What Women Make » Ethnography

Design Thinking Through Empathy

Kristina Drury — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:12:51 +0000

Last month, I introduced my monthly What Women Make column dedicated to design thinking tools that entrepreneurs can use to solve business challenges.

The most important element that sets design thinking apart from other methods of problem solving is the fact that it’s a user-centered process. A traditional top-down process, on the other hand, involves presenting a design brief describing the problem, devising a solution and then testing that solution with a focus group. User-centered design is great because it engages the end user of your business throughout the entire process.

Here’s a tool that will help you do that. It’s called a “User Empathy Maps”. Empathy mapping exposes user needs, offers community insights and reveals opportunities to reach out and connect with your end users which will help make sure you’re creating a meaningful solution.

So how do I use an empathy map?

The goal of this map is to identify the true needs of your user and to eliminate your assumptions so it’s best to do the exercise before engaging your user in order to pinpoint what you don’t know, and what you need to know and again after to see the difference between your assumptions and what you’ve learned.

On a large paper or whiteboard, create 6 equal sections and place your user in the center.
Populate the map by taking notes of the following six traits of your users. I would suggest using post-it notes or writing on the piece of paper/whiteboard.

SAY/DO: Who they are in their world? What are their attitudes and actions in public? Appearance? Behavior? Where do they spend their time? What are some quotes and defining words your user said (based on interview or research)?
THINK/FEEL: What might your user be thinking? What about their beliefs? Whose opinions influence them? What emotions might your subject be feeling? What really counts? What feelings and beliefs guide their behavior?
HEAR: Whose options influence them? Who are their friends? What beliefs are they hearings?
SEE: What is surrounding the users? Environmental factors? What is on the market? Friends’ behavior? Context for challenge?
PAIN: What are the fears and frustrations of the user? What influences their behavior based on the challenge?
WANTS/NEEDS: What are the elements the user wants changed? What are their aspirations?

Take a step back to examine the needs of your users. Pay attention for a couple important factors.

What is a ‘fact’ versus an assumption. If you don’t know something is true but think that is how your user behaves or thinks then put a question mark. This will identify what you need to confirm before moving ahead.
Watch for solution posting as needs…. Either remove the post and save for later or reframe by asking ‘why do we need (solution)?”

New creative solutions to challenges are more effective when you eliminate assumptions about the needs, wants, and behaviors of the person who is going to ultimately use your product or service.

To learn more about how to use this tool or have any questions about how to adapt it to your user or challenge please contact me.

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KRISTINA DRURY is an expert in design thinking and the Executive Director of TYTHEdesign, a consultancy serving the social sector based in New York City. TYTHEdesign uses design-based approaches to support the goals and needs of agencies in the social sector, drawing on communication and organizational design to increase the impact of their work. Feel free to contact her if you have questions at all! She’s here to help.

Recipe for Business Opportunity: Include the Practitioners — Ethnography at work for Innovation

Chauncey Zalkin — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:29:25 +0000

Research companies, like everyone else, are questioning their value. Like everyone else, they are struggling to push beyond the boundaries of their current deliverables. In their case, information is too fluid to rely on one definitive report. At the same time, I imagine that ad agencies might wish they weren’t called ad agencies. It’s like naming your medical practice by the diagnosis. You can’t give away the ending in the title and know you’re doing the right thing for every client. Surgeons cut. Ad agencies make ads. And last but not least, design firms prioritize physiological and aesthetic relevance but they do take the time to understand people and groups. They engage in ethnography to get context and use mapping techniques to spur innovation even if their business model does not allow for completely open-ended non-prescriptive discovery.

There are only one or two innovation firms that I’ve come across in my search for a job home that are really ideal settings for ethnography. One of those is WhatIf; they use experts with long backward trajectories in various categories to solve problems. They also listen with purpose. But WhatIf isn’t hiring.

I was recently asked how I would approach bringing innovation for new product development to a traditional quantitative and qualitative research company with most of their DNA in brand and advertising research. Here are the initial thoughts I offered. Though I didn’t have enough time to develop them further, I thought I’d share them.

‘The Constellation’ I talk about in this blog post calls for a shift in approach

A Shift In Approach #1

Look beyond the super-users and early adopters trend and insights experts tend to seek out. Everyone with an Internet connection is an influencer. The single idea or authoritative voice has been replaced by a constellation of conversations, ideas and stories.

Influence is multilateral. Everyone is pinging around from fact to fact, story to story, idea to idea. Those facts and stories are disembodied most of the time. The antecedent is not always important.

The constellation of input is what we have to look at.

A Shift In Approach #2

We’re living in an age of ongoing experimentation. Reach across disciplines and cultural phenomena for answers. I did this naturally but was really taught to do it working at Crispin. You look to other categories not just for inspiration but for insight into cultural resonance.

Recipe – the Secret Sauce

Traditional Quant

Traditional Qual (as needed)

Ethnography (deeper open-ended cultural exploration) that includes designers and other ‘makers’. Find those with a pertinent process-knowledge base and bring them into your research in addition to the end-user you are trying to learn about (not only as the experts they are but as people to learn from, observe, and explore with.)

Triangulate as needed.

Tools & Tenets

Consider all social, economic and cultural factors that effect business and consumers (locally or globally or both):

Visit innovative hubs in emerging markets to look for fresh ideas

Listen to world’s greatest problem solvers and cross-reference findings with best thinking

Engage in innovation research praxis: trends and best practices + practical concerns of the business at hand + research into behaviour and emotion –> put into test scenarios.

In a Nutshell

Innovation starts with observation.

A diversity of well considered perspectives increases the depth and in turn, the value of the proposition.

It is vital to involve makers (designers, engineers, developers) – those versed in design thinking and iterative process – for richer analysis and problem-solving.

Drawing fresh ideas from related cultural phenomena further shapes thinking and brings ideas to life.

Stuff I Like to Do or Lead

Self-documentation / digital ethnography

Journaling, Videography, Brainstorming

Sketches, mock-ups, scenario building, co-creation

Map the Marketplace, Category, Competition, Trends

Shopalong

Develop an ‘app-along’

Workshops for Clients

Designer / Developer/ Engineer/Creator panels

Guided tours

Also Incorporate

Protyping – 3d ideation or narrative booklets and videos of findings and innovation exploration

So…

Trends

Observational Research

Workshops

To create best products, brands, services, business opportunities.

The End

I think I’m now off to do more What Women Make stuff and combine my anthropology and truth-seeking with Peter Crosby’s human geography landscapes. More later from Barcelona.

Great Presentations

Chauncey Zalkin — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:34:37 +0000

I’m putting together a proposal and doing some background research to buttress my proposition. Through yesterday’s research, I discovered some great ideas, which I’ll share in a minute, but first I’ll share a thought that occurred to me during the day:

Life used to be what you saw around you – the milkman, the neighbor, the car park, the airport, the plane, the landing strip, the drive, the hotel. We saw life in a direct plane outward from wherever we were. Now, life has become more like a land map, a blueprint or a satellite image – so many wires going this way and that, our life containing so much more than what our eye can take in – that we can no longer see our lives with the naked eye. This is such a huge transformation and so undeniably true and becoming truer by the day that I imagine it is becoming part of our psyche to flex a muscle that sees beyond the immediate environment. We think less ‘across the street’ and more ‘Hubble telescope’ because it’s the only way to get it all into one picture. We’re developing another quotidian dimension, a birds-eye instinct emerging. Another reason why we just can’t think or work linearly. Interesting, this thought helps my proposition a lot.

Now onto a few good ideas around the web:

I discovered Venessa Miemis:

“What are young adults thinking about money and value? How can we create new systems of wealth generation and abundance? What does the future hold for banks and other financial institutions in the wake of massive peer to peer exchange? This video was created as part of Venessa Miemis’ presentation at the SIBOS Conference in Amsterdam, 25 October 2010.”

I discovered Zaana Howard and loved her exercises:

Design thinking and knowledge management: brothers from different mothers

View more presentations from Zaana Howard.

I discovered a great and oh-so-satisfying article called At the Intersections of Design, Ethnography and Global Governance

…which spoke to my desire to merge deeper ethnography (spontaneous, creative, experimental ethnography and workshopping approaches to listening) with a designers ability to make incarnate the output of cultural insights that someone like me might synthesize but with words, not objects or actions. It do us all one better to take our thinking and filter it through design thinking – add analytical thinking, creativity, and cultural sensitivity together in the soup toward the purpose of dinner on the table.

Ethnographers, if you want to be a purist, aren’t really supposed to have much of a purpose outside understanding. At least not while they’re in action. That’s ethnography in its academic form which for argument’s sake, might just be a little too much self-talk (why I didn’t follow the academic route). That’s where this article makes so much sense to me in my search for a comrade in my desire to use ethnography for making things, services, communication, connectivity, the world – more interesting and more well-suited to apparent changes going on. Combining those who think in terms of design and those that think in order to understand and get at a wider truth can be a mighty powerful partnership.

Aditya Dev Sood, the article’s author, says: “socio-cultural knowledge and insight, acquired through ethnography and filtered through any array of disciplinary frameworks from the social science and humanities, while valuable and necessary, (in some prior experiment) was also (alone) proving insufficient. This was because cultural knowledge in terms of observed behavior and practice was being presented as observed fact, rather than dynamic operational opportunity (for me, why incremental application is great). To move from local knowledge to programmatic action was still a challenge, and this is where Design could play a critical role. Perhaps Design and Cultural Research and Public Policy really do fit together, as we had demonstrated to one another in our working group.”

He goes onto to answer the question of why ethnography and design haven’t always been natural partners (which I was wondering). He talks about ethnography once used for governance in discovering new lands (outdated, imperialistic) to eventually being relegated to academia, while design came out of the industrial revolution and was about adjusting to the industrialized mechanized world but now we’re reindividuating in our decentralized world – and that’s where ethnography steps back in. He goes on to create a great mental image of the loop of these two disciplines and how they can augment and further each others goals: “the sum of Design and Anthropology can be plotted as a line that courses back and forth without creating an area, a polygon, corresponding to new value” The article is fantastic, read it here. There is, as underpinning to his argument on joining ethnographers with designers, one non-essential logic that I disagree with personally, and that is those performing cultural exploration are shy and look backward, are not forward thinking, as opposed to designers who are people who think of what could be (hence the wobbling zig zag shape of their interaction). Maybe in academia, again, a purist making notes in the wild is only looking at what is, but personally, I’m propelled to look at cultural nuance specifically because of my inner futurist’s desire to see the edge of what could be (out there in kernel form).

Why Ethnography (originally published in Comunicas Magazine)

Chauncey Zalkin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:58:43 +0000

In the fall I presented an ethnography seminar in Barcelona in partnership with a company called Brain Ventures. The audience was a lively assortment of marketing professionals. During the session, I relayed stories of media-producing eleven year olds, rap industry insiders who vehemently denied the validity of a client’s research, and stuffed animal nostalgia that offered insight into grown up identity. It was a mixed bag to say the least. But that’s what I do; I wade through the messy reality of contemporary life in order to find the nuances that offer opportunity and change.

Ethnography comes from anthropology. It’s a style of research writing where the author privileges discovery over verification and provides a deliverable that takes the viewer on a journey instead of presenting the client with one big rational conclusion. Counter to traditional market research protocol, subjectivity and flexibility is crucial to the value of this kind of work..

My own history with ethnography emerged quite by accident. In 1999 after getting a degree in cultural studies from the New School with a thesis on Vogue Magazine and a few editorial jobs, I started a pre-blog era website called Girlonthestreet.com where I published an obsessive list of the deals swarming around the tech and media sector and combined those with observations from the streets of New York. I was driven by a desire to connect the dots. Over time I amassed a following of likeminded creative young entrepreneurial women and a social network. Marketing firms and ad agencies caught on. They hired me to dig for insights and translate them into business terms. Eventually I became an account planner at ad agencies and while I gained the discipline to transform fresh insights into strategic positioning, it was a struggle to get the powers-that-be to give much credence to my immersive approach.

It’s a tough sell, proselytizing free flowing research methods when the marketing department needs numbers, measurement, and proof; but that is precisely why ethnography is a discipline that serves marketing, development, and operations, all at the same time -and is a case for why these areas should work more closely together. Discovery leads to insights. Insights lead to action and measurable testing – much easier to do in small doses in today’s manufacturing and communications environment – and in the end, all parties from the consumer to the board of directors, can gain clarity and renewed focus.

The key three principles of this type of research, boiled down, are: become a participant; be aware of your own subjectivity; listen without prejudice.

The benefit of unfiltered observation is that you can see things that people are simply unable to tell you about their behavior. For instance, someone in a focus group might tell you they sit down with a salad every day at noon but spend time with them, and before you know it they’re wrist-deep in a bag of french fries exiting a McDonalds drive through window. When people get comfortable, they start to be themselves. They might intend to eat a sit-down meal every day and really think that’s what they do but the reality could be far different. This insight might lead you to create a product like the guys at Jamba Juice did – a healthy delicious smoothie with energy boosters available at convenient, hip, and clean Jamba Juice locations all over the U.S. It’s a lunch you can have in transit or at your desk. Or you could create a food storage system with a chilled component, or compact healthy meals to eat on the go, and so on. Ethnography is a way to find out how people really live with existing products. Most often products have a second life not intended by the manufacturer. Keep your eyes open for discoveries. Then, and only then is it really legitimate for you to start to develop your theories and test them.

So how do we get there? How do we get inside? First you find the right people. Be as strategic about this process as any other. Not just any subject will do. Small samples are encouraged. It’s quality and depth, not quantity and breadth, that count. Find insiders who are articulate, dynamic, and demonstrative. You can find them through natural networks, through recruitment companies who will pinpoint the people leading purchases and cultural shifts, or through an ethnographer who has the resources to do both.

After you’ve found your group, open your mind and be humble. You’d be surprised how much people want to share with you if you show sincere curiosity and respect for differences. An ethnographer goes in one end somewhat blank and come out the other end full of new information.

When you embark on ethnography, make sure you are recording not only your observations, but also your changing thoughts and feelings. An ethnographer should be part of the research and be transformed by it. For a loungewear brand targeted to young women and older teens, I researched the role of stuffed animals because it tied into the iconography of the brand. I gathered a group of young trendsetters and opened up the exploration. What emerged was an interesting connection between childhood nostalgia and young adult romance. I explored how cuteness becomes sensuality and what that meant for the equity of the brand. This led to rich storytelling opportunities that lent depth to the brand.

The purpose of ethnography is not to justify a preconception, nor is it to rationalize a company’s existence. If you try to push an agenda, it’s the waste of time. For a classic men’s fashion brand, a trip around the U.S. brought out the insight that your average ‘Joe’ between the ages of 28-35 working in middle management with traditional expectations for marriage and job advancement is just not comfortable with the amount of pressure being put on him to be fashionable too. We looked at how this could be an opportunity to relate to men, however uncomfortable it was to present to the client. The result was a campaign unlike any other men’s fashion campaign out there, one that used the vocabulary that was most natural for the group we spent time with.

We’ve experienced a sea change in the way we live. As our framework continues to splinter into finer threads of communication and stimuli, we have to look at the market as an ever-flowing continuum of give and take. We have to stop thinking ‘us’ and ‘them’. That old divide no longer exists. We have to look at our consumers as the people they are instead of as the bottom line or a demographic that will respond to a message. The social network universe is an ideal place to start.

Take a highly successful teen anti-tobacco campaign for example. It had been awhile since they’d done any teen research and they weren’t sure they really needed to. Psychologically, teens are not that different decade after decade. But culturally, they absolutely are. I picked ten teens from around the U.S., boys and girls from 11 to 17 years of age. I asked the kids to keep a daily diary of all of their media and technology activities for one week and to observe two of their friends in the process.

What I got back was robust, revelatory, and visually rich material. First off, everyone was obviously technology obsessed. The sixteen and seventeen year olds sent a lot of texts, downloaded a lot of music, and put pictures on Facebook. But it became clear that the younger kids were the most active producers of digital content. The thirteen year old skipped school and pretended he was sick so he could keep making his “Dragonball Z fan video”. He wrote: “At my grandmothers, saw two movies and fell asleep early. It’s so boring being away from my computer. I can’t wait to go home and finish the video.” Meanwhile, the eleven year old handed in a multimedia DVD of her life, complete with a music soundtrack. These younger kids and their friends were the most at ease with the tools of technology and the least passive. The boundary between producers and consumers was blurring and it was evident in just the span of one teen generation. That was 2005.

The bottom line is that you need to be standing next to your consumer serving their needs, not selling them smoke and mirrors. The future is theirs and they are just too smart for that. After all, they’re you!

As an ethnographer, my desire is to work more and more on the client themselves, opening them up to the insights within their own company, their products, their services, the quality of life at the office, and day to day operations. Together with immersive consumer research, companies are simply more prepared for the future. If you want to learn more, please contact me at chaunceyzalkin@gmail.com and visit me at www.whatwomenmake.com where I focus on ethnography, design, and female entrepreneurship.

—————–

from the article I authored published in Comunicas the magazine of Spain’s leading financial paper, Expansion and this year’s winner of the Gold Quill.

-Chauncey Zalkin

Want to see the whole article easily but you don’t subscribe to Spain’s financial paper, Here it is.

Post Adverpocalypse: Agents & Facilitators in a New Era

Chauncey Zalkin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:20:58 +0000

How can people who’ve honed their skills with passion and vision contribute to the next phase of humanity instead of say, make another KFC ad? What we do now will determine our future.

History is not a continuum. Now’s a time when history is showing its joints and bending. But which way?

I read this post on BBHLabs and I think a lot of people agree that ad agencies are no longer necessary but we’re all afraid because we’ll all be out of work (well I haven’t been at an ad agency since 2006 but they are still a big part of my life) if we admit that everything we’re doing now can not be stuffed under the umbrella of ad agency. Agency means facilitator. We need a collective of people that work together to facilitate, mediate when companies fall into a rut, or find they have a problem they can’t solve internally. Managers of development. Managers of story. Managers of communication. That is not exactly an advertisement agency. Ads are great (for the sake of argument). Maybe we’ll always have ads. And there will be teams that make them. But I can imagine ad-making being more what it was in the old days: A copy guy and a designer type tweaking away at the typeface and the design of the thing, some ad-tastic team making more of those funny clever Superbowl ads. Ha ha, what a gas! But those guys come later. Waaay later in the process. So lets put ‘ads’ over there for now.

So lets look at what agencies have tried to do the last few years. They’ve tried to pretend they are movie producers, product designers, art curators, publicists, gurus of the future, pundits, yet they still maintain a media buying dept, a media planning department, a ‘creative’ department focusing on those awards, brand planners ad testing and gluing up those research holes — and the account people tap tap tapping away at their cubicles. I think it’s pretty bombastic to claim to do it all and yet still be an AD agency. It’s hard to continue along a path where part of your job is to convince the client they don’t know their business yet you don’t really take the time to step into their shoes in any real way and think beyond the old model. Most ad agencies ARE the old model but they pretend not to be. How can they tell their client to do something that they’re not even doing themselves: REALLY getting their grubby fingers off the old rule book and throwing that thing out.

Based on what I’ve done when I have felt most useful at an agency (when I’ve convinced management to let me do my thing), this is what I imagine we could do if we were to start fresh. It would go something like this:

Workshop the client. Act as therapist, teacher, nurturer. Facilitate them telling YOU about the company they work for. Clock in real hours understanding what it’s like to be in THEIR skin and go to work every day. Why do they do what they do? Have they thought about it? Maybe yes, maybe no.
Stimulate the clients imagination. The VP of sales, the receptionist, the sales team, the CFO, the CEO, the guy or gal who does payroll, the brand manager, the engineers, the guys in operations, shipping, you get the picture, get people from top, bottom, side to side to come in and roll up their sleeves in smallish groups cutting through hierarchy. Be disarming. Take the corporate speak out of the picture. Find out whats under the surface. Do an ethnography on THEM, the CLIENT. After all, its them that you are helping and one day you’ll be gone. You are not creating an ad for them, you are making their business better.
Consumer ethnography. Who’s their target? Great. Is that all? Are you sure? Is that really the target? The only target? Now that you’ve workshopped the hell out of the client, you probably can respond to this with authority. Now go out there and be a part of the target for your dear client and witness without prejudice how people think and behave surrounding the brand, the category (or categories), the lifestyle surrounding that category, and insights into culture that at first glance seem to have NOTHING to do with the category or the brand but are so important in society that they might be a part of the brand that you never before imagined. Like social networking. Like multitasking. When those were big surprises way back when. Go in without arrogance and see what you didn’t already know. Don’t assume because it makes an ass out of you and me.
Strategy Time. Well you’ve been doing it all along, haven’t you if you’ve been THIS involved and this much not a bullshit artist. You now know: your client is this. Your consumer is that. Throw out the rule book that says you have to write a unique selling proposition, that big idea one sentence thing that will determine the 360 approach of the brand blah blah blah. Those are for stable cultures and certain times. THIS IS NOT ONE OF THEM. Does your mom have a unique selling proposition? Does your best friend? Brand is the word for the public image of a company. The associations. These associations are part intangible, emotional and part functional. The company is the main thing here; What does it do for people. Why do they buy it. Why do they need it. Why do they trust it. And once you determine that, have it chat away about the things its best at. Like a person. Dear Brand: be yourself. Know who you want to talk to about it and be articulate! Be fun. Be engaging. But don’t be so fixed and immutable for crissakes.
Make. I think you have to be an entrepreneur to be doing this job now. Not just a spin doctor. You have to be a problem solver because superfluous businesses are liable to die. You’ve sussed out the problem, challenge, opportunity. And since you’re not an ad agency, the solution could be to make a new product or service, a movie, get into a different business that nobody ever thought of. One that fits strategically. One that works operationally. One that solves other company problems and considers revenue, not just the consulting fee you pocket until the next pitch. A manager to manage the creative capital and developmental aspect of a business in conjunction with operations, management, sales, and distribution. (or similar, of course, depending on the business we’re talking about).
Chat away. What am I doing? I’m blogging. A few minutes ago, I was tweeting. A few minutes before that I was in the office kitchen brainstorming. Earlier today I was on the phone with the U.K. Yesterday I was on Huffington Post commenting. This morning I was texting, Facebooking, and emailing an invitation to Mexican night at my house. And I was checking out the FB groups I’ve recently joined. My boyfriend, meanwhile, is making a movie about his experience in Barcelona and he’s climbing over fences to take pictures of areas people don’t normally get to see. He’s a location scout. I am (he is, you are) communicating, spreading, reading, participating, commenting. The company you work with needs to all of that too. All products are content and content is ever flowing. Chat away. Strategically.
Revise, repeat. A woman’s work is never done. And a brand is never done. An agency with the smorgasbord of stories and storytelling techniques at its fingertips, or wily enough to hunt them down, is what a company needs as an advocate to help them find the right venue for communicating and the right products and services to offer.

-Chauncey Zalkin

Ethnography: Immersive, Dynamic, and Unscripted

Chauncey Zalkin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:58:40 +0000

Image by Swedish Illustrator, Linn Olofsdotter

Some of you are curious about the foundation of what I do aside from my passion for innovation and writing about women who create. I’m an ethnographer. I was an ethnographer long before I even knew the term. When I ended up in advertising, I would get frustrated with highly regimented approaches to understanding consumers (people basically, consumers makes me think of lever pulling and manipulation which I am dead set against).

I have always approached insights and strategy/concept building with honest, open curiousity and interest – and I’d like to think a strong dose of savvy from weaving in and out of different social and cultural situations. I studied Cultural Studies and Semiotics in school and then attended the school of life where I set out to find the patterns and rhythms of New York City’s inhabitants. Then I went deeper. And I went broader as I worked with diverse clients with subtle nuances and micro-cultures that required abandoning all preconceptions. (and moved country. twice.)

The basic questions that make this work worthwhile are: What do people want and need? How can we make manifest products and services that will make lives better/easier/more pleasant/more connected? How can we bring ideas and the narrative of business’ social role to life in ways that matter and are sustainable? How can we add instead of take away, drain, deplete? And how can we surprise?

I gave a one day workshop hosted by a consulting firm in Barcelona called Brain Ventures. Antonio Monerris, the partner in the firm who approached me about the project, is just one of those people on this earth that keeps growing, evolving, learning, always with an open mind and an eye on the future. Among those present were representatives from Pan Rico (bread), Gallina Blanca (soups), and Chup Chups (candy). Here’s the gist of the presentation part.

Ethno One Day Workshop

View more documents from Chauncey Zalkin.

‘Ethno day’ can also work in two to three day workshops where we roll up our sleeves and go deep into your brand/product/service/business model – not just looking at the consumers but the folks that make up your company. That’s where the real work begins.

If’ you’d like to know more, contact me and check out the ‘about’ section. Here’s the slide show from the Ethno One Day Workshop. Enjoy!

Vision of the Future Part II: Sustainability is?

Chauncey Zalkin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 07:26:23 +0000

Dr Alan Knight outlined his 10 key points of focus for a sustainable lifestyle at the Goodenough Conference in July 09 as the following and I’d like to use it as a jumping off point for comment:

1)    I manage my own self esteem and health (What? Not being dictated to by a Lifetime Television for Women, Oprah, or Vogue? Not being overmedicated by my doctor. No miracle cream to make my marriage work? I can read and educate myself on illness, preventative medicine, exercise, and health? I can use my family and my inner strength as a compass to what is right for me, and not the next door neighbors Mercedes or my co-workers 500 euro heels? Hmmm.)
2)    I live within my own finance limits (triple star *** Living in continental Europe instead of the U.S., in France specifically, I learned how hard it is to get true credit cards. They are so closely tied to the actual money in the bank. That makes it tough to start businesses but people live in reality. They vacation in reality. They don’t put on completely false lives for the public with leased cars and McMansions because they can’t. It forces people to be more accountable. It’s less confusing and it creates less consumer anxiety. A rose is a rose is a rose. Now isn’t that refreshing.)
3)    The products I buy help local and international trade (This is a little vague to me. Of course the products you buy will “help trade”. What does this mean? ‘What kind of trade do you want to support’ is really the question. Buying with your values. Buying based on accountability. The practices of the company you are buying from. How do we do that effectively? More transparency. More ways to clearly see the records of the big brands, to see their operations flow. Where are their factories? How do they treat their employees? What are their quality standards? Who is in their top management and what are their personal records? No judgments, avoid rampant subjectivity, just the facts ma’am.)
4)    I only use clean and renewable energy (As an individual consumer, this is tough and I don’t know enough to decide. How many of us do? This seems a policy level issue. And again, an issue of education, transparency, clear choices offered to the customer without using guilt marketing. Please, no guilt marketing.)
5)    I am active in a vibrant community (In our solitude oriented technology driven lives, we crave togetherness, finding common ground with others, likeminded values, wholesome activity, nature, travel, peace, clean spaces, good services, easy interaction. This is huge and companies that make this happen or create the right environments to facilitate positive interaction will be the big winners. We like brands. We like business. Especially when business helps us to be a better, healthier, progressive, synergistic people and society.)
6)    I talk with, not at, people (YES. My cause celebre as an ethnographer. I never wanted to use women as a marketing tool, to learn how to sell them more soda and tampons. I want to work together to provide what we need and represent authentically.)
7)    I have found the right balance between technology, simplicity and stewardship (eloquent and right on the money, four stars ****)
8)    My political leaders have courage (Obama, and don’t forget freer press. The unpopular (but not sensationalist or divisive) opinion. See Noam Chomsky.)
9)    I use much less stuff (see my last post. this is took me the past three years living in France and Spain. Breaking away from shopping as filling a void. Shopping as something you need to do, a thing to get done, an accomplishment. Success in having more. Move house enough times and you realize its mental baggage to have too much. Find what is special. Get what you need. Eliminate the rest.)
10) There is a New Economics – a new form of growth aligned to nature. (Nothing is ever as beautiful as it is in unspoiled nature. Everything else is a striving toward the original.)

Ten points as originally Reported by Olivia Sprinkel on the Sustainability Forum.

Good. It needs definition. We need definitions constantly defined and refined for this wildly viral buzzword.

-Chauncey Zalkin

Two Kinds of Stories: The Page and The Screen

Chauncey Zalkin — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 10:11:12 +0000

I’m been working on a long, big, involved writing project since January 2007. And not one that can be done via tweets, posts, or powerpoint but instead in chapters employing reams and reams of paper crisscrossed into piles and filed with ink markings.

I started in Paris and two years later ended up in Barcelona in a markedly less charged, less anxious environment than New York. I grew my hair long, stopped getting highlights. I stopped wearing high heels and stopped shopping on Saturdays. (Shopping-as-hobby in euros and without a corporate paycheck, in a markedly less consumerist environment, feels absurd). I live in an ancient building with uneven stairs. Wearing heels would be impractical to say the least. . Instead, I’ve become quite the chefette. Fresh fish at Boqueria (and later Santa Caterina market) has led me to Google searches with alarming news of overfishing and the politics beyond my dinner table. Yikes.

But I left to cut the chatter out. To smell the sea and know thy butcher. The longer piece of writing is still not done (now it is!) but it is a living breathing thing that I will sorely miss when it is done. It’s what I do mornings. It’s my real and tangible life.

Afternoons, now back in the drink of digital and work life in the form of What Women Make and planning curriculum for teaching and workshops in branding and ethnography for the fall (done!), I am swimming deeper into digital space, a place where I find no up, down, or center, just endless self-perpetuating time. Time to infinity if you let it. As part of this, I have nestled myself deep in Twitter-land.

Sitting here in Barcelona, thinking about one of my characters, I scribbled in my notes, ‘are we all building concentric circles and burying ourselves in the middle of them?’

I began my dive into Twitter by looking for women makers online and swimming down that path I ended up finding scores upon scores of tech heroines – connectors, doers, investors, travelers, oracles – and I’m amazed at the female talent, passion, and community that’s showing it’s face.

I haven’t done that much writing outside my book ever since I started working on it but I realized this question has nothing to do with my book and everything to do with my digital observations. We are blowing bubbles of concentric circles every time we add a twitter connection. We float in our bubbles and we seek out: The Conference. Conferences seem to be a crucial oxygen seeking mission in all this. We come up for air there. After all, people want to speak, laugh, see one another, share the same carpet.

After the conference, we all go home, follow one another on twitter and go on building our concentric circles. But hopefully that’s not all.

How often do our circles land in tangibles?

When do they form intersecting points that lead to applications, products, services, marriages, babies, and all that good stuff?

They do, I know they do, but I’m interested in those stories. The ones grafted on the page of social networking that come alive in physical space.

I want even the physical space tinkerers or artisans to have a foot in both without compromising their craft.

I love this rapid evolution. As it changes life itself, I’m pleased with the slippery easy online glide. I remember when it was so much more cumbersome.

I think of what it can and will look like – the synergistic evolution going on in the ever widening half of our life that is lived online also happening in equal measure in physical space. To me, that is the ultimate and most critical pursuit.

-Chauncey Zalkin

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