A recent Bruno Latour keynote[PDF] has been making the rounds on the Anthrodesign mailing list.
Called “A Cautious Prometheus?”, it is a very concise and thoughtful dissection of the changes the word and concept ‘design’ has been undergoing for the past 30-40 years, which also signals the change from “the hubris of modernity” with its [...]
Posts under ‘Anthropology’
All design is redesign
Fields of care and online collaboration
There’s a good discussion over at the Savage Minds anthropology group blog in relation to the recent publication of an article discussing the pros and cons of Open Access Anthropology.
The article has been written by no less than seven anthropologists using email and Google Docs to create an online collaborative space. Following the publication of [...]
Anthropological diagrams
One of the continuing challenges in my work is adapting my ethnographic findings and my anthropological analyses to the consulent format of choice: The Powerpoint slide.
Slides are infinitely better suited to gaudy visuals and photos, so often, the best to get an analytical point across is to compose a model or a diagram to illustrate [...]
It was Dr. Jones
It is not uncommon that people ask me how I ended up studying anthropology, and usually I just respond that it was my broad and undefined interest in all things social, cultural and human that led me in that direction. But that it is not the whole story.
I don’t think I was entirely aware [...]
Doing (ethnographic) interviews
I found this video on ethnographic interviewing techniques and “getting people to talk” on the American Anthrodesign mailing list:
Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy on Vimeo.
The film is made by a couple of design students at the Illinois Institute of Technology in order to give a set of [...]
Anthropology of business
Last Wednesday, I went to a discussion seminar on Business Anthropology arranged by the Danish Association of Anthropologists. With Business Anthropology, the organizers actually meant the anthropology of business – as in the ethnographic study of corporate culture and leadership, which became clear as the two presenting researchers gave their talks to initiate the debate.
The [...]
Making an impact
Last Friday, I finished a 2 month freelance project for Copenhagen Living Lab, a small Danish innovation consulting firm. The project was an ethnographic exploration and mapping of the business development and production practices of Danish computer game companies in order to identify central challenges shared by such companies and suggest ways in which such [...]
Ethnography and the design of new media
More and more anthropologists are doing research on new media technologies like mobile phones and social networking sites. Some of them are even being hired by companies to do ethnographic studies to gather the sort of “actionable insight” that can help a better understanding of how these technologies are used, and help inform how new [...]
Digital (ethnographic) montage
Among some of the old unfinished projects that I’ve had time to finish recently, is the HTML version of my essay on the use of montage as a means of ethnographic presentation. It’s definitely experimental, since I have little experience with how clicks flow through websites like this, and it is not very pretty by [...]
Making design research useful
I found Dan Saffer’s presentation on “How to lie with design research” on Nicolas Nova’s blog today. A User Experience researcher, Nova posts a lot of blog posts of varying insights on interaction design and user experience and such buzzwords.
The talk is a tongue-in cheek discussion of ethnographic design research, which appears to annoy a [...]
I'm an anthropologist working as an 
