Am quite excited that we’ve finally launched this project! In short, it is a year long research and immersion program with 12-21 year olds in India. We’re really looking for 5-6 sponsors - to help kick it off the ground – personally I believe that one of the key benefits (apart from the actual understanding and immersions with kids and youth) is that Clients from different non-competing industries will go on this journey together and learn from each others rich and varied experiences too.
More details and the brochure available for download here – bit.ly/convokids
Tagged as:
convo,
convokids,
Ethnography,
immersions,
India,
kids india,
learning journey,
longitudinal ethnography,
qualitative research,
research,
youth,
youth india
Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina
- How we’ve changed! User experiences in reverse – mobile to desktop – Apple Pushes the Desktop Toward a Mobile Experience – Apple isn't the only company merging the experience of using the desktop with that of smaller devices. Microsoft is taking things even further. The next generation of their PC operating system, Windows 8, borrows heavily from mobile design and user experience concepts. It features a touch-friendly UI, a new breed of HTML5-driven applications and a relatively seamless user experience between smartphones, tablets and the desktops.
- troubled
. India’s economy: Slip-sliding away | The Economist – EXPECTATIONS for India’s economic growth rate have been sliding inexorably. In the early spring there was still heady talk about 9-10% being the new natural rate of expansion, a trajectory which if maintained would make the country an economic superpower in a couple of decades. Now things look very different. The latest GDP growth figure slipped to 6.9% and industrial production numbers just released, on December 12th, showed a decline of 5.1% compared with the previous period, a miserable state of affairs. The slump looks broadly based, from mining to capital goods, and in severity compares with that experienced at the height of the financial crisis, in February 2009, when a drop of 7.2% took place. Bombast is turning to panic.
Tagged as:
app store,
apple,
apps,
computing,
economy,
GDP,
India,
mac os x,
Mobile,
recession
Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina
- @sumants i love the "collective art" expression! The CST Flash Mob in Mumbai – but why? | Beast Of Traal.com – Another tweet response – from Sumant Srinivasan was more pragmatic and made sense to me – collective art. Yes, I quite buy the ‘collective art’ argument. It’s just that I’m not exposed to such philanthropic collective art to make people happy in India besides Lok Sabha TV that shows parliamentarians behave like kids.
So, yes – it is a wonderful precedent that there are people like this in India who spend so much time, effort and money in creating collective art to make other people happy with only YouTube views as return on time/money invested. To be clear, I’m not deriding this effort – it is a damn good effort and the final video to communicate the effort is superbly produced and edited – lot of little nuances like people’s surprised expressions have been captured beautifully!
Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina
- @sumants i love the "collective art" expression! The CST Flash Mob in Mumbai – but why? | Beast Of Traal.com – Another tweet response – from Sumant Srinivasan was more pragmatic and made sense to me – collective art. Yes, I quite buy the ‘collective art’ argument. It’s just that I’m not exposed to such philanthropic collective art to make people happy in India besides Lok Sabha TV that shows parliamentarians behave like kids.
So, yes – it is a wonderful precedent that there are people like this in India who spend so much time, effort and money in creating collective art to make other people happy with only YouTube views as return on time/money invested. To be clear, I’m not deriding this effort – it is a damn good effort and the final video to communicate the effort is superbly produced and edited – lot of little nuances like people’s surprised expressions have been captured beautifully!
Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina
- A Case for Why Words Matter | Ad and Marketing Book [via @ Reviews – Advertising Age – QUOTE: "Mr. Shapiro's shift in nomenclature from the idea of customers — that is, buyers — to users is fundamentally valuable for two reasons. First, user is, frankly, more of a digital term, as opposed to a consumer-packaged-goods term. And CPG language has dominated the marketing vocabulary for decades. People use Google, Twitter and Facebook — they aren't customers of them. Mr. Shapiro's book is another signal of the cultural shift towards the digital in everything. We're no longer applying CPG terms to digital entities in order to understand them. We're applying digital terms to the CPG world, so that it functions better in the new reality.
The second reason this is fundamentally valuable is it identifies a deeper kind of transaction: the word customer defines the relationship purely in the transactional terms of buying and selling. But buying does not solve the buyer's problem. They have to become a customer, so that they can then become a user."
- Facebook Study: It’s a Small(er) World After All | Epicenter | Wired.com – The concept of a tightly knit, interconnected world — one where an individual’s connection with another is within six degrees of separation — has been around for nearly half a century. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram published his findings in 1967, and has been a standby of sociology and pop culture alike ever since.
It comes as little surprise, then, that the rise of social networks over the past decade has brought us even closer together. Facebook released two studies of its social graph on Tuesday, which conclude that we Facebookers are closer to one another than we thought.
In collaboration with academic researchers at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Facebook’s study found that instead of the average of six degrees of separation between each of us, Facebook users are separated by an average of four degrees.
Tagged as:
advertising,
Consumer,
customer,
facebook,
martin bihl,
motivation,
research,
six degrees of separation,
social psychology,
target audience,
user
Updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina
- Ethnography Matters – Discovered a good new blog on Ethnographers and Ethnography. From the about page:
"We came together to start this blog because we believe that ethnographic research — with its focus on human experiences in context — is critical for countering the trend towards users as numbers, as digits, as data and as markets. In the push to scale technologies globally, technological talk often focuses on the production and consumption of technological goods — There are Users, Makers, and Artifacts — and very little in between. We believe in the in between. This blog will be a place for conversation between academic and applied ethnography, for listening to and thinking about people’s stories, and for analysis and theory focused on the social patterns and contexts of technological (re)use, rejection and (re)construction.
Tagged as:
anthropology,
Ethnography,
research,
triciawang
3 random gems from my wise maid this morning.:
Gem 1: We were discussing an imminent death in one of the TV soaps. She says: “People die only when they get a better role & more money. Wish that happened in real life”! Karma redefined?
Gem 2: [[Warning: this is a graphic one engaging all your senses!]]. She burps really loudly. Full throated. I say: Try keeping your mouth closed? She says: “You don’t understand – if you burp with your mouth open and let it out with a large sound, it lightens your stomach and is worth it. Otherwise why burp?”
Aside: As a child, I remember my Hindi tuition teacher who would burp right after drinking tea my mum served him. Burping loudly each time. I once asked him why he did that and he said it is to say “thank you”. Indian culture!
Gem 3: She is making me a nice spicy paste for fish. We’re chattering away. She asks me when my “gori” friend (“white” friend) is coming to stay again. Comments that my “gori” friend would find the masalas too spicy. And then comes up with this gem: “You know didi, they are so white because they eat so much butter and cheese and not enough spice”
My maid….she keeps me real. And is my number one in-home, real-time, living ethnography project!
Some of her earlier Gems:
On the Walk n Talk Idea Cellular ad: “should be banned!” tells me she has seen people fall off local train while talking on cellphone
Another time, she asks “are newsreaders on TV more intelligent & better educated than you, didi?” Her logic; they must be because they’re on TV and I am not 
Then this one: “pple r saying obama is going to buy India. he’s rich & owns america. what will happen to congress/shiv sena?”
And this, I will never forget.
Tagged as:
Indian Culture,
maid,
wisdom
