Workshop
Insights from Onlife: How to make sense of digital behaviors with digital ethnography and netnography
Daria Cantù, Isabel Farina & Mattia Della Libera
A unique opportunity to understand why and how digital ethnography and netnography can make a
difference in your design process, thanks to hands-on activities and a theoretical foundation.
Ethnography in context is central for user research and human-centered design, but sometimes the physical context is hard to reach due to limited resources (i.e. budget, multi-country research). In other cases, digital tools allow researchers to better reach and engage with users (specific examples will be presented during the workshop).
Tools and methods to execute remote research have been designed and used since the early 2000s, but in the last decade new research trajectories have opened due to the worldwide adoption of smartphones and social media.
The concepts of digital ethnography and netnography have the potential to enlarge research horizons. Digital ethnography is an umbrella term comprising both research in digital spaces, in which part of people’s daily lives now takes place, and new research methods that take advantage of the digital environment. Design methods such as cultural probes can now also be re-thought through the mediation and production of media data.
Netnography is the in-depth observation of user behaviors and conversations in digital spaces (Facebook groups, forums, blogs, etc…) without a direct interaction with them. As people’s lives increasingly transcend the physical environment, online spaces have become the environments where decision-making, knowledge acquisition, and interpersonal interaction takes place and these spaces can be studied and explored with qualitative methods.
While digital research can shorten the distance between designer and user, and directly produce data and materials that lead to meaningful insights (video diaries, audio, photos, virtual tours, it also has its limits and ethical implications that have to be taken into account when considering these tools compared to the more traditional in-context ethnography.
By joining a workshop on digital ethnography you will discover its different applications and explore how the methodology can bring value to your design practice.
Workshop tickets are sold separately from other conference events.
Outline
The workshop proposes a practice-based journey to its participants that will allow them to better assess the implication of applying digital ethnography and netnography in the design process.
The session starts with a theoretical introduction, presenting case studies in fields such as healthcare, consumer goods and museum experiences, conducted for leading international companies. Then the participants are asked to experiment first-hand with netnography and to analyze the digital ethnography materials provided on the same topic. Each group will elaborate further on the findings and present the results of their research. The workshop will conclude with a collective discussion on the implication of the methods on the results achieved.
Target audience
UX designers, Service Designers, Design Researchers, Anthropologists, Innovation Managers, Corporate Innovation Decision Makers, Mid-Career Professionals.
About the speakers
Daria Cantù
I’m a Service Design Lead at Experientia s.r.l. and hold a Ph.D. in Design from Politecnico di Milano.
In my position I work in different sectors, such as healthcare, finance and consumer goods. Recently, I have led the UX research team in eliciting user requirements for technology adoption in the home care context for the EU-funded project CANP, and I carried out contextual research and led a service design process for a major hospital in the south of Italy, involving five clinics and the organization governance.
In the past I worked for 7 years as a research fellow in the Polimi DESIS Lab, a university- based research center working on design for social innovation and sustainability, and my Ph.D. work focused on participatory approaches and co-design methods for designing services.
I have been involved in several national and international service design research projects and teaching activities, traveling in Europe, the United States and Africa. I have taught at the Politecnico di Milano School of Design and School of Architecture and IES Abroad Milano.
Isabel Farina
I’m a medical anthropologist with an MA in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology from the University of Turin. My work is based on a multidisciplinary approach, built on my expertise in HealthCare, having earned an MA in Healthcare Systems and Integrated Medicine at Milano-Bicocca University where I completed a thesis on Social Robotics and Technology for Humanization in healthcare environments and an MA in Narrative Medicine at ISTUD Milan.
At Experientia I’m the Research Lead for the Health Business Unit and I work mainly on patient journey mapping, grounding design processes on ethnography, digital ethnography and experimenting with design research methods using narrative medicine and anthropological theory.
In the past I worked as a consultant for DEAR Onlus at the Pediatric Hospital Regina Margherita in Turin in technological laboratories for hospitalized cancer patients. I have also worked as a project manager assistant for Arduino and Maker Faire Rome 2017.
Mattia Della Libera
I have a master's degree in Relational Design from Abadir, a master’s degree in Product and Services for Sustainability from Politecnico di Torino and a bachelor's degree in Industrial Design from IUAV university, Venice. For the past three years I have been working for Experientia, both on user research and design projects. Before, I worked at Casa Jasmina (an Arduino project), experimenting with digital ethnography using Facebook Groups. One of my final university projects was “Social spiritualità”, a research on how small spiritual communities in Italy use social media to spread their creed. Another project was a theoretical proposal of visual language to visualize networks based on network structural properties. As a side project, I’m experimenting with how systemic approaches (systemic design, soft-system methodologies, systems thinking, system dynamics, etc.) can be integrated into the design process.