Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

The global IA workshop at the IA Summit turned out great. There were 17 people, from all over the world, and we had some great discussions. We also had a follow-up round-table which was fun too. I’ve embedded the entire deck below. I’ll see if I can get the content of the handouts out here too, although that might take a while.

The feedback from the workshop was good too. Some quotes from the feedback forms:

“The session was more fun than expected.”

“A much needed, excellent presentation with great documentation.”

“Great pace with great slides.”

| View | Upload your own

Mosoci is a (new?) consultancy with Dina Mehta that provides 2.0 strategy based on deep ethnographic-style research (at least, that’s what I understand.)

So again, this is a great talk. “You grew up with Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame; they’re growing up
with being famous amongst 15. They’re collecting friends as a way of
demarcating audience in a world without meaningful signals about who’s
watching. If you’re not in their list of friends or aren’t like the
people in their list of friends, you are not the intended audience.”

Perhaps the breakdown of privacy is creating the biggest cultural shock since the 50s/60s when rock&roll and all that happened.
 A lot of people really don’t understand what teenagers do on Myspace (as an example).

Was reading this thoughtful post on gift giving in Bloglines, and I thought, Hey, that could have been written by Danah Boyd! Turns out it was, I just didn’t know I was reading her feed.

I love this design :) Johannes Wilm

Whenever I blog like 5 posts of another blog in a row, it means I’ve discovered an interesting new one: “I met a guy last Saturday night and he asked for my phone number and, like, things were going well at the bar, so I give him my phone number and he puts me right into his phone and was like, hey, that’s ,that’s, that’s pretty quick and then he asked me if I wanted his number and I was like yeah do you want to put it down on a business card or something. I mean I’m a lady! Who thinks of jumping right into my phone. I got to take this as a process. If we call, if we have some sort of thing going.”

[The ad shows the Nokia 8801 and the line:] Nokia: It’s your life in there

“It’s like my cell phone is precious, it’s precious territory.”

This Blog Sits at the:: “The Marketing Science Institute meetings on ethnography are
now over.”

Some good insights in ethnography in a business setting.

“But as it stands, almost all the b-school academics who care to teach this stuff were in the room [John Sherry (Notre Dame), Eric Arnould, Linda Price (Arizona), Lisa Penaloza (Colorado), Craig Thompson (Wisconsin) and Rob Kozinets (York and MIT)] and this is not a good sign.”

And this one: “One of the real challenges that remains stands at the border between outward research and inward process. Some corporate cultures have a hard time bringing the ethnographic insight fully in-house.”

Now Go read the whole thing.

Flickr: Photos tagged with harlemrosegarden. We had a bunch of volunteers in the community garden. I put some pictures online. It was great to work in the garden again, even though it was raining. And it’s my birthday today. Now I gotta run to hear Aiwa Ong talk.

Intel’s anthropological army - ZDNet UK Insight: “And we looked at cultural groupings in London, Tokyo and Los Angeles, because we wanted to know whether there were greater similarities between people in those environments than differences. So we looked at 22 to 34 year old women, and there were great similarities. But then we checked women in Brazil, and there was a huge difference. Technology is a matter of life and death in big cities in Brazil, literally. Mobile phones were given to children, so they could be kept track of. But you don’t take out a laptop in public, because you risked bodily harm from someone willing to steal it. Yet home computers were fantastic, because they kept the kids inside and engaged instead of being at risk outside.”

God, this stuff always fascinates. My girlfriend is doing ethnographic research (the real stuff) in NYC these days - amazing.

Institute of Design : Profile : Project: Design for the Base of the Pyramid: “Our approach is to develop solutions that harness the entrepreneurial spirit of local citizens
[...]
Through disposable camera studies, video ethnography, interviews and other design-oriented user observation methods, the team identified a wide variety of profitable businesses already taking place in and around slums.”

A Visible City: How do anthropologists blink?: “Pat and others at ID have a project called Design for the Base of the Pyramid. Most of the research has been conducted remotely in India. The ID folks have set up templates and sent them to various researchers in India (social workers, architects, and MBAs, all new to observational research) with instructions to gather information in the slums of Mumbai.”

Can you distribute research? I heard that at least some user research for US companies is done by Indian companies. Outsourcing UX?

The CIA is sponsoring anthropologists and thus there is a lot of discussion about whether that is acceptable.

antropologi.info: “according to dance anthropologist Judith Lynne Hanna, there may be as many dance languages as humanity’s 6,000-plus verbal languages.”

Photoethnography.com: Fieldnotes: My interview fieldkit. And: “I have read of people who go to really dirt-poor parts of the globe and pack a Canon battery-powered 4×6 dye-sub printer, so they can make prints on the spot and give them to the people they photograph as a thank-you gift. In many countries, less blase about photography than our pampered industrial societies, these would become prized family heirlooms.”

Photoethnography.com: Fieldnotes: My interview fieldkit: doing foto ethnography on the road.

What’s going on these days in ethnography? Popular Ethnographies

Dina writes about visual ethnography with Flickr, but how about visual ethnography with Mefeedia? In other words, with movies?

This Blog Sits at the: transformation watch: “Americans have been whitening their teeth at such a furious pace that the makers of caps, crowns and in-fills cannot match the new American mouth. Their stuff just isn’t white enough.”

How Far Have We Traveled? Magic, Science and Religion Revisited: an anthropologic way of looking at the missile defense system.

The Cavalier Daily: Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans in all academic fields, especially anthropology.

FRONTLINE: watch online | PBS: the latest video is about the business and science of choosing language to sell us things, including politics.

UCSB Anthropology: American Modern
: the history of the flush toilet.

I discovered this new and interesting blog on anthropology and design and such: TechnoTaste.

Anne Galloway: want to find some good books on qualitative research?

Here are some random thoughts about the sharing of stories since I am at a computer anyway. I might add pictures to this post later.

I was visiting a temple this afternoon, filled with extremely elaborate detail. You can walk around it and read stories of the kings that built it, it’s like a kind of elongated comic book. The temple was used for ceremonies that probably (I’m guessing here since that’s what ceremonies in temples and churches seem to do) were basically about telling the stories of the religion and rulers.

So temples are for telling stories.

They’re really efficient since you can build a temple with a story on it, and the story will be told millenia afterwards if the temple survives. Your story survives. And many temples do survive, despite the destroying of temples and churches by competing religions as has happened in Europe, India and all over the world.

I saw tourists (Indians and foreigners) walking around the temple, reading the same, 1500-year old story. Stories are important because they explain the world, and in that way contain values and such.

Then I had to think about pictures. I remember visiting my girlfriends family, and 3 generations were standing around a photoalbum, and the stories of the family were being retold. I’m sure you’ve experienced the same thing.

Photoalbums are another medium that lets us tell the stories of our families, and in that way convey the values of our families as well.

An important element of these stories is their construction by the way: they are constructed by the entire family, watching pictures together. This way, it’s a kind of democratic process that creates the stories of the family.

I’m fascinated by digital pictures. What will be the social constructions around those artifacts that will let us use them to share our stories? Emailing them just doesn’t cut it. Microsofts Photostory is a good attempt, but not good enough. Printing them out also somehow doesn’t cut it - it’s not truly part of the media. So I’m curious to see what happens.

Comments? I’ll add links and pictures later.

I asked my little nephew and niece (7 and 9) and my aunt (in her 70s) what the internet is. (I translated their responses from Flemish).

Me: “But what IS the internet?”
Niece: “The internet is where everything comes together… where all the information comes together”.

Me: “What’s the difference between your computer and the internet?”
Nephew: “on the internet you can find programs all over the world, and on your computer you only find a few files that are yours.”

Me: “What is the internet?”
Auntie (70+): “So when are you going to India? … The internet is when you can write to everyone…” (she doesn’t have internet access.)

Me: “What is patience?”
Nephew: “You have to have patience when the sand-clock is there.” (refering to the icon that indicates the computer is working.)

I have all this on video, but haven’t asked for permission to post it yet.

Refuting objections to a Global Rural Network (GRNet) for developing nations (by Larry Press) addresses the question: why give poor people internet if they don’t even have clean water/phones/… yet? I am a geek, so I tend to believe in the power of technology to fix things. That’s my bias, but I understand the counterargument as well. The paper includes this interesting screenshot.

The digital divide: “Why the “don’t-want-tos” won’t compute.” Studying non-use of technology is a good way of understanding a bit more about that technology and its cultural dimensions. Geeks like me tend to think non-users are just being stubborn, but there are often very valid reasons for non-use.

Smart Mobs: UK girls use camera-phones to check their hair - poll: “20 percent of mobile users send snaps of themselves in new outfits to friends to see if they like them.” I actually showed my girlfriend my new shoes over IM video today. More good stuff on Picturephoning.

E M E R G I C . o r g: July 22, 2004 Archives: “Two years ago, it would have been hard to imagine that Indians would be buying cellphones at the rate of nearly 2 million a month. Similarly, today, it is hard to imagine a broadband India - but that is exactly what we are about to see. The next couple years will see Indian consumers and enterprises enveloped in ubiquitous, high-speed connectivity from multiple sources - wireless, DSL, cable and satellite. Complement this with WiFi-enabled laptops and smartphones, and the always-on world is at hand.”

Leapfrogging.

Just a thought (nothing statistically relevant) about internet technology dispersion and acceptance.

When I ask people here (Belgium) who don’t use the internet, it’s mostly older people, and mostly because they “can’t use the computer”. Non-use seems to be mostly by choice. One lady told me she’d rather spend her free time outside. Another told me her husband always does everything. They also seem to be having a hard time imagining exactly why they should learn this new technology. But none of them had real worries about being able to learn it if they had to.

I’ve always wondered why third world companies don’t sell more of their fantastic crafts (they have the manpower) to the first world over the internet. I’m sure the reasons are many and complex. Here’s a story of a company that actually does that.

rediff.com: Nyala ‘unaffected’ by Clinton visit: “What about the IT revolution in the village, the computerised milk co-operative society of women and much-hyped internet-connected panchayat, a first in Rajasthan? “Our panchayat is yet to get a telephone connection and you ask about the internet,” says sarpanch Kalu Meena. The computer on which ‘tutored’ women members of the co-operative demonstrated their skill to President Clinton is lying unused.”

Last (W)rites: The Indian PC (aka What women want. :-) )
Let me expand on this perspective - if you start to profile the average Indian PC buyer what stands out notably is he is more often than not a she. If we regard women as the central figure of an average middle class Indian family, what are we specifically doing today to ensure that the PC addresses some common scenarios around Indian housewives?”

In a way, he his saying that the computer needs to be socially and culturally “constructed” (by adjusting it to the needs of these users) while at the same time constructing the users (through classes, advertising, …) and letting both user and technology construct each other. It relates to the social co-construction of users and technology, something I’ve written about a bit since I read a book with the same subtitle.

While I am in India, I plan to videoblog daily (although intermittant internet access might make that hard). I also plan to do some ethnography-like research, and blog my source material.

Blogging the source material (I’ll make an effort to indicate where I am interpreting stuff), hopefully, will enable others to reinterpret it. What’s more, I hope it will start a conversation that will make the resulting interpretation much more refined that what I could have come up with myself.

In practice, that means that I’ll transcribe interviews. I’ll put video and photomaterial online. I’ll mix those materials with my notes, and then leave it up to my esteemed audience (that’s all 6 of you!) to discuss.

That’s the clearest I’ve been able to explain what I have in mind. I’ll try again later. See also: how to blog like an anthropologist.

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Ethan Zuckerman: the WorldChanging Interview: “The community of people who blog right now are largely wealthy, white European and American technocrats. The stories that come out the community and tend to get amplified tend to be stories having to do with having to do with technology and American politics.
[...]
That’s why a blogging community that pays attention to the rest of the world is so important. If bloggers talk about what’s happening in Africa, say, that not only means that more people have access to information about what’s going on there, it also means that there’s a countervailing force which shows the editors at the New York Times that people are interested enough in these issues to read about them.”

“[...]
Encouraging people to blog in Ghana is all well and good, but at the moment, most of the interesting debate there is happening on talk radio.
[...]
Empowering individuals, for example, to avoid systematic corruption — that’s the kind of project which has leverage. Put the customs service online. Customs is a place where there’s an enormous amount of corruption, where goods come in the door and lots of money changes hands under the table. If you can put that system online, it becomes much harder to subvert.
[...]
We tend to think of information technology as inherently and essentially democratizing. It’s not. A lot of it comes down to who gets the tools first. When it’s the activists and the artists and the kids, the technology looks and behaves one way. When repressive governments catch on, and realize that they can use these tools, too, very different things happen.
[...]
If you look at the situation in Sudan, it’s very clear that the Sudanese government has been hiring pr professionals for decades to try to figure out how to deal with its public relations problems. And while you’ve got lots and lots of people standing up and saying Sudan is a genocidal regime, go online and you’ll discover tons of websites essentially arguing the contrary. Trace those sites to their roots and you find they belong to a small number of organizations who are tied to a Sudan-American or Sudan-UK “friendship” organization of some sort or another. The same sort of grassroots techniques we’re trying to use to get people to talk about and organize about these issues are getting used by dictators. ”

An obvious yet profound insight is that we can’t build the tools the third world needs without their help.

“If you want to build a tool that will be useful for political activism in Central Asia, you’d damned well better have some Central Asians involved in the process. But at this point, that sort of inclusion is just not happening.
[...]
You need people who understand who understand the local problems and also have the skills to write the code.”

As you might have gathered from the extensive quoting, a must-read.

“I think that interactive voice response systems are maybe the most critical information technologies needed by the developing world.” - the good stuff just keeps on coming. Read it.

“We need to be getting on airplanes and going out and finding people in countries which are poorly represented, who are already community leaders or interesting thinkers, and figuring out how to get them into the dialogue. But people who can blog well across cultural lines are rare. They need to be natural bridge-builders, to have one foot in each culture, to be bilingual or multilingual, but most of all, to be people who can understand enough about their own culture to make it understandable to people from outside of it.”

And check Ethan’s blog.

Here is the first instance of kindof anthropological blogging I’ve found: 73bus (from a larger project), although he she doesn’t use the blog as a repository for documentary information the way I imagine someone should. I guess I’ll have to do it myself.

Also, one block radius, a project of Brooklyn artists Christina Ray and Dave Mandl [known collaboratively as Glowlab], is an extensive psychogeographic survey of the block where New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art will build a new facility in late 2004. Engaging a variety of tools and media such as blogs, video documentation, maps, field recordings & interviews, Glowlab creates a multi-layered portrait of the block as it has never been seen before [and will never be seen again].

TP: On the sunny side of life?: (a review of the conference). “In Sweden’s sun city, Karlstad, Internet researchers from some 30 countries surfed through the cultural specifics of the Web … The tricky causalities – the complex relationship between culture and technology.” The conference site.

Trying to salvage good stuff from this conference (the proceedings are kinda expensive):

Nina Wakeford (university of Surrey, UK) is director of the Incubator for Critical Inquiry into Technology and Ethnography (projects, blog) and did a keynote trying to answer the question “How can the next generation of research deal with experience which is ‘non-normative’ or ‘at the margins’ of ICT development?”.

I’m always conflicted about hardcore ethnographers/researchers. The language many of them use almost guarantees they only speak to themselves. At the same time, they have interesting things to say. Like this: “Early discussions of the internet betray a tendency to celebrate the taking on of other (usually non-normative) identities as a way of describing the capacity of a transformative technology.” Very true.

I’m digging in a bit in the Incite site and blog.

(via Emergic) Internet arrives via rickshaw in India: a mobile rickshaw-like computer with teacher, from the InfoThela project. This way they distribute the cost of the computer, and provide a way of developing knowledge as well.

See also this story about bookmobiles.

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Understanding the Indian Tech Boom: what effect does the tech boom have, and what are its costs?