carsten knoch – essays + ideas

It’s December 29th, a Monday in the middle of the interregnum between Christmas and the new year, between work and… work.

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while: a critique of the widespread use of “personas” in design work, especially where it’s informed by qualitative research or what we generously call “ethnography” in business contexts.

… and just like that, another year is almost over.

Better late than never, here is my annual blog post listing my favourite new releases from 2023.

Our house.

On January 31, 2022, I gave a talk at the Ethnography Lab at the University of Toronto, about using “gamestorming” — a set of collaborative workshop techniques — for ethnographic data analysis.

Hand-drawn picture of a reindeer by “Cora” A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of the afternoon, someone enthusiastically rang our doorbell and then knocked several times.

I.

It’s the morning of Boxing Day, December 26, 2020, and Ontario has been back in full lock-down since midnight.

“Trump drinks bleach graffiti in Minnesota” courtesy of Lorie Shaull Creative Commons Sometimes, an irresistible writing prompt presents itself.

About two years ago, I wrote a post here describing a simple and cheap method of coding text documents such as interviews.

Instrument of Instruments, seen in a hotel lobby in Burlington ON I understand that most people are probably not as passionate about new recorded music as I am.

Immediately after I finished my MA in 2017, I felt driven to consider starting a PhD.

Johnny Clegg dancing, courtesy PeterTea (Flickr/Creative Commons), cropped Where did the time go?

2018 was another year full of outrageous distractions, the misconfigurations and abuses of the public sphere relentlessly encroaching on whatever space one tried to carve out for thinking, experiencing beauty or getting some rest.

Update February 2020: Since writing this blog post, I have updated the method described below to using a newer, more broadly compatible approach which works with all/most versions of Microsoft Office — and also on the Mac and Linux computers.

Starting this year, I will occasionally post lightly commented lists of books I’m currently reading.

Courtesy of Jennifer Johannesen via Instagram This year’s best music list comes in the middle of the Great Deep Freeze of 2017, where it’s apparently colder in Canada than at the North Pole.

Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, at two and a half hours, is neither light entertainment nor what most would think of as a seasonal movie.

Navigation by Martin Fisch Creative Commons via Flickr The following is an excerpt from the introduction to a forthcoming master’s thesis in anthropology which I am working on at the moment.