What’s Next?
Introduction: Sharmism and the ethics of value
In a recent Pulse Survey, our team at Verizon Connect scored markedly and consistently high in areas to do with team dynamics. Ours was the only team that scored full points under the category ‘freedom to express my thoughts and ideas’. Given that I only recently joined the team, I was not involved with the survey. But, as I will outline below, the Sharmisms that my colleagues have noted in previous #MayankMondays posts and the corresponding diversity, cohesion, and solidarity that are characteristic of our team are vital not just in ‘adding value’ to the company but, importantly, opening possibilities for doing so in ethical ways.
During our one-on-one last week, Mayank encouraged me to work with my strengths by harnessing and foregrounding the powers of ethnography in my role as a UX researcher at Verizon Connect (#BeAChangeAgent). But, as I will discuss below, an important part of recognizing anthropology’s strengths is also taking stock of its potential pitfalls. In a context where increasing numbers of anthropologists and anthropological insights and toolkits are being employed in UX research, anthropologists have felt encouraged (and perhaps a little compelled) to tout the tremendous utility of anthropology to UX research and design. There has, however, been remarkably little focus on the darker side of anthropology and the dangers that wholesale import/export of anthropology may spell for UX. As I prepare to ramp up on my initial projects here, I want to use this space carved by Sharmisms to think about What’s Next for me and for anthropology in the UX space, both in general and at Verizon Connect specifically.
Part I: anthropologies and their sinister pasts
For anyone vaguely familiar with the history of anthropology, we are painfully aware of the awful entanglements between early day anthropology (and anthropologists) with colonial systems of rule, domination, and oppression. It is no accident that the founding fathers of the discipline were mostly white men shouldering ambitions and aspirations of Empire. Not only were the findings by these early era, colonizer driven anthropologists used to further suppress, control, and manage ‘savage’ peoples around the world, anthropology, in many of these instances, provided the very rationale for scientific classifications of peoples based on Euro-centric evaluations of humanity, civilization, and modernity. This is not to preclude benevolent and somewhat more enlightened early anthropologists who, by ‘living with the natives’ for extended periods of ethnographic time, came to understand that they were just as human and ‘civilized’ in their own customs as Europeans were in theirs.
Housed in prestigious academic institutions of the colonial worlds, anthropologists conjured up expansive social theories (cultural relativism, structuralism, functionalist structuralism, etc.) and fortified them with dense esoteric philosophical verbiage in desperate attempts to comprehend, capture, and make sense of (i.e., conquer) the complexities of non-European social systems, cultural traditions, cosmological beliefs, and material realities. While such social theories were meant to (at least in part and to the fancy of some) elevate ‘the savage’ to the same relative standing as the colonial European, they were also deployed to tickle European oriental fantasies, drive colonial bureaucracies and military institutions, and further colonize and monopolize systems of knowledge production. Indeed, as those of us who have been in the trenches (‘in the field’ in anthro-speak) know fully well, the processes and potential (mis)usages of ’knowledge of other peoples’ have always been political and fraught with ethical concerns and moral dilemmas.
Part II: anthropology and the UX pie
I have not provided this rather dreadful account of some of the histories of anthropology to dismiss or undermine the discipline wholesale. On the contrary, I wish to bring these sinister aspects of my discipline into discussion here because I believe it is absolutely important to reckon with them if we are ever to aspire to harness the immense potentials of the discipline to make valuable contributions in emerging fields like UX.
Considering the complimentary aspects between (cultural) anthropology and User Experience Research, it is no surprise that increasing numbers of anthropologists and anthropological toolkits and methodologies have been employed in the UX arena. In our bid to claim a piece of the UX pie, anthropologists have produced many articles touting the tremendous strengths of our discipline in helping reveal social patterns, provide cultural insights, and help understand crucial aspects of everyday lives of ordinary peoples (users) that can then eventually be used by businesses (or other interests) to craft better suited products and services. In-depth knowledge of users’ behaviors (which cannot simply be calculated through statistical methods) for any business organization looking to design products or craft services cannot be overstated. Indeed, as many innovators in the tech. industry have come to acknowledge, innovation is itself deeply intertwined with and perhaps even premised upon knowledge of people’s needs and behaviors.
This is the very crux of the intersection between User Experience Research and Design and Anthropology — that UX thinking has foregrounded the need to understand people’s motivations and behaviors, and anthropology (together with other social and clinical sciences such as cognitive and experimental psychology, human factors research, human computer interaction, public health, etc.) have provided the methodological tool kits to mine and synthesize such insights about people that can be deployed to expand the frontiers of innovation.
As colonial regimes understood the political and economic significance of understanding (or claiming to understand) ‘the natives’, tech. companies today too have begun to look towards insights from the social sciences to drive design, production, and marketing of products and services. How then to avoid the horrendous pitfalls of colonial era anthropology while forging new anthropological frontiers in the tech. industry? What does it mean to do ethical research in/ for the tech. industry. This question becomes particularly pertinent as anthropology is uniquely situated to play a significant role in mediating connections between people, cultures, social systems, and mental models on the one hand, and companies and their products on the other.
Coda, what’s next?
These are the very imbrications between anthropology and UX that have attracted me to this field and which render my training in anthropology instrumental in helping carve the contours and explore the limits of UX research — whether it is in the context of shorter term testing and validation, or longer term exploratory North Star research. Yet, given the dark history of anthropology I foregrounded earlier, I want to caution all those who are looking to apply anthropology to UX — it is critical to be aware of the troublesome histories that birthed the methodologies and toolkits that anthropologists routinely use, and which other fields such as UX research have been borrowing.
Such critical awareness ought not freeze us in horrified intellectual paralysis. But rather, we ought to use these learnings to avoid the pitfalls of troublesome aspects of social science and to steer our values towards ethically informed research solutions. This, I believe, will not only make for better anthropology, but, if we follow the homology outlined above, it will also make for better UX research and design, which, in turn, will mean better value for companies. Being able to openly and freely have critical discussions with team mates is an important first step in this direction. “Anthropology in UX does not only concern intellectual problems but must help emphasize fundamental problems that people actually face and how to find solutions for them”, Mayank mentioned in our one-on-one. Indeed, evaluations of ethics and value are embedded in broader company concerns and require researchers to be routinely tactical in crafting practices to ensure that these elements are framed as complimentary factors. Over my time here, I look forward to innovating on the strengths of anthropology and crafting collaborative, practical approaches to fine-tune ethical research that is valuable to the company, and, ultimately to the users.
Written by Sujit Shrestha, PhD
Sujit is an anthropologist and UX Researcher at Verizon Connect in Atlanta. Sujit is an alum of Emory University where he completed his PhD in Anthropology. Sujit believes in football (yes, he means soccer) and music, and wishes to be able to watch Messi play before he retires from Barcelona FC.
