June 17, 2016 | 0 Comments

Lou and Cee Cee prepare for fieldwork in the future: a world where robots conduct ethnography

Note from the Editor, Tricia Wang: Kicking off our Co-designing with machines edition is Alicia Dudek (@aliciadudek), Innovation Insight Lead & Design Ethnographer at Deloitte Digital Australia. Using design thinking, ethnography, and other deep contextual customer research methods, she designs, conducts, and trains others in the world of customer empathy. Her contribution to this edition is the first science fiction to explore robots conducting ethnographic work. She uses a fictional story with Cee Cee, the robo-ethnographer, to examine what aspects of fieldwork can be conducted by a robot. I first met Alicia Dudek at an EPIC conference in London, where I became a fan of her work and promptly interviewed her for our edition that featured the best from EPIC. Read the interview, Play nice – design ethnographer meets management consultant, and find more of her writings on ethnography at her site.

Increasingly we are seeing more conversations about ‘what does it look like when the robots take your job.’ Once upon a time we believed this was some remote future where we’d finally invented the technology that could replace our bio-body’s ingenious functions. Now we are coming into a time where our technology has grown so advanced that the replacement of ourselves with robots is not only imagined, but plausible and even possible. An example of this shift is the imagining of white collar jobs ‘going robo’ that was recently covered by Quartz.

Writing this piece I wanted to have a little fun imagining a wonderful world where we can work hand in hand with robot peers. It is exciting to imagine the day when artificial intelligence is on par with that of our human research team members. Ethnographic technology is sometimes slow to progress due to the art and science nature of our work, but if we had the magic wand to unite all the drones, phones, data smarts, and humanly arts, we might have robo-colleagues as a part of our team one day soon. Friendly humans and friendly robots conducting ethnography together are a powerful combination. Also thank you to Elizabeth Dubois for writing this piece about trace interviews, which has some cool ideas on how we might conduct interviews.

– Alicia Dudek

Lou muses over her tea as she prepares for fieldwork with Cee Cee.

Lou mused over the steam rising from her cup of tea. She gathered her thoughts around what she’d be looking for in the field next week. She and her team were going to shadow young families and understand how they managed their finances. Field work was always one of the most exciting and exhausting parts of the data collection in her ethnography projects. What would be the right focus area for a trip into this family’s everyday life? She knew she’d have to cover the basics of bank accounts, credit cards, laptop / tablet / phone usage, calendar keeping, overall scheduling, family diaries, but what else might be valuable? What else could help to point the team in the direction of the golden nuggets of insight? All these years of traipsing in and out of the field and analysing scores of transcripts, videos, audios had left her always questioning, what’s next? What were the mental parameters that led her to the deep and meaningful insights from field observations? What was that ineffable thing that clients kept hiring her for again and again? How does an ethnographer see differently to find the golden nuggets?

Lou was jostled out of this reverie as Cee Cee energetically buzzed into the office and landed on Louise’s desk with a plop. “Louise I’m here for my briefing for the field work to be conducted.” Lou looked up from her imagined fieldwork and focused on Cee Cee’s entry into her office. In the past Lou had had dozens of assistants, grad students, and junior ethnographers to help with her work. None of them was quite like Cee Cee, who was rather innovative and definitely pushed Lou’s ways of working to new places. “Alright Cee Cee let’s get going on the briefing and I’ll tell you what we’re looking for and how to behave when you get out there.” Lou readjusted her posture and swung around to meet Cee Cee head on and get into the briefing.Read More… Lou and Cee Cee prepare for fieldwork in the future: a world where robots conduct ethnography

June 13, 2016 | 1 Comment

Co-designing with machines: moving beyond the human/machine binary

Letter from the Editor: I am happy to announce the The Co-Designing with Machines edition. As someone with one foot in industry redesigning organizations to flourish in a data-rich world and another foot in research, I’m constantly trying to take an aerial view on technical achievements. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the future of design in a data-rich world increasingly powered by of artificial intelligence and its algorithms. What started out over a kitchen conversation with my colleague, Che-Wei Wang (contributor to this edition) about generative design and genetic algorithms turned into a big chunk of my talk at Interaction Design 2016 in Helsinki, Finland. That chunk then took up more of a my brain space and expanded into this edition of Ethnography Matters, Co-designing with machines. In this edition’s introductory post, I share a more productive way to frame human and machine collaboration: as a networked system. Then I chased down nine people who are at the forefront of this transformation to share their perspectives with us. Alicia Dudek from Deloitte will kick off the next post with a speculative fiction on whether AI robots can perform any parts of qualitative fieldwork. Janet Vertesi will close this edition giving us a sneak peak from her upcoming book with an article on human and machine collaboration in NASA Mars Rover expeditions. And in between Alicia and Janet are seven contributors coming from marketing to machine learning with super thoughtful articles. Thanks for joining the ride! And if you find this to be engaging, we have a Slack where we can continue the conversations and meet other human-centric folks. Join our twitter @ethnomatters for updates. Thanks. @triciawang

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Who is winning the battle between humans and computers? If you read the headlines about Google’s Artificial Intelligence (AI), DeepMind, beating the world-champion Go player, you might think the machines are winning. CNN’s piece on DeepMind proclaims, “In the ultimate battle of man versus machine, humans are running a close second.” If, on the other hand, you read the headlines about Facebook’s Trending News Section and Personal Assistant, M, you might be convinced that the machines are less pure and perfect than we’ve been led to believe. As the Verge headline puts it, “Facebook admits its trending news algorithm needs a lot of human help.”

The headlines on both sides are based in a false, outdated trope: The binary of humans versus computers. We’re surrounded by similar arguments in popular movies, science fiction, and news. Sometimes computers are intellectually superior to humans, sometimes they are morally superior and free from human bias. Google’s DeepMind is winning a zero-sum game. Facebook’s algorithms are somehow failing by relying on human help, as if collaboration between humans and computers in this epic battle is somehow shameful.

The fact is that humans and computers have always been collaborators. The binary human/computer view is harmful. It’s restricting us from approaching AI innovations more thoughtfully. It’s masking how much we are biased to believe that machines don’t produce biased results. It’s allowing companies to avoid taking responsibility for their discriminatory practices by saying, “it was surfaced by an algorithm.” Furthermore, it’s preventing us from inventing new and meaningful ways to integrate human intelligence and machine intelligence to produce better systems.

giphy As computers become more human, we need to work even harder to resist the binary of computers versus humans. We have to recognize that humans and machines have always interacted as a symbiotic system. Since the dawn of our species, we’ve changed tools as much as tools have changed us. Up until recently, the ways our brains and our tools changed were limited to the amount of data input, storage, and processing both could handle. But now, we have broken Moore’s Law and we’re sitting on more data than we’re able to process. To make the next leap in getting the full social value out of the data we’ve collected, we need to make a leap in how we conceive of our relationships to machines. We need to see ourselves as one network, not as two separate camps. We can no longer afford to view ourselves in an adversarial position with computers.

To leverage the massive amount of data we’ve collected in a way that’s meaningful for humans, we need to embrace human and machine intelligence as a holistic system. Despite the snazzy zero-sum game headlines, this is the truth behind how DeepMind mastered Go. While the press portrayed DeepMind’s success as a feat independent of human judgement, that wasn’t the case at all. Read More… Co-designing with machines: moving beyond the human/machine binary

January 21, 2014 | 17 Comments

Play nice: design ethnographer meets management consultant, an interview with Alicia Dudek from Deloitte Digital

Alicia Dudek (@aliciadudek) is a design ethnographer and user experience consultant at Deloitte Digital Australia. She has experience in designing and conducting customer focused qualitative research in a professional services and academic environment. Her experience includes delivering useful, in-depth, and straight from the field customer insights for diverse industries including healthcare, agriculture, finance, telecommunications, and tourism. Her entrance to the ethnographic insights industry began at the University of Dundee’s Master in Design Ethnography program. She previous worked in product management and residential construction project management.

What are the most forward thinking management consulting firms doing? Hiring ethnographers. That’s right. In this post for the January EPIC theme, I interviewed Alicia Dudek (@aliciadudek) from Deloitte Digital Australia. Through our hallway conversations at the Royal Institution, I found out that Alicia is Deloitte‘s first design ethnographer in Australia. At Deloitte, she has worked in a diversity of fields from health care, agriculture, finance, telecommunications, and tourism. In our interview, Alicia talks about her experience in designing and conducting customer focused qualitative research in a professional services and academic environment. She provides additional answers to the question I posed in the opening post of this series, Why Go to an Ethnography Conference?

Alicia posted additional reflections on EPIC 2013 on the Deloitte Digital blog (Deeply understanding your future customer, ethnographically speaking). If you want to find out more about Alicia’s work, be sure to read her fascinating guest post on Ethnography Matters co-authored with Rachel Shadoan where they discussed their use of hybrid methods (Plant Wars Player Patterns: Visualization as Scaffolding for Ethnographic Insight). Check out Alicia’s website for a treasure trove of links and thoughts.

For more posts from this January EPIC edition curated by contributing editor Tricia Wang, follow this link.

image source: Alicia Dudek

So Alicia, thanks for chatting with me for our January Epic theme. So tell me, why did you go to EPIC?
A few years ago when our cohort was studying on the masters of design ethnography course at the university in Dundee, our course leader was Catriona Macaulay, an organiser and participant in the EPIC community. She often mentioned the conference, its proceedings, and most of all the people who participated. Since then I have always viewed it as a goal to attend. This was my first year at the conference and it was even better than expected, especially to be listening to many of my heroes in the halls of the Royal Institution in London.

At EPIC 2013 and so excited to be meeting my ethnography heroes in the science and history soaked halls of the Royal Institution.

What did you learn at EPIC?
I learned that big data was a big deal to ethnographers. I learned that everyone is still figuring out how to do ethnography in diverse and new environments. I learned that the only way we get better, faster, stronger is by sharing stories in words, on film, in video, or even live (if your budget allows). The lesson that constraints breed creativity was reinforced again and again, as researchers showcased many Macgyver worthy data collection methods. The most important thing I learned was that every single person there was always working for the work itself. You can say that it is a place where passionate and curious ethnographers converge.

How did you end up at your current role as design ethnographer at Deloitte Digital in Australia?
A few years ago Deloitte Digital was one of the early adopters of design thinking and customer experience research as core business drivers. This is part of a design thinking methodology that is being spread throughout Deloitte Australia. I like to think that the people who hired me in Deloitte Digital thought that a design ethnographer made sense in the user experience team and were willing to roll the dice. In the time since I came on board I have spent a significant amount of time learning about technology development, user experience methods, business analysis and interaction design. Our national team works as more of an experience design team that pulls together diverse skill sets to research, design, and develop holistic customer experiences. Ethnographic work in this case usually lives in the problem definition and customer research areas of the design process.Read More… Play nice: design ethnographer meets management consultant, an interview with Alicia Dudek from Deloitte Digital

January 14, 2014 | 16 Comments

Why go to an ethnography conference?: Notes from the EPIC 2013 Conference

This month’s theme features a series of posts from EPIC 2103 (Ethnographic Praxis In Industry Conference)and is edited by Ethnography Matters co-founder, Tricia Wang (@triciawang), who gave the opening keynote at EPIC, “The Conceit of Oracles: How we ended up in a world in which quantitative data is more valued than qualitative data” (transcript).

Most ethnography conferences are largely academic affairs and have been ongoing for years. The American Anthropological Association is in its 113^th year; the Ethnography in Education Research Forum, its 35^th; the Ethnographic and Qualitative Research Conference, its 26^th; and the Chicago Ethnography Conference, its 16^th. In contrast to conferences that are mostly academic in nature from the speakers to the attendees and content, one relatively new conference focuses on the work ethnographers do within organizations: EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis In Industry Conference), which was held most recently in London from September 15-18, 2013 (draft proceedings of papers & program).

Before attending an ethnographic conference, there is a critical question that must be answered: Why go to an ethnography conference? This is not a trick question. It is something that I have asked myself a number of times. In fact, I had honestly been unsure of the value of such conferences. That is, until I attended EPIC 2013. Let me elaborate…

Consider the hypothetical in which you are a superhero. You would likely want to hang out with a team with different super powers(a la X-Men or Justice League), not a team comprised of clones of yourself. So for most of my career, I didn’t prioritize going to ethnographic industry events. That said, I have attended my fair share of academic conferences such as HCI, CHI, CSCW, and ASA. By and large, I haven’t been overly impressed; the academic rigor of presentations wasn’t always coupled with inspiration and the events could be incredibly sleep-inducing (except for the fun meet ups afterwards where everyone becomes human!). I generally prefer conferences that challenge me to think about the unfamiliar, which shouldn’t be surprising to hear from an ethnographer.

But I can now testify that I have attended my first ethnography industry gathering and I found it very inspirational, indeed!

In September 2013, I traveled to London to attend and speak at EPIC 2013. It was an honor to deliver the conference-opening keynote lecture entitled “The Conceit of Oracles: How we ended up in a world in which quantitative data is more valued than qualitative data” (transcript). While there was some variability in the quality of the presentations, the ones that were high quality were beyond inspirational. Equally brain-exploding were the fantastic hallway conversations with other accomplished ethnographers.

EPIC is a gathering where academic ethnographers and corporate ethnographers mingle as equals. In its sixth year, EPIC “promotes the use of ethnographic investigations and principles in the study of human behavior as they are applied in business settings.” EPIC started out with folks who were working at large tech companies such as IBM, Xerox Parc, Intel, and Microsoft, but it has now evolved into a conference that welcomes attendees working in boutique research firms, design studios, and consulting agencies.

There is no other conference in our field that is so interdisciplinary in attendance and ideas. I met attendees who deal with ethnography in every context, including marketing, strategy, design, research, and academia. Simply put, this is the conference to go to if you wish to learn how to make products, services, and organizations that truly serve people.

To capture the memorable presentations, interesting conversations, and useful workshops from EPIC 2013, Ethnography Matters will present a series of guest posts from presenters and attendees of the conference.Read More… Why go to an ethnography conference?: Notes from the EPIC 2013 Conference

April 11, 2013 | 6 Comments

Plant Wars Player Patterns: Visualization as Scaffolding for Ethnographic Insight

Rachel Shadoan

Editor’s note: This post for the April ‘Ethnomining‘ edition comes from Rachel Shadoan and Alicia Dudek. Following on the past posts about hybrid methods, this one features another interesting case study involving an on-line role-playing game. Their work correspond to a different approach, based on visualizations, than what we saw in the two previous posts.

Rachel Shadoan @RachelShadoan likes to find answers to interesting questions, and build interesting things using those answers. Currently she is answering interesting questions in the Intel Labs using a combination of data visualization, data mining, and ethnographic techniques.

Alicia Dudek

Alicia Dudek @aliciadudek is a design ethnographer and user experience consultant. Her passion is finding unusual solutions to the usual problems. Currently, she is finding unusual solutions for Deloitte Digital, where she specializes in engaging stakeholders in research insights through participatory design workshops.

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This is one of the visualizations we created for the research. The horizontal axis is date; the vertical axis is time of day as recorded by the Plant Wars server. Each mark on the chart represents a single instance of in-game training. In Plant Wars, a player can train their plant in one of three areas–speed, defense, or attack. The different colors of the marks corresponds to the characteristic being trained, while the radius of the mark encodes the number of stat points received from the training. The time shift can be seen clearly in this visualization: prior to June, this player starts playing in earnest around 16:00 server time. By October, the player has somewhat settled on starting play around 10:00 am.

A few weeks into our study of Plant Wars, an online text-based fighting RPG developed by Jon Evans of Artful Dodger Software, we encountered a mystery. We had visualized the server log data that records the players’ in-game activities, and discovered a pattern as obvious as it was inexplicable: in June 2009, the top Plant Wars players began slowly shifting the time of day in which they were playing. Over a period of six months, the time that the top players started playing each day shifted by nearly six hours. We poured over the server log data, checking the processing code for errors, for time zone issues, for any possible explanation of this shift in play pattern. Using only the server log data, we came up empty-handed. What was going on?