Adaptive Path Blog

I’m on a listserv called anthrodesign, which, as you might guess, is full of anthropologists interested in design and vice versa. This is a great idea in concept as both groups have a lot they could teach each other and, to be fair, there is a lot of great conversation on the list. But there is a recurring problem exemplified by this quote below. It’s in response to an interview in BusnessWeek with Jan Chipchase of Nokia (A summary of the conversation on anthrodesign is here in Putting People First’s comments on the Businessweek interview.)

“Nokia’s ethnographic research sounds basic, even primitive. It’s akin to Dr. Livingston in “Darkest Africa,” sussing out the “natives”: how many yams they eat in a week, who tells the iconic stories, what clans do to maintain hegemony, etc. Very ho-hum, except that the technology is “cool.” Cellphone ethnographic research, so far as I can tell, studies behaviors related to product use but as the snippet in BW reveals, not the inner workings of cellphone users — how they relate to cellphones in phenomenological ways, for example.”

The problem with a lot of the people on the list is that they are anthropologists first and students of human behavior second. I know that theoretically the previous statement shouldn’t make any sense but it is sooooo true. People go into academic social science as interested, grounded, empathic people and come out unable to make sense of human experience and behavior except through the lens of abstracted academic theory and methodology. The way you try to get to the answers begins to totally overshadow the answers themselves. It also tends to reinforce disciplinary identity politics and makes people forget that there are other disciplines and perspectives that are as valid as their own. (And anthroplogists should be especially ashamed of themselves for falling prey to this.)

To understand the human world you need economics as much as you need anthropology, psychology as much as sociology. The fact of the matter is that we need to understand all of the things that Jan discusses just as much or perhaps more than the kinds of things anthropologists think are interesting. (Not to mention that it is quite poor scholarship to make a judgment on the research efforts of Jan and Nokia as a whole from a cursory two-page interview in BW.)

This is the kind of talk that spawns and spreads terms like “pseudo-ethnography” and other such demeaning terms. This does nothing but kill meaningful conversation and ensure that the good stuff from anthro stays out of design and vice-versa. It makes me so mad. Grr. Don’t get me wrong, I love academia. I’m just annoyed by 80% of all academics. This is why I left.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under user research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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