Photo courtesy of fernandopelillo

Lilly Irani was recently profiled (in a good way) on the CACM Blog, which is located here:
Thinking Globally, Thinking Locally: Infrastructures for Collaboration | Computers And Society | Communications of the ACM

An excerpt follows:

“Lilly studies infrastructures necessary to support design teams that operate out of India and work with clients who are also in Europe and the United States. Lilly started with seven weeks of immersive fieldwork observing a Delhi-based design team. She lived in the homes of her participants and went to work with them daily. As a researcher, she mostly observed, but she also helped with small tasks around the office, shopping for office supplies and tools, and photographing and filming user research done by the firm. Something Lilly found in her initial fieldwork is that short digital films (e.g. posted on vimeo) can help in communicating with foreign design research clients. In the words of Lilly, “You can post films on vimeo and really engage someone 12,000 miles away in a way that you can’t with a document or a phone call. If a picture is worth a 1000 words, a film is worth 10000 and it’s a lot more likely, if the film is good, that the intended viewer (the client) will watch it all the way through. “