Ethnography

[Carl Moggridge]

I start an ethnography course next month and I'm rattling my brains to come up with anything that is

1. Remotely interesting
2. Managable
3. Little red tape.

I suppose I'm being a slacker and asking for some advice. I'm really looking forward to the course but I have absolutely no experience in this area. What would you do if you could take a couple of days off and undertake a study?

I've only come up with one thought at the moment after recently pitching for a football club account. Something around the influence of pessimism and optimism among groups of fans.

[John Grant]

you could interview/track the online lives of members of plan.ning & explore how they are managing social and professional identities, relationships, community in a 2.0 clowd of twitter, meetups, blogs & so on...?
That's a real slacker option. All you have to do is hang out here & roundabouts :J

[Michael Johnston]

There is an easy one

Check out some people on twitter. I wrote a post on how we could use it for research

http://thingsdonotchangewechange.blogspot.com/

[Carl Moggridge]

Thanks for your thoughts. Despite it being the slacker option, I think it would be interesting. I need to go away and have a good think about what to do but I might well ask you for some more advice.

On another note it's going to be interesting to see how the community reacts to Russel Davies giving up the blog. I think he motivated many people to start one, myself included. Perhaps it isn't an interesting thing for planners to do anymore? Do interesting people find interesting things become uninteresting the more people find it interesting? If that makes sense.