IMD Ethnography

You will be studying alongside designers and engineers in some of your modules, gaining insight into their working practices, environments and problems. In so doing you will acquire a deeper understanding of what they need from us. You will also have access to the latest technologies being used by design ethnographers and user researchers in industry; social networking tools can help us reach study participants we otherwise could not, digital media allow us to present our research results in creative and effective ways, and of course web technologies allow us to make our work visible to a wider range of design stakeholders than in the past. You will also be studying on a course that has been developed with the input and insight of our Industry Steering Group:

• Ken Anderson - Intel, USA
• Jeremy Ashley - Oracle, USA
  
• Martin Bontoft - consultant
• Daniela Busse - SAP Labs Palo Alto, USA
• Susan Dray - Dray Consulting, USA
• David Farquhar - 2in10, UK
  
• Richard Harper - Microsoft Research, UK
• Jonathan Hughes - Realtime Worlds, UK
  
• Graham Johnson - NCR, UK
• Rachel Jones - Instrata, UK
• Chris Rourke - User Vision, UK
• John Seton - BT, UK
• Richard Smith - BBC New Media, UK
• Nelle Steele - Microsoft Research, USA
• Dennis Wixon - Microsoft Games Studio, USA

Prospects for graduates exist, in research within the design, media, manufacturing, IT and service industries. Graduate roles might include: design ethnographer, user research specialist, design strategist, design researcher, user experience specialist, usability analyst, or market researcher.

The Masters in Design Ethnography is delivered jointly by the Schools of Design and Computing, and the teaching team embraces the full range of professionals graduates would be likely to encounter in industry. Their rich and varied research activities inform the course and provide access to the very latest advances in the fields that contribute to design ethnography and user research. It is this unique mix of environments that allows us to engage with some of the most pressing challenges that face design ethnographers and user researchers working in industry today - how can we make the outputs of our research accessible and actionable within a design context, how can design ethnography respond to the challenges of the open innovation and large scale user engagement models that are developing currently in industry, and how do we ensure that our work stays relevant in a rapidly changing commercial world?