"there is a very deeply-rooted assumption that humans have some innate, unique qualities that distinguish us from not only mere matter but other animals as well. … once we show that life is not a necessary criterion for this thing called culture, then the fun really begins — and you can see why lots of people would oppose this. … I keep returning to this quote from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus on music: “Of course, as Messiaen says, music is not the privilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of refrains … The question is more what is not musical in human beings, and what is already musical in nature. Moreover, what Messiaen discovered in music is the same thing ethnologists discovered in animals: human beings are hardly at an advantage, except in the means of overcoding, of making punctual systems.” Music is but one of many domains that is typically seen as inherently social and therefore uniquely human, and the anthropocentric perspective tends to reduce everything to how it functions in the human experiential frame. And on a side note, this is why I’m so excited by Ian Bogost’s upcoming book “Alien Phenomenology: Or What It’s Like To Be A Thing” … Robots can be said to have their own culture precisely because they don’t need to copy our sociologisms in order to be social, although what they do in their own social realm may not easily map on to things we do in our social realm. This is probably what fascinates me most"

"re/touch brings together hundreds of cross-cultural examples of social norms and values involving touch—all categorised according to actions related to touching. A collection of quotes from ethnographic accounts written between the late 1800s and the present, re/touch encourages designers and researchers to explore how touch is used by people to relate to one another and the worlds in which we live. Browse the quotes by selecting an action below to create design briefs, refine interaction scenarios, define game play or otherwise get inspired to think, make and do things touch-related."

"At it's best... [ethnographic research] inspires, informs, and delivers insights that can shape and sustain ideas/products/services/resources through the organisation all the way to the consumer, it's cost effective, it's timely, it's responsive. It's as much about bridging corporate culture as bridging cultures. In short it's all about finding the right people with skills that stretch across multiple disciplines and the right blend of project management, strategic thinking, diplomacy, leadership, humility, media awareness, extrapolation, psychology, street smarts combined with an instinct for bridging experiences from the field and understanding what it takes to make them relevant. I probably forgot listening. Damn. ... It's what my design studio colleagues would probably call an in-between job - living in a space between existing disciplines, existing ways of doing things. Not sure quite where that sits in the corporate career path. Not sure I care to know."

"Digital technologies have become ubiquitous. ... Anthropology and ethnographic research is fundamental to understanding the local consequences of these innovations, and to create theories that help us acknowledge, understand and engage with them. Today's students need to become proficient with digital technologies as research and communication tools. Through combining technical skills with appreciation of social effects, students will be trained for further research and involvement in this emergent world. This MA brings together three key components in the study of digital culture: 1. Skills training in digital technologies, including our own Digital Lab, from internet and visual arts to e-curation and digital ethnography. 2. Anthropological theories of virtualism, materiality/immateriality and digitisation. 3. Understanding the consequences of digital culture through the ethnographic study of its social and regional impact."

"The World Simulation is a radical experiment in learning that is the centerpiece of the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course at Kansas State University, created in a fit of frustration with the large lecture hall format which seems inevitable in a classroom of 200-400 students. Of utmost concern to me, was the nature of questions I was hearing from students, which tended to be administrative and procedural rather than penetrative, critical, and insightful. My least favorite question was also the most common: "What do we need to know for this test?" Something had to be done, so I set to work creating the World Simulation."

"a Kansas State University working group led by Dr. Michael Wesch dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography."

fake names, real cellphone #s: "Chipchase’s theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity"; "People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either"

"basic mobile kit of phone, wallet & keys are a constant ... as are the items in the second-order mobile kit which often include a music player & reading material. ... the basic technological building blocks for access, interfacing, and footprinting"

Thomas b/marking this made me realise I never had. ""SMS is to tell you I miss you, Email is to organise our dinner, Voice is to say I’m late, and IM is to continue our conversation", says Broadbent."

"master the mechanics of the interview process … concepts at the ready. Patterns standing by to serve us in the process of pattern recognition. … acts of analysis"

""the future's already here, it's just unevenly distributed" ... in the memory of every futurist ... since we started using ethnographic techniques ... studying early adopters for clues as to how the rest of us would use currently-new technologies"

Links. The future.

"A lot of rich qualitative user research loses its soul by the time it's been squeezed into conference & journal submission formats … So what you see here scratches the surface, nothing more."

"Ethnography may be no silver bullet … but "it could become a core competence" in the executive tool kit. Here are three case studies that demonstrate how businesses are using it to spark innovation"

"Thinking of ethnographic fieldwork as a base for sketching, rather than descriptions, creates openness that invites collaborative authoring. … becomes a design material for an open-ended design process."

"In the cultures we studied 3 objects were considered essential across all participants, cultures and genders were keys, money and mobile phone."

"The Mass-Observation Archive specialises in material about everyday life in Britain. It contains papers generated by the original Mass-Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), and newer material collected continuously since 1981"

a research programme exploring the potential benefits and costs of local knowledge mapping and sharing, what we have termed the public authoring of social knowledge

software platform for knowledge mapping & sharing – public authoring. combines mobile & internet technologies with geographic information systems to build relationships between places & associate stories, information, pictures, sounds & videos with them

If we are really trying to build sociable media that supports social interaction, shouldn't we do it based on what social life looks like? Shouldn't we allow for the vast array of nuances that allow people to interact differently depending on their needs?

People say: "What good does it do to point out the obvious?" A great deal of good, since we sometimes know facts without paying attention to them