Design Research and Strategy
Canadians love spring. If you’re not Canadian, I bet you’re thinking, “Of course they do; everyone does.” Ah but you do not “verstehen” Canada if you say such things. Indeed, I didn’t even “verstehen” Canada growing up on the West Coast — we didn’t even have snow!
Spring is approaching in Canada, and we feel it. [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · class · discourse analysis · goffman · social networks · technology design · web analytics
I am currently writing a grant proposal for a research project on mobile phones. This is the (very) short version:
All too often, technology designers create systems that unwittingly expose social actors to socially awkward situations. Companies like Facebook struggle to satisfy their users’ needs to present different selves in different social contexts. The dreaded “My [...]
Categories: Blog · Research Methods · anthropology · design · ethnography · goffman · product design · qualitative research · sociology · technology design · user experience
I was recently invited to speak at Ottawa’s Social Media Breakfast. The organizers, Simon Chen, Rob Lane and Ryan Anderson, asked me specifically to bring a sociologist’s understanding to social media. Below is my presentation. For the full version, with the notes, visit the full slideshare version.
My essential argument for the presentation was that we [...]
Categories: Blog · bourdieu · design · facebook · goffman · home · interaction design · market research · social capital · social media · social networks · sociology · technology design · user experience
For those of you who caught my Ignite TO presentation, here are the slides. For those of you who missed it, below is a text summary that goes with the slides.
I’d like to give thanks to my teacher and friend, Dr. Karen Anderson, whose scholarly work underpins many of the ideas in this presentation.
Slide 1:
This [...]
Categories: design · facebook · goffman · interaction design · sociology · technology design · user experience
The New York Times reports that the American Medical Association is considering doing away with the venerable symbol of the physician: the lab coat. There’s a very good reason to get rid of lab coats: they’re dirty. But the symbol of the lab coat is far more important. The New York Times reports the empirical [...]
Categories: Research Methods · anthropology · design · ethnography · goffman · qualitative research · quantitative research · sociology