Co-designing with machines: moving beyond the human/machine binary
Letter from the Editor: I am happy to announce Welcome to the The Co-Desinging with Machines edition. As someone with one foot in industry redesigning organizations to flourish in a…
Tag: Business
A New Home for Ethnography: The Use and Legacy of Ethnography by Anthropologists and Non-Anthropologists
Rhiannon and I are currently completing an article that looks at ethnography at this moment in time. One thread in this discussion is the way in which ethnography…
Local food, global labour
The globalized movement of things, money, ideas, images and people has become more frequent and normal than any time in history. This is especially the case for those…
Apple and the Smartphone market in India
Photo Courtesy: CC: Wikimedia Commons: Kārlis Dambrāns from Latvia Less than a fifth of the Indian population might own a smart phone, but India is now the second…
What is "sensemaking"? Anthropology in marketing
Quantitative research — which has long been the market research standard — can provide insights into broad patterns and customer metrics. While this ‘big data’ can tell a…
Does your Business need an Anthropologist? Why yes I believe it does…
Lisa Earle McLeod,Creator of Noble Purpose in business concept, addressed the question, “Does your Business need an Anthropologist?” in her post in HuffPo today. McLeod’s post is a…
A Business for the Future? Redefining Value, Quinoa and the Quest of Pachakuti Foods w/ Alexander Wankel
We’re back in Peru! Join Adam and special guest Alexander Wankel of Pachakuti Foods for a conversation about the future of food production, agrobiodiversity, sustainability, and keeping traditio…
Lemon Difficult: Building a Strategic Speculation Consultancy
Joseph Lindley works with design fiction in order to facilitate meaningful speculation about the future. In between he likes to make music, take photographs and combine the other two…
For anthropologists, is interdisciplinarity ever truly a meeting of equals?
I recently read a Twitter post which asserted that interdisciplinarity was never a meeting of equals. As an anthropologist working outside of an academic department I met this…
We have a Slack! Join us at Ethnography Hangout to discuss applied ethnography
The Ethnography Matters, Anthrodesign, and EPIC teams have created a Slack channel for conversations about ethnographic methods. At Ethnography Hangout, we are an interdisciplinary group wea…
The jacket
I’m trying a new strategy at work to raise my oomph and improve my legit appeal. I’m no slouch when it comes to sparring about ideas, concepts and…
“Free Basics” – does it really matter to the poor in Panchagrami?
Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons: Facebook The launch of Facebook’s ‘Free Basics’, a rebranding of internet.org, has been a hot topic in India for the past few months as Facebook tries to…
How does an Anthropologist add value in the workplace?
At work I’m not employed as an anthropologist. Not directly anyway; my skills in research and higher education certainly helped…
An article! An article!
If there’s one thing that helps to ground you when you’ve felt voiceless or powerless in the past, it’s when you see the writing equivalent of your name…
Reading fiction as therapy
Recently I found a website that offers fiction as therapy. You have a consultation of sorts and they send you away with a list of novels to read…
Ropa americana online: the local market for used clothing
A Facebook announcement from an online shop in northern Chile announces “Jackets, Vests, and Sweatshirts” Ebay, Etsy, Alibaba, and Taobao have changed the way many people around the…
Change jobs, return to research or enrol in further higher ed?
You get to a point in your life where you start to reflect on your skill set and your current responsibilities and you wonder whether these match up…
Sharing anthropological discoveries on social media: ‘marketing’ or ‘interactive learning’?
Social media and engaging anthropology? (Photo: Pabak Sarkar CC BY 2.0) Over the last year, people have often asked us questions like “Surely you will market your project using social…
Getting Down To Business By Letting The Love In
I originally posted this article on LinkedIn but felt compelled to share here as well, since the Narcissistic Anthropologist in me is certain you will want to read…
Why do Young Men from Lower Socio-Economic Classes prefer Shopping Online?
Photo by Shriram Venkatraman Most of us on social media have noticed the static advertisements that are displayed on the side panels or the advertisements that intrude upon…
Opening doors: Rural Chinese business promotion on social media
A typical shopfront in the North China fieldsite (Photo: Gillian Bolsover) One surprising feature of QQ – the most popular social media platform in the rural Chinese town where…
Practicing Anthropology in Design and Business – Portland State University Presentation
These are my slides from a talk I gave at Dr. Jeremy Spoon‘s undergraduate Applied Anthropology class at Portland State University on May 20th, 2015. In the presentation,…
Design: cycles and heroes
Bill O’Connor was kind enough to send me an early comment on my recent blog post on Design and the corporation. He has given me permission to reproduce…
What I’ve been reading lately: the not-so-weekly digest (#5)
Presenting another installment of a collection of most-highly-recommended articles and websites that shaped my thinking throughout the past few weeks on the following topics: design, research, busines…