Design Research and Strategy
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I am a new home owner. Like many new home owners, I am both fascinated and repelled by the most terrifying show on television: Holmes on Homes. This show demonstrates a key aspect to understanding social life: normativity or what “should be.”
For those unfamiliar with the show, allow me to summarize the narrative arc of [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · culture · design · home · market research · product design · sociology
Consumers are “time starved,” as many designers and marketers may know, but there is more to the story than simply not having enough time. The very concept of “down time” carries an important lesson about technology design.
In this post, I analyze the idea of “down time” and the activity of “cottaging” as a Canadian (and [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · culture · design · home · interaction design · sociology · technology design · time · time use · user experience
Autumn Rituals: Buying Jeans
Ritual plays an important role in our lives. Emile Durkheim noted in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that ritual bookends our experience of time:
The division into days, weeks, months, years, etc., correspond to the periodical recurrence of rites, feasts, and public ceremonies.
Time passes, in part, because we create rituals to signal [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · brand · culture · home · market research · sociology · time
Copernicus’s Sam Ladner is vying for coveted spot on the SXSW agenda. The topic: consumer culture.
SXSW “crowdsources” its panel picks. The organizers have devised a voting system, which (ostensibly) culls the least worthy panel ideas. (I say “ostensibly” because there is an interesting cultural element to this process, but that’s another blog post.) Please join [...]
Categories: anthropology · culture · ethnography · market research