Workshops

What happens when a time-pressed researcher is confronted with an intangible subject where observation is difficult and conversation barely scratches the surface? When faced with this challenge, workshop organizers have infused their research design with principles of Design. A focus on these principles has yielded an approach to games that can be used to better understand abstract topics when engaging with research participants.
Games become facilitation tools that give research participants tangible interaction and response nodes within the context of complex and non-rational spaces. Games can be central to creating researcher-participant interactions that are rich yet targeted while respecting time constraints of a research environment. Workshop participants will learn to apply the design principle of tangibility to research methodologies and walk away with fundamental techniques for gathering data in new ways.

Traditional text-based reports are overwhelming to digest and frequently end up buried on a desk. In this workshop we walk attendees through the modeling process, creating models from the raw data that comes from qualitative research. We will start with example raw data or comments from users and work from the bottom up to build a model. The workshop will expose participants to each step in this structured process. By completing the modeling process first-hand, participants will be well-equipped to return to their respective practices with new tools and techniques for rigorously synthesizing and modeling data that focuses on what's important.

As our worlds become more connected, we have both increasing opportunity and obligation to design experiences that recognize individuals in their context that serve to continuously improve ourselves and our environment. Experience Mapping provides a means to surface implicit and tacit information vital to effective design of experiences.

Participants in this workshop will work with a variety of "lenses" vital to designing meaningful experiences: storytelling, magic, games and improvisation. Participants will employ these lenses leveraging a design process that focuses on both goals and outcomes.

How might we create futures for the local communities? When we think of reviving the ever-shrinking local communities, we tend to focus onto understanding the issues and features of each community one at a time. However, we see opportunities in connecting multiple ‘locals’, each of which could help stimulate one another and to identify new opportunities. Based on series of fieldwork and workshops that took place in the locals of Italy and Japan, participants of this workshop will learn how they could utilize their skillset in ethnography and organize cross-local workshops to identify new opportunities for locals.

Come play with us… seriously. This session is for researchers and designers interested in using game design to model and explore services and other social systems. Through a simple process of rapid game development, participants will create conditions for decision-making and other emergent behavior, challenge assumptions surrounding control of the design process, and experience the power of spontaneous transformation and feedback. We’ll discuss topics like meta-design, improvisation, tangible cues, and game mechanics. Participants will leave with a set of principles and techniques they can apply to generative research or collaborative design sessions with users, clients, or internal teams.

This workshop seeks to provide a primer “how-to-edit-and-share-video” intended for ethnographic researchers who wish to edit their own footage as part of their final deliverable to corporate audiences. We will focus on the key tool-kit skills required for ethnographers. This workshop is intended for absolute beginners, moderately-skilled editors, and anyone who wants to compare the leading editing systems and distribution platforms. Hands-on instruction will be provided for: Final Cut Pro 7 & X, Adobe Premier, Avid, free on-line software platforms, and DIY solutions including camera-to-smartphone editing. As a bonus, participants are invited to borrow several steadicam rigs and cameras and bring them out to the streets of Savannah.