Design as anthropology in reverse
My inspiration
Other cultures have always fascinated me. This has inspired a lifelong love of travel, and my undergraduate major: anthropology. After years of studying other cultures and time periods to understand how their customs and material goods reflected their cultural beliefs and lifestyles, I realized that the academic path wasn’t for me. I didn’t just want to study culture, I wanted to do something more creative.
Eventually I came to a powerful realization: design is anthropology in reverse. The things we are building today are as much a reflection of our own values and needs as anything in my textbooks. This is what still motivates me today. My goal is that every artifact or system I help create would be self-explanatory to an anthropologist of the future.
My approach
My multi-disciplinary background has greatly influenced my design methodology. I strongly believe there is not one method, process or tool that will always yield the best results, but rather that each situation calls for a unique approach in order to engage stakeholders, understand users and encourage effective collaboration. I regularly borrow overlapping methods and tools from:
Service design: service blueprints, service ecosystem maps
UX design: user journey maps, workflow diagrams, information hierarchy documentation
Marketing research: customer surveys, conjoint analysis, industry/competitive analysis
Business strategy: business models canvas, Ansoff matrix
New product development: 5 whys, SCAMPER, evaluation matrix, agile development, lean startup, service roadmap, success metrics/KPIs
I find that nearly all projects can be broken down into the basic steps of:
Identifying key user needs/problem(s) (user research, participant observation, ethnography, quantitative)
Exploring potential solutions (supporting brainstorming processes, identifying likely options)
Testing promising solutions (first on paper, then in greater fidelity through prototypes, skits, pilot tests, etc. )
Implementing validated solutions (with mechanisms to collect feedback and allow for further iterations) - here I turn to lean start up, agile, and growth hacking methodologies .
Cx vs. ux
Though there is much overlap in definitions in the industry, prefer to refer to my field as customer experience design, rather than user experience design. While I don’t love the words customer or user (how about we call it human experience design?), I find user in particular to be too limiting as it typically refers only to a person who is actively using a (usually digital) product. I am typically looking at service ecosystems that span both physical and digital touchpoints over the entire provider/consumer interaction, which may begin well before the customer actually interacts with the product.