A hand drawn profile
Back in 2016 the very talented Charlotte Hollands was commissioned by EPIC to do a profile of me. Instead of writing an account of my career she decided…
Author: Simon
Goodbye…Hello (2005)
Some thoughtful commentary on job hunting by Amy Santee, a UX researcher based in USA provoked me to dig out this blog post from 2005. I wrote it…
Squeaky Dolphin
From an article about the anxieties of big data by Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford. 2014 is the year we learned about Squeaky Dolphin. That’s the Pynchon-worthy code name…
Explorers
“Nowadays being an explorer is a trade, which consists not, as one may think, in discovering hitherto unknown facts after years of study, but in covering a great…
Anthropology & design
“Anthropology provides a kind of thick description that contextualises design processes and products, and design offers anthropology creative means of exploring and representing what it means to…
Things
“Material thing are often like that. They have a certain humility. They jump up and down and confronts you as a critical symbols of yourself or your relationships.…
‘That full complement of riches’
For those who attended the “Why the world needs anthropologists” symposium in Amsterdam yesterday here are the slides. For those that didn’t attend I hope the notes with…
Culture and utility
Re-reading a chapter in Marshall Sahlins’ Culture and Practical Reason, Le Penseé Bourgoisie today I could have cited multiple chunks of though-provoking writing. Instead, here’s a simple …
Why the world needs anthropologists.
I’m looking forward to speaking at this event in Amsterdam this autumn. The outline of my talk is below. ‘That full complement of riches’: the future role of anthropology in…
Writing as a kind of observation
This is a piece of writing about writing. The original aim was simply to explore the thought that writing diaries, writing anthropological fieldnotes and maintaining blogs are activities…
Big data, asymmetry and business
[This post is a little longer than initially planned – it’s about a 15 minutes read] It was of little surprise that big data figured as a major…
The said and the unsaid
When the FT Magazine did a special issue on visual design anthropologist Gillian Tett opted to highlight the influential thinking of Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of doxa…
EPIC 2013
EPIC 2013, London 15th-18th September EPIC 2013 is coming. The Call is out and can be found here. Tickets will be going on sale in March.
What are traditional societies for?
From a great review of Jared Diamond’s book The World until Yesterday, by Wade Davis in The Guardian “Traditional societies do not exist to help us tweak our…
EPIC – a few pictures
Some pictures of EPIC 2012 which was held in Savannah and which, as co-chair, I am too fatigued to write about but here are just a few of…
Relations and Relatedness
Thanks to the Wayback machine I found an old post I wrote on kinship and social networks from Ideas Bazaar (2004 vintage). I’m in the midst of writing something…
Why study consumption?
There’s probably no one better placed that Danny Miller to answer this question:
Silence and silos
Couple of years old now but well worth watching in full – Gillian Tett, Managing Editor of the FT in the US addresses the 2010 AAA on “Silence…
Anthropology and the abduction of strategy
I gave a talk last week at a UK UPA event on ethnography in design and innovation. I somewhat subverted the intent of the session by not talking…