Pecha Kucha 2: Renewals of Culture

Our broken healthcare system badly needs the attention of the (UX) design (research) communities. But for these communities to have an impact, they must become better aware of: what about their typical work limits what they can achieve in fixing healthcare; the socio-cultural characteristics that offer substantive resistance to healthcare system change; what is happening in healthcare that might go part way to achieve the change needed; and what they can do differently to prepare themselves to have a substantive impact.

Cell phones have become ubiquitous devices that help us to navigate and interact with the city. We use them for almost everything from talking to emails to surfing the web. Through these interactions we leave behind geo-local ‘data trails’ that enable assumptions and observations about our behaviors with one another and our environment. In the context of the current hype around data this session explores questions around the use of digital data as new means for behavioral user observation and the impact of these methods on the field of user observation and field studies.

New configurations of work, promising great hope and great risk for society, are emerging. In sites such as Innocentive people can self-organize to solve vexing scientific challenges. The large-scale production of work can be managed rapidly through micro-task labor at sites such as Mechanical Turk. The broad spectrum of technical developments has the potential to liberate people from binding and hard to secure organizational bounds and threatens to prompt de-skilling and organizations’ abilities to sustain innovative practice.