October 2025 ARVIC

The October 2025 ARVIC conference centered on a shared challenge: how do researchers go beyond surface-level data to understand people more fully and communicate those insights in ways that move stakeholders to action? The single talk in this hub draws on ethnomusicology and retail research to argue that the answer starts with how researchers listen.

Rethinking Listening as an Active, Multi-Sensory Practice

A core provocation of the conference is that listening is not passive reception. Drawing on experience in both music and UX research, one talk makes the case that genuine listening combines auditory, tactile, and contextual awareness. Researchers who treat listening as simply transcribing what is said miss the majority of what an experience actually contains.

Surfacing What Participants Do Not Say

Ethnographic listening is presented as a method for excavating the assumed, the commonplace, and the indescribable alongside the remarkable. The RACE framework (Remarkable, Assumed, Commonplace, Indescribable) gives researchers a practical four-category structure for capturing and communicating the full depth of a user or customer experience, including everything participants take for granted or struggle to put into words.

Communicating Findings to Stakeholders

Knowing what you found is only half the job. The conference highlights two principles for closing the gap between insight and action:

• Make the unfamiliar feel familiar and the familiar feel unfamiliar, calibrating explanations to what different stakeholders already know.
• Use immersive participation, such as bringing digital and product teams into a physical store to role-play as customers, to convey experiences that are hard to quantify in a report.
• Translate singular, intimate experiences into forms of meaning that stakeholders can understand and act on, always communicating findings with compassion for the people behind the data.