The work of cultural anthropologists can help deepen your understanding of your customers, refine your business objectives, and even assess the success of your efforts! This presentation will introduce you to the ways that cultural anthropology and its focus on gathering data in natural settings can yield actionable insights to fuel your designs and strategies.

1. Gathering Real-World
Insights from the Field
with Anthropology
Matt Baline
Sr. User Experience Strategist
Idea
@MattBaline
http://www.mattbaline.net/anthro

2. An anthropological approach
will provide you with unique,
exciting, and actionable
insights that are grounded in
what people really do.

3. ✔
✗
(Ervin 2005:1)

4. Unique Insights

5. Culture
Holism
Relativism
Theory

6. Culture

7. Culture is “an integrated
system of shared ideas
(thoughts, ideals, attitudes),
behaviors (actions), and
material artifacts (objects),
that characterize a group”.
(Jordan 2003:40)

9. Holism

10. Holism is “pulling back from
the specific problem, event,
or situation under study and
putting it in a larger context.”
(Jordan 2003:108)

11. Motorola Social TV
Interruptions

12. Motorola Social TV
Interruptions
Video:
A young mother with a baby contrasts her
loud alarm clock to her baby’s soft coos.
A college student describes his frustration
with his neighbors who always want to
hang out.

13. Caution! Holism may have the following side effects:
✴ The tendency to suggest research every time
✴ Business stakeholder frustration
✴ Project manager heartburn

14. Cultural
Relativism

15. Cultural relativism involves
“trying to understand behavior
from the participant’s point of
view rather than your own
personal one.”
(Jordan 2003:2)

16. Literal Point of View
Video:
An engineer walks from a loud warehouse
full of industrial equipment, across a dusty
yard full of pipes, and into a trailer.

17. Figurative Point of View

18. Theory

19. Theory helps us to guide our
focus on and make sense of
what we see in the field.

20. “Institutional ethnography”
draws attention to the
reduction of people to “cases.”
(Escobar 1995:110)

21. Taking a “vertical slice” of a
situation leads us to study up
and down.
Television Viewing
Producers
Broadcasters
Distributors
Viewers
(Nader 1972:292)

22. “Liminality” directs our
attention to when people are
between states.
(Turner 1969:167)

23. Culture
Holism
Relativism
Theory

24. Exciting Insights

25. Anthropological methods
Abandoning preconceptions
Making the invisible visible
Being Flexible
Being Ethical

26. Anthropological
Methods

27. “Participant observation is the
gathering of data about the
daily life and customs of a
people while participating, to
the extent possible, in that life.”
(Jordan 2003:21)

28. Participant Observation
Video:
A montage of engineers working with
technology in cramped, loud, cold, hot, and
dirty situations.

29. Observer Participants
Video:
Two video diary entries.
1. An engineer describes how he and a
peer used their mobile phones during a
late-night telephone cutover.
2. An engineer demonstrates how he uses
his phone to document fiber connections in
a networking closet.

30. Interviewing enriches your
understanding of what you see.
Video:
An engineer explains the concept of a
“pimp check.” He describes how when one
engineer interrupts another engineer for
help, the interrupting engineer gets “minus
one” and the other gets “plus one.”

31. Analysis of events focuses your
attention on action.
Analysis of relationships
focuses your attention on
relationships.

32. Abandoning
Preconceptions

33. Casting off your
preconceptions means
operating like you don’t know
anything.

34. The Realities of Breakfast

35. Millions Wasted?
Video:
An engineer explains why he does not turn
to Cisco.com first for technical support.

36. Making the
Invisible Visible

37. Making the invisible visible
means seeing what others miss
and getting at the unspoken
and unrecognized.

38. Mobile Phone as Directory
Video:
An engineer looks up a phone number on
his mobile phone, but dials it on his desk
phone.

39. Being Flexible

40. Anthropological methods can
be used almost any time.
✴ Early design research
✴ Evaluation
✴ Re-design/Re-contextualization

41. Combine methods through
triangulation to gather data
faster.
✴ Observation + Interviewing
✴ Focus groups + Observation
✴ Qualitative + Quantitative
✴ Designers + Researchers + Specialists

42. Being Ethical

43. Don’t do harm to anyone if
you can possibly help it.
Don’t deceive people or
misrepresent either yourself or
what you’re doing.
Try to be as impartial as
possible.

44. Anthropological methods
Abandoning preconceptions
Making the invisible visible
Being Flexible
Being Ethical

45. Actionable Insights

46. Analysis
Presentation

47. Analysis

48. Inductive Analysis
Observation
Observation
Pattern 1
Pattern 2 Implications,
Observation
↺
Analysis Pattern 3
Recommendations,
and Ideas
Observation Pattern ...
Observation

49. Pawing Through and Marking Up
↺
Atlas.ti
(Ryan and Bernard 2003)

50. Presentation

51. Make Your Findings Stick
✴ Involve your team in analysis
✴ Provide “scaffolding” around your exciting data
✴ Situate participants and action in context
(Cramer et al. 2008:120)

52. Situate Participants and Action

53. Analysis
Presentation

54. An anthropological approach
will provide you with unique,
exciting, and actionable
insights that are grounded in
what people really do.

55. This is an approach you can adopt now.

56. Works Cited
Cramer, Meg, Mayank Sharma, Tony Salvador, and Russell Beauregard
2008
Video Utterances: Expressing and Sustaining Ethnographic Meaning through the
Product Development Process. Proceedings of EPIC 2008:116-127.
Ervin, Alexander M.
2005
Applied Anthropology: Tools and Perspectives for Contemporary Practice. New York:
Pearson.
Escobar, Arturo
1995
Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Jordan, Ann
2003
Business Anthropology. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.
Nafus, Dawn and ken anderson
2006
The Real Problem: Rhetorics of Knowing in Corporate Ethnographic Research.
Proceedings of EPIC 2006:244-258.
Turner,Victor
1969
The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers.
Ryan, Gery W. and H. Russell Bernard
2003
Techniques to Identify Themes. Field Methods 15(1):85-109.

57. Photo Credits
Slide 3
Jeters - thejcgerm http://www.flickr.com/photos/thejcgerm/3769815547/
Men - Pine Street Inn http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinestreetinn/4167378656
Woman - Miss_Colleen http://www.flickr.com/photos/colleenmorgan/2701052370
Slide 4-5; 19
Alyssa L. Miller http://www.flickr.com/photos/alyssafilmmaker/5358329756
Slide 7
V&A Friday Late http://www.flickr.com/photos/fridaylate/
Slide 18
redjar http://www.flickr.com/photos/redjar/113959474/
Slide 20-21; 35
Americo Aperta http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaperta/5715797525/
Slide 28
Tenuto http://www.flickr.com/photos/70417572@N08/6648404733
Slide 36-37; 42
Anders Illum http://www.flickr.com/photos/aai/6936657289/
Slide 55
Justin Henry http://www.flickr.com/photos/benton/247994083/