Ethnographic Research

Paolo Friere, the Brazian educator once told me, “education design is 90% intiution and 10% research, but you have to spend 90% of your time researching to make sure your intuition is correct, because if it’s not, then you miss your mark entirely and accomplish nothing.”

I think that moment with such a great educator articulated my passion. An ideal setting, comming up with ideas and then conducting research to see how they could be improved or improve the user’s life. Ah, that is the life.

I found this beautiful description of ethnographic research
“rather than studying people, enthnography means learning from people”

Microsoft and Intel sponsored a conference last year Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference. The mission statement says,
“By understanding people; what they do, how they do it, and how these change over time, we can create better corporate strategies, processes, and products, as well as enhance and simplify people’s lives.”

My introduction to ethnographic research started by listening to folk singer Pete Segeer. He talked about John and Alan Lomax who were ethnomusicologist. They went around the country recording folk music and catologued it for the Smithsonian.

Later, I was introduced to the work of Margaret Mead. Then in 1980 I Directed the the National Literacy Campaign for Northern Managua. In addition to teaching the workers how to read and write, own mandate was also to learn from them and document as best we could what we learned.

It Takes 30 Years to Create an Overnight Sensation- Paul Saffo

Eugene Kim presented an impressive demonstration of the launch of HyperScope a new tool that adds real power to the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers.

 

It provides powerful new features that will change the way you work and think about using Web-based resources.
<http://hyperscope.org/hyperscope/src/demos/augmentinghumanintellect.opml>.

It is all open source and I think it is going to make quite an impact on Silicon Valley. (So, if you are looking for the new new thing you can always mine the work of Dr. Douglas Engelbart who first wrote the theoretical foundation for the Information Age back in 1962 which is the paper featured in the HyperScope demo)

 

Eugene Kim headed a dynamite team including Dr. Jeff Rulifson, the Chair of Engelbart’s organization the Bootstrap Alliance and Dr. Engelbart’s daughter, Christina Engelbart as well as superstar developers Jonathon Cheyer and Brad Neuberg.

 

Several members of the orginal Augmentation Research Center that developed the legendary NLS and Augment systems where present and honored by all who attend the SRI launch party at SRI last night.

Monaco Media Forum

I just registered for the Monaco Media Forum: Leadership for the Digital Revolution http://www.monacomediaforum.org/ in late October and looking forward to it.

The event is chaired by His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco
Prince Albert II of Monaco
The Co-Chairmen are:

HRH Prince Alwaleed bin Talal
Chairman of Kingdom Holding Company
Emilio Azcarraga Jean
Chairman of the Board,
President and Chief Executive Televisa
Maurice Lévy
Chairman and CEO Publicis Groupe
Ruigang Li
President, Shanghai Media Group
Bob Wright
Chairman, NBC Universal

So, it looks like it will be an interesting trip….