Talks and Pubs

Industry Presentations

Cury, M., Whitworth, E. & Schuur, F. (2019). Hybrid Methodology: Informing the Development of Context-Aware Personal Computing and Assistive Technologies. EPIC, Providence. (download)

The not-too-distant future may bring more ubiquitous personal computing technologies seamlessly integrated into people's lives, with the potential to augment reality and support human cognition. For such technology to be truly assistive to people, it must be context-aware. Human experience of context is complex, and so the early development of this technology benefits from a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to research— what the authors call “hybrid methodology”—that combines (and challenges) the frameworks, approaches, and methods of machine learning, cognitive science, and anthropology. Hybrid methodology suggests new value ethnography can offer, but also new ways ethnographers should adapt their methodologies, deliverables, and ways of collaborating for impact in this space. This paper outlines a few of the data collection and analysis approaches emerging from hybrid methodology, and learnings about impact and team collaboration, that could be useful for applied ethnographers working on interdisciplinary projects and/or involved in the development of ubiquitous assistive technologies.

Whitworth, E. & Einhorn, F. (2018) Principles of Sense Augmentation for Shared Care. SXSW, Austin. 

Healthcare technologies typically focus on supporting the patient. Yet, we know that care is a social process in which caregivers have a central role. If technology could enable caregivers to share a patient’s sensory experience, how might that improve health care? In this talk, we’ll introduce design principles – inspired by the body hacking community’s use of sense augmentation – for enhancing existing healthcare products, as well as designing new products for fostering empathy in shared care.

Whitworth, E. & Mehus, S. (2017). Microethnography: a UX research method for next wave technology. Radical Research, Vancouver.

Now that we've entered the era of ubiquitous computing (predicted by Weiser and Seely Brown in 1996), UX research methods that focus on the interaction between an individual and a screen are no longer adequate. People interact with one another and with technology through a rich mixture of sensory modalities: visual, vocal, auditory, gestural, and haptic. Microethnographic techniques offer a means of describing and analyzing multimodal interactions among humans and their technological tools as they unfold in physical and digital spaces. In this talk we describe how to leverage microethnographic methods to inform the design of multimodal interactions for home and enterprise products by providing guidance for collection and analysis of multimedia data.

Academic Articles, Conferences, & Workshops

Feinberg, M., Broussard, R., & Whitworth, E. (2014). Framing a set: understanding the curatorial character of personal digital bibliographies. Interacting with Computers, 28(1), 102-124.

Whitworth, E. (2014) World-at-hand and World-in-sight: Communication Practices in Contemporary Hetero-technic Cooperative Work. In The 6th conference of ISGS. San Diego, CA, USA.

Richard Harper, Eno Thereska, Sian Lindley, Richard Banks, Phil Gosset, William Odom, Gavin Smyth, and Eryn Whitworth, (2013) What is a file?, in ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Whitworth, E. and Harper, R., (2013) “Fixity: Identity, Time and Durée on Facebook”. In Proc.Internet Research.

Garnett, A., Whitworth, E., and Fazzio, S. (2012) “Doctor Who meets Doctor Zhivago: Modeling Serendipity on Extreme Divergence”. Workshop on Design, Influence and Social Technologies at Computer Supported Collaborative Work.

Whitworth, E., (2012) “Documenting Design Process thru Autoethnography”. Workshop on supporting reflection in and on design processes at Designing Interactive Systems.

Feinberg, M., Geisler, G., Whitworth,E., and Clark, E., (2012) “Understanding Personal Digital Collections: An Interdisciplinary Exploration”. In Proc. Designing Interactive Systems.

Geisler, G., Willard, G., and Whitworth, E. (2010). "Crowd-sourcing the Indexing of Film and Television Media" In Proc. of American Society for Information Science and Technology.

Crow, J., Whitworth, E., Wonga, A., and Pendyala, S., (2010). “Timeline Interactive Multimedia Experience (TIME): On Location Access to Aggregate Event Information,” In Proc. of Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.

Whitworth, E. (2010). "Overcoming Obstacles to Sketching the Design of Collections with Rhetorical Purpose" Poster at American Society for Information Science and Technology.