Building a Social Science-Led User Research Practice

Panel Event: Building a Social Science-Led User Research Practice

Social scientists working as user researchers in multinational tech corporations such as Intel and Microsoft is well established. But what happens when you’re working in a company where the value of social science in user research isn’t properly understood?

Our three panellists will share their differing experiences of establishing a social science-led research practice, in particular how they convinced internal stakeholders of the benefits. As one of our panellists remarked, “it’s an ongoing process”.

Camilia (sociology), Eva (anthropology), and Rosie (health psychology) will share with us the highs and lows of:

• Setting up the foundations of an effective behavioural science practice.
• Setting up a UR practice in a corporation with many stakeholders, and resistance to change, and what you can do to ensure embedding of UR practices.
• Moving out and away from the UX agenda and bringing the anthropological scientific practice to the top of an organisation’s agenda.

Who should attend this panel event

While the event will be recorded, it’s worth attending live to ask questions, share your experience, and learn from your peers.

All registered attendees will be sent a copy of the event recording.

Panellists

Camilia Srairi
, User Researcher

Camilia is a sociologist located in Copenhagen working in the Digital Transformation department of a global biotech company. With the ambition to embed a user-centric mindset in the way digital solutions and services are developed, Camilia spends the majority of her time coaching or enabling her team, department and the organization in doing UR, testing different ways of showcasing the value of UR to find the most impactful ones, and challenging current ways of working, often pushing for more explorative research and highlighting where practices can be improved.

Eva Tang Vangkilde, Global Project Lead – Specialist in Patient Insights

Eva Tang Vangkilde holds a Master’s Degree in Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen. Eva investigates the life circumstances of people with diabetes, obesity and other chronic diseases; deep diving into the social, psychological and cultural aspects that shape the circumstances for dealing with these chronic conditions – even though it is truly complex and ever changing.

Her main responsibility as an anthropologist in Novo Nordisk is to explore how new and innovative products can make sense to people, bring value and change their options for dealing with their condition – and bring that knowledge into the innovation and development process of new drugs, tech devices and digital support services.

Rosie Webster, Science Lead

Rosie is a behavioural scientist with a PhD in psychology and extensive experience conducting research in digital health companies. While at large scale-up Babylon, she established their behavioural science practice, designed to enhance the impact of their health improvement work. She now works at Zinc, helping very early stage startups to bring science, research, and evidence into their businesses.

Further reading

• Social Science-Led User Research in Tech — Rosie Webster explains how she established a behavioural science practice at Babylon Health.
• Building Evidence-Based & Problem-Led Commercial Ventures — Rachel Carey explains the benefits of grounding new commercial ventures in evidence-based research and with a problem-led approach.
• Intel’s Sharp-Eyed Social Scientist — an interview with anthropologist, Genevieve Bell, in the New York Times (2014)
• An Anthropologist in Silicon Valley — Anthropology News (2018)
• Articulating Anthropology’s Value to Business — Anthropology News (2020)
• The UX-ification of Research — Stripe Partners (2017)
• Why Big Data Needs Thick Data — Tricia Wang (2016)
• AI’s social sciences deficit – Nature (2019)

The Response-ability Summit (formerly the Anthropology + Technology Conference) is a community established in 2018 that champions applied and academic social science within the tech/AI space. Our inaugural event took place in 2019 in Bristol, UK. Originally an event founded and organised by Dawn Walter of Mundy & Anson, Response-ability will become a stand-alone non-profit organisation in 2022.

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