Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients
Descriptions of standard user research methods in plain english.
Zombieism is not so much a state of being as a set of practices and cultural scripts. It is not that one is a zombie but that one does being a zombie such that zombieism is created and enacted through interaction. Even if one is “objectively” a mindless animated corpse, one cannot really be said to be fulfilling one’s cultural role as a zombie unless one shuffles across the landscape in search of brains.
Gabriel Rossman – Towards a sociology of living death
Lucha libre is thus constructed around the public secret of the fixed ending. Yet the secret of the fixed ending is only one of a number of back secrets, of stories told and stories hidden, of secrets revealed to conceal still others. The secrecy of the fix stands for a series of dissimulations, for the mystery that animates the genre.
Heather Levi – The World of Lucha Libre – Trade secrets and revelations
While all meetings have an officially scripted agenda, their tacit agenda is power. Meetings establish who is in charge. When someone calls a meeting, he or she is asserting authority over those who are called on to attend. Meetings are exclusive and closed. In most corporations, who gets invited to a meeting—and who does not—sends a signal about who’s “in the loop”. Meetings are a form of social grooming inside organizations. Meetings impose vertical authority. They establish status hierarchies. [...] When power is diffused and distributed more democratically, meetings are no longer necessary. But corporations are not democracies.
Matthew Fraser – Enterprise 2.0: Wiki While You Work
Every social situation in which individuals are voluntarily taking part – sometimes they might also be coerced to do so by vocalized or non-vocalized social regulations, sanctions or force – leads to the formation of a social structure. Even in short everyday interactions, sharing an elevator for example, these mechanisms are visible.
Of course, one could argue that the trained eye of a sociologist might only see what it wants to see. In these cases, the examples have to be extraordinary, like pilots and other airport personnel building mobile colonies on airport parking lots. They even have a mayor, problems with prostitution and unsolicited residents.
Now if that isn’t convincing, i don’t know what else is.
On a related note to my post from yesterday, Step Two Designs has a short overview on how to use an established qualitative approach from the Social sciences, more precisely interviews, when conducting an intranet needs analysis.