Donna Lanclos

Re-imagining the users' experience: An ethnographic approach to web usability and space design

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the process and work undertaken by the library anthropologist and the Usability Task Force (UTF) for reconfiguring the librarys physical and virtual spaces to meet the educational needs and expectations of users, including students, faculty, and community patrons.Design/methodology/approach – Through formal usability studies and ethnographic research, the paper describes the process and work undertaken by the library anthropologist and the UTF.Findings – Through surveys, focus groups observation data were obtained about the current study and web habits of undergraduates and faculty.Originality/value – This paper presents an ethnographic approach to policy development and implementation to re‐orient the physical and virtual library environments at a large research library. Libraries and library administrators will find value in the policies established and processes outlined for the development of user‐centered learning spaces.

User-centered decision making: a new model for developing academic library services and systems

This longitudinal study tracks US and UK participants’ shifts in their motivations and forms of engagement with technology and information as they transition between four educational stages. The quantitative and qualitative methods, including ethnographic methods that devote individual attention to the subjects, yield a very rich data set enabling multiple methods of analysis. Instead of reporting general information-seeking habits and technology use, this study explores how the subjects get their information based on the context and situation of their needs during an extended period of time, identifying if and how their behaviors change.

Keeping an Eye Out: Real Time, Real World Modeling of Behavior in Health Care Settings

Imagine a health care facility that is able to track and understand the meaningful behaviors of the patients 24 h a day, 365 days a year, understanding individual variation in behavior over both the short and the long term. Now consider the needs of patients with Alzheimers, who typically have trouble with spatial and visual issues. They are sometimes unable to distinguish between a shadow cast on the floor and a step; they can also spend the entire day at the “front door” anticipating arrivals and departures. The families of these patients, to the best of their ability, want to be able to maintain surveillance and understand the changes in the behavior of their parents or spouses. Continuing on the work of the Computing in Place research group that includes faculty with specialties in architecture, computer vision, ubiquitous computing and anthropology, we propose in this paper a new paradigm for intelligent architectural settings. Health care settings, like most architecture, are generally conceptualized as a spatial volume containing human and technical elements. There is an implicit distinction between the active contents and the passive container. From our research group’s expertise in ethnography, we emphasize the importance of meaning to the understanding of behavior, to the idea of place as a construed setting: or, as Clifford Geertz describes it, the difference between “a wink and a blink”. Our new paradigm proposes the creation of “intelligent” architectural settings that capture such meaningful behavior in real time and generate knowledge that is useful both in the real world and in the evaluation of design revisions.