I just received this from the EPIC folks!

Scholarships Announcement 2008 Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference

We [EPIC, not ethnography.com] are pleased to announce 3-5 scholarships for the EPIC conference in Copenhagen, 15-18 October 2008. Any student (undergraduate, master’s, Ph.D.) can apply! Scholarship recipients will receive free registration, in exchange for working 12-16 hours before or during the conference.

Deadline for applications: 25 July 2008

Application process: Please submit a curriculum vitae and a cover letter to scholarships@epic2008.com. In your cover letter, indicate whether you will be presenting a paper or organizing a workshop. Also, explain how you will benefit from attending the conference. Thirdly, we want to make sure that the scholarship recipients carry out their conference tasks in a responsible and effective manner, so you should describe any relevant experience of this type.

Scholarship recipients will be chosen by 4 August. Priority will be given to

• Those who are presenting a paper or organizing a workshop
• Those whom the conference would benefit the most
• Those who seem most likely to be responsible and effective in their work for the conference

Questions? Contact Christina Wasson, Scholarships Committee Chair, at cwasson@unt.edu.

It has been an interesting experience becoming involved with entrepreneurship, business, and learning the do’s and don’ts of this type of environment in contrast to the skills and information I have learned in the social sciences. It seems as if there really are two vastly different types of thinking in these two worlds. I’ve come to realize that it is possible to learn the traits valued within each discipline and to ‘wear’ them when the situation calls for it.

With the study of anthropology, we learn to be trained observers. We also learn to be careful about knee-jerk judgments in order to be sure that we’re seeing the entire picture (or as much of it as possible) and not simply placing our own opinions or values onto the others. The research process focuses on the importance of analyzing the data carefully and being sure not to draw conclusions that are unfounded. In business and entrepreneurship, on the other hand, quick decisions and risk taking are necessary. This field calls for constant innovation and a trial-and-error type approach in order to move the venture along as quickly as possible. More than one entrepreneurship teacher has used the slogan “If you are going to fail, fail fast”, and then move on to the next idea.

Although these two different disciplines seem so very different, and in many ways are, common ground can still be found in some aspects. Anthropologists and business people must both step outside their comfort zones often and must be able to gain strangers’ trust. The anthropologist must gain the trust of his or her informants or research subjects, the business person must gain the trust of his or her customers. The anthropologist steps outside their comfort zone in order to submerse themselves within a completely new environment and culture, and are often confronted with beliefs, practices, or actions that conflict with their own values. The business person steps outside their comfort zone by doing what it takes to make the networking connections necessary for the success of their venture.

Personally I have found it a valuable learning experience becoming so actively involved in another discipline. When I first began last September, I was only able to see the differences between the two disciplines. A much deeper understanding has evolved since I am now able to see the commonalities.

I recently moved on from a wonderful long career in design anthropology to my latest adventure. I joined the Army’s Human Terrain System program and for the next few months I’ll be living near the Ft. Leavenworth area. How much I’ll be writing about my HTS training and work is unknown at this point. Over the years I have tended not to write about any of my professional work directly, but who knows. In the meantime, I wanted to pass on a couple of my personal learning’s for clients and consultants from over a decade in design anthropology. Here goes:

Clients: Please, please stop demanding that you want or own the raw video recordings from the fieldwork.
If your consultant is smart, they have written in the contract that you do not own them. But there are very good reasons that you DON’T want them. To start with, clients want the raw video in the mistaken belief it can somehow be reused later to answer other questions. This is very unlikely and I can count on one hand the number of times I have gone back to the raw video after the program is finished, and that usually yields nothing new of value. Look, do you really want to spend the 3 to 5 viewing hours per actual hour of video trying to pull new meaning out of video shot for a completely different question? Also, that video is a Liability to own. As a rule, there are releases signed with the participants that the video will not be used for anything other than that project and viewed by a limited group of people. Those videos contain people crying, telling off-color jokes, admitting to seeking divorce without a spouses knowledge. Are you really interested in taking the rap for when this shows up on YouTube? Unless you are planning on hauling all those tapes with you all over your company to keep them safe, you really don’t want them.

Consultants: Take your clients into the field, always.
Your clients know their business better than you do and will make connections you don’t. Also, they are going to be your most important voice within the organization that vouches for the process and credibility of the final work. They are not going to watch one interview and change the company strategy based on this. Take the time to show clients how they are expected to act in the field, debrief field visits with them and treat them as research partners.

Clients: Fieldwork is not a vacation or a time to be a tourist.
Fieldwork is hard work, long days and people you were expecting to interview changing schedule, canceling outright, or turning out to be downright strange is par for the course. This is NOT the time to just drop in with a VP unexpectedly to let him or her experience fieldwork once. Researchers work hard to plan activities and schedules to get the best data we can. The only people allowed in the field should be those that will be contributing to the insights in the long term. Your sightseeing VP is not one of them. They get to watch the clips reel.

Consultants: Never forget the “why should they give a sh*t?” rule.
When you think you have come to an interesting route to investigate, or interesting insight, always ask yourself and your team “Ok, Great… now why should our client care about this?” Even if you realize in the conversation that they don’t really care about your insight, that’s fine, you have just pushed ahead. If you do have a great why they care moment, write it down, that’s going to be your lead!

Clients: Little can save you from a poorly scoped program, and that’s squarely in your court.
I can’t mention how often a client has shown up with a project that asked the team to “boil the ocean.” Even worse, I have had to lead a couple of those projects and they rank on the top of my list for worst professional experiences. Boiling the ocean is when the client refused to limit the scope of the project in any way. I once had a client that scoped the project as virtually any topic or business they were not in at the time. Space Tourism? Sure, we might try that! Building toasters… sure, we’re up for that. Never mind they had zero intellectual, professional, manufacturing or research assets in those areas. Work collaboratively with your consulting team to scope the project to your needs, timeline and be sure your consultant has the resources to do the job. Its not all the clients fault, its the consultants job to know when to walk away from the project and let the competitor have it.

Just some thoughts for the moment.

As I described in one of my previous blogs, I am part of an inter-disciplinary research team at Fresno State University. Our team is comprised of three computer engineering students, a business student, and myself, an anthropology student. As part of their senior project, the engineers are developing a proto-type piece of technology. Our team is developing a voice-activated remote control and part of our research efforts are focusing on how to differentiate our product to make it more desirable and user-friendly than those already on the market.

As part of my research for the project, I’ve done participant observation with three different research subjects, observing remote control use. When I first began the project, remote control use seemed like something that was so very basic and mundane. I did not know what to expect because this was my first time doing this type of research. All of my previous research was conducted in public spheres. I was nervous about entering these individual’s homes, and wondered whether my observations could produce any useful data that would benefit the team’s project. However, I decided that the best way to go about it was to just jump right into it with the goal of observing the activity and environment as if it were the first time I had witnessed anything like it.

Currently I’ve completed three of the five planned observations and I have been pleasantly surprised at the results. Since I went into the environment not knowing what to expect and deciding on just writing every detail I could observe, each observation session actually ended up resulting in data that inspired new ideas for our team to research regarding product design, capability, and service. During the initial observation session I left with the research subject a design activity in which they used various shapes put together with Velcro in order to represent their ideal remote control design. This activity ended up creating valuable discussion with each of the research subjects which also inspired ideas for our product design. For example, after each of the subjects created their remote control designs they proceeded to explain each part of their design and its function. All three research subjects described their designs as simple, despite the fact that all three varied greatly in the number of functions and in the technological complexity that would accompany a true proto-type of their design. Using these three research subjects as examples, we were able to get a small glimpse of the vast amount of differences that product users might have.

While the project is still on-going and there is much work to be done, I believe that the experience of doing this type of observation in a more intimate setting (an individual’s home) has given me more confidence in doing this type of research. It will be interesting to see what further research will inspire.

I went to a workshop Friday in which anthropological involvement with the German military in Afghanistan was described. The German army is participating in the NATO operation in northern Afghanistan, which is in one of the more peaceful areas of that country. An ethnologist, Dr. Monika Lanik reported on the difficulties in developing inter-cultural competence in the context of deployments. Ethnographic competence is considered important because the German military is taking on a new international character as a result of peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan, and the former Yugoslavia. Dr. Lanik pointed out that this is as much a diplomatic function as a military one. As a result, this new type of military operation requires diplomatic skills which in turn implies ethnography.

In the case of Afghanistan, German military have provincial reconstruction teams. This context requires soldiers to be aware of patronage relationship, the context of the drug trade, and modern versus traditional values. Dr. Lanik noted that awareness of such “deep play” goes well beyond the simpler tasks involving the recognition of ethnic symbols, or actions likely to accidentally give offense. Rather it reflects a need to focus on the deeper context that culture provides for not only a peacekeeping, but economic development.

The ethnographic training of German military personnel asks them to recognize the context that their own culture provides in what they are trying to accomplish. As in any military, both military and national culture is inter-twined and taken for granted by the soldiers. In such a context, a job for the ethnographer is to ask soldiers what part of their world view is a consequence of their military training, what part is a result of German culture, what emerges out of their personal biography, and finally what is brought by the local culture? As in any culture, there are naïve assumptions that home culture is universal, and can be imputed to the people with whom they will negotiate. The job of the ethnologist is much the same as it is with any institution—train and teach for inter-cultural competence.

There is controversy associated with the German mission in Afghanistan. The German mission in Afghanistan is itself politically controversial in a country which sees its military as strictly for domestic defensive purposes. How long the German forces should stay in Afghanistan is an on-going political question raised frequently in the German Parliament.

Some German anthropologists also raise the issue of whether anthropologists should be involved with the military at all, even though the German military is focused strictly on defensive purposes. As in the United States, it is framed as a question of professional ethics—and the question is asked whether providing ethnographic advice is appropriate at all.