January 12, 2006

Anthropological thought pointing the way

Last night I attended an exceedingly enjoyable dinner brought together by local members of the anthrodesign mailing list. About 15 of us crowded around the table(s). To my left and right were folks from Yahoo, and across from me was an account planner at Grey Advertising, an anthropologist working for the architectural firm MKThink, and the senior user researcher at Walmart.com. Also at the table were a retail anthropologist, a strategist from Frog, a guy who works at the Center for South Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, and user interface design luminary Aaron Marcus.

I was particularly excited talking to Mark from MKThink, because he's getting MKThink to move beyond standard architectural practice and consider ethnography as a method toward constructing better built environments. It was also fun hearing Ari's stories of reconciling being an anthropology postdoc with working for one of the world's leading advertising agencies.

One of the things I realized is how the tenor, and discussion, in this group is different from other professional groups I hang out with. Professional groups tend to be identified by the domain of their work, not their practice. So information architects and interaction designers are very much beholden to the Web and software. Graphic designers are relegated to print material and interactive. Architects work on built environments. Industrial designers make physical products.

The people in attendance at dinner, though, bringing anthropological thought to the world of design, are refreshingly free from being shackled to particular domains. And I think it's for a simple reason -- when you begin by engaging with people, it's obvious that people hop domains (say, web sites to phone calls to in-store) and they're not particularly concerned with subjects of domain. They just want to get something done. Not to say that domains aren't important (MAYA's work showed that hopping domains was a key break point in the process of library visitor), but it's paramountly foolish to find yourself restricted to a single one. Anthropological approaches can't help but demonstrate the how these various domains come into play.

The drum I find myself beating this year is trying to get the methods I, and my colleagues, practice used in domains that go beyond the web. Not to give short shrift to the web - I love the web, and find the challenges there remarkably engaging. But "the web" is just one part of the elephant, and focusing solely on it leads to short-sighted solutions.


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January 11, 2006

I resolve to do what they all resolve to do

Adaptive Path has published its yearly set of resolutions. It's a remarkable piece of commentary, and makes me exceedingly proud of the people I work with.

Posted by peterme at 02:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Extending the metaphor (to the point of breaking)

A long time ago, David Weinberger wrote that, in our practice of categorization, we're moving from trees to leaves -- this was a way to distinguish monolithic singular hierarchies from what's happening with tagging and folksonomies.

David cites Peter's response, which can be found in his new book Ambient Findability. Peter originally shared this view with us at the IA Summit in 2005, as written about by Gene:

Peter Morville responded to the quote by saying (this is paraphrased):

And we know what happens to leaves when we rake them together. They rot. And become food for new trees.

And at the beginning the his presentation Peter Merholz said (again, paraphrased):

And sometimes the trees get really big and block out the light and kill off everything on the ground. So you have to chop the trees down.

As David was getting the meme sent around again, I thought it worthwhile to point to Gene's post on the subject.

Posted by peterme at 02:29 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
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