.
Introduction
It doesn’t take a lot of research to understand that design is a powerful tool in contemporary business thinking. Nor is it difficult to notice that design is increasingly central to an escalating number of parts of everyday life: more kinds of companies in more and more varied sorts of endeavors are using design, design processes, design partners, and design thinking in their work. And because design work has, in most of those applications, taken deep and considered understanding of the people who are going to use, inhabit, or experience what design makes, we tend to think that a broadening portfolio for design is a good thing. To most,
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
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
Introducing pulp: notes from rer
pulp: a writer’s salon at the intersection of design, social science, and business.
In graduate school I was part of a ‘workshop’ that had been started by one of my advisors (Wendy Griswold, now at Northwestern University) on the ‘Sociology of Culture.’ There wasn’t a curriculum. Wendy didn’t lecture. There were no grades. It went across academic quarters, year over year (I was part of it for four of them), with an evolving composition of graduate students and faculty members from across the university.
We presented work in progress. We shared drafts of papers and chapters. We critiqued what we read and we argued (productively) about what we were working
Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations (Studies in
Melissa Cefkin, Editor
The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Rick E. Robinson
published works by our authors
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