Session 4: (Co)creation and (co)participation: multiple actors in the research

The fourth session questions how ethnography is produced through multiple voices. Coming from different disciplinary backgrounds including Design, Business and Software Engineering, researchers report on co‐creating and co‐participating in the formation of ideas, practices and outcomes. Once upon a time, ethnographic reports were stereotypically produced in the Malinowskian manner: a single outside researcher enters the location to subsequently reproduce and represent his vision of the reality in that place. In 2013, and probably for the majority of the attendees of EPIC, this is no longer the case. Ethnography no longer has just a single voice: There are multiple stakeholders, often directly involved in the research, even though they may hail from different disciplinary backgrounds ranging from Design, Business to Software Engineering. Moreover, these days we often have multiple researchers reporting several perspectives for the same project. Finally, often the ‘subjects’ of the research are becoming involved in data reporting, data analysis, and/or implementation of insights as well as consumers/recipients of and through ethnography. In this session we hear from 4 different groups on such co‐creative, and co‐participatory endeavours that cut across all the above developments in various situated projects, ranging from post‐disaster community rebuilding to intra‐company international employee relationships and from post‐operation cancer care to capturing the intangible of successful individuals in specific company roles.