social context | anthrostrategist

The other day I was privy to a discussion by a researcher who was decidedly upset about having to “dumb down” the research report he had completed. The client was impressed by the depth of the work, but equally frustrated with the seemingly academic depth of the language of the report and the use of jargon that was, realistically, more appropriate to anthropological circles than to a business environment. The researcher was upset by the client’s request to strip out discussions of agency, systems design theory, identity formation, etc., and stated something along the lines of “I had to learn this sort of thing in grad school, so they should take the time to do the same”. And while I think it would be lovely (and perhaps beneficial) if clients took such an interest in what we as researchers study, I have to say my views on the matter are very different. Making what we learn useful and meaningful to the client isn’t “dumbing it down”, it’s performing the task for which we were hired. We do not receive grants and write peer-reviewed articles when businesses hire us. Indeed, we may not write at all. What we do is produce insights and information that they can use, from their design team to their CEO. If they aren’t asking us to become expert in supply chain models or accounting, then asking them to embrace often daunting concepts in socio-cultural theory is both unrealistic and, frankly, arrogant.

In general, companies hire ethnographers (anthropologist, sociologists, etc.) for a simple reason: to uncover new ways to achieve competitive advantage and make more money. This translates, most often, into research to understanding new product opportunities, brand positioning, or salient marketing messages. Unfortunately, our clients often have no idea what to do with the research. But more often than not, the fault lies with ethnographers, not the client, and can be overcome if we apply ourselves just a bit.

Usefulness means being a guide, not a lecturer. So why are we so often disinclined to make what we do useful to business people? Part of it, I believe, stems from an unwillingness to address our own biases openly and honestly. There is a tendency among many of us coming out of what have traditionally been academic disciplines to ridicule or react negatively to people in the business world. To be honest, it’s why we chose, say, an anthropology program over a business program in college. We often, consciously or subconsciously, hold these people in contempt and believe that it is they who should bend, not us, as if we are providing secret knowledge are indeed of a higher order of life than they. We resent the idea that these lesser minds would have to audacity to ask us to curb our genius. And yet, there’s nothing new in making complex ideas useful, simple, or intelligible to people without advanced training in the social sciences. Look at any Anthro 101 course and you realize we’ve been doing this for a very long time already. The fact of the matter is that in order to be relevant and to get the client excited about what we do and to value the thinking behind our work, we have to remember that not everyone wants to be an expert in social science any more than they want to be physicians or painters – they want us to be the experts and to know what we’re doing, including crafting what we learn into something they can grasp and apply even as they try to balance their own work load. Balancing jargon with meaning is, or should be, the goal.

Another struggling point I often think stems from how many of us were trained. Traditionally, the researcher is either left to work alone or as part of a very small team. The findings are analyzed, complied and shared with a small group of like-minded individuals. (We would like to believe that the numbers of people who care about what we write are larger, but the truth is most of us don’t give the work of our colleagues the attention they deserve or would at least like to believe they deserve.) Our careers are built on proving our intelligence, which means making an intellectual case that addresses every possible theoretical angle in great detail. But in the business context, to whom are we proving our intelligence? And do they care? They hire us precisely because we are the experts, not to prove how smart we are. This isn’t to say that we can or should forego the rigor good ethnographic research should employ, but it is to say that whether we like it or not, most of the theoretical models we use should end up in the appendix, not in what the client sees, hears or reads. Not only does it overcomplicate our findings, it often comes across as either arrogant or needy, neither quality being something the client finds particularly enticing or reassuring.

The fact is that we do ourselves and the discipline a disservice by not learning the language and needs of business people. We complain that untrained people are slowly “taking over” ethnography, but it’s our own doing nine times out of ten. It isn’t enough to have a better grasp of the complexities of the human condition, we have to learn to translate our work and come to terms with the fact that the people hiring us have a very real, practical need for our findings. If it cannot be translated into something that can be grasped in the first two minutes, then in their way of seeing the world, it is money wasted.

Are we there to educate or inform? Our work is frequently deemed too academic. So what does it mean when a client says, “It’s too academic.”?  It means that they didn’t hire you to teach a class about anthropological theory and method. It means they don’t want to sit through a 100 page Power Point presentation before getting to the heart of the matter. They are in business and have neither the time nor the interest of a scholar or student. Again, this doesn’t mean you don’t do the work or fail to set up the points you are trying to make, but it does mean that you be cognizant of the fact that the audience hired you to improve their business and products, not teach a course on anthropological methods. And indeed, some concepts are simply too complex to turn into a couple of bullet points. But that doesn’t mean we cannot try, particularly if we hope to get more work from the client.

The people with the luxury of sitting through a lengthy presentation or who have the time to discuss the intricacies of social theory rarely have a significant amount of authority in the decision-making process, and they rarely hold the purse strings. This isn’t to say that those two hours of research findings we present aren’t meaningful, but rather that presentations need to be tailored to the needs of the people buying your service (research) and product (recommendations). For the business community, the product is not knowledge, but intelligence. In other words, the product is knowledge that is actionable and useful. And to be fair, it’s worth noting that the client is the one who pays for our work. If the idea of providing them with the service and product they need is unpalatable, then I would argue that the ethnographer needs to quit complaining and start exploring a different line of work, plain and simple.

The researcher, research team, creative team, client, and everyone invested in the project need to work toward turning information into something they can act upon. When the time comes to sit down with the client and explain what you learned, the ethnographer must be prepared to also explain what to do with it next in a simple, clear way.

We spend a great deal of time talking about context, but rarely use models to define elements of it. This particularly true when talking about mobile devices and accounts for the hit-and-miss quality of most apps available on the market. It is one thing to design a usable app that conforms to human factors and cognitive requirements, but it is quite another to design a stage in an environment, or an environment itself, when there are innumerable semi-autonomous devices mediating an swirl of information. Consequently, it makes sense for us to think about how we structure context so that we can determine what exactly we can affect.

Physical Context

From the computational side of things, physical context refers to the notion of imbuing devices with a sense of “place.” In other words, devices can distinguish the environments in which they “live” at any given moment and react to them. But this is much more difficult than it at first appears. Mapping out longitude and latitude is one thing, but reacting to features (political, natural, social, etc.) is much more problematic. Getting beyond demarcation of identifiable borders and structures, means coming to grips with place (as opposed to space). That in turns having to be “aware” on some level.

Think of a mall. Within that mall are hundreds of stores, each with hundreds of devices and/or nodes of information. The device now has to decode what information is most relevant to itself, what information is most relevant to the user and how it will deliver that information. Returning to the mall example, we have to think about a host of things in order to make any app relevant. What competing retailer apps get precedence over others? When you receive an offer from one store, will the device “tell” other retailers in order to generate real-time counter offers? When someone else is hold your device for you (say, while trying on clothing but needing to set the iPad aside), how will the device know what incoming content is private and what is public? How will the device communicate with a location or with other devices as it moves throughout the mall?

Device Context

Just as various kinds of sensory apparatus (GPS-receivers, proximity sensors, etc.) are the means by which mobile devices will become geographically aware, another class of sensors makes it possible for devices to become aware of each other. There is a fundamental difference between the ability to transmit data between devices and the ability (and desire) of devices to discover each other. And this presents a series of problems that are different in nature than those of physical context. Because this deals with choices of communication.

We are on the verge of existing in a world with zero-infrastructure networks that can spring up anywhere, anytime. That means that devices are in a potentially constant state of discovery. Returning to the mall for a moment, imagine that your are with a friend whose device is communicating with yours. In there mall are a couple of thousand devices, all of which are discovering each other. What happens now? Assuming we’ve dealt with the problem of my mobile phone communicating with my friend’s phone while blocking out the other 2000 devices, we still have several thousand potentially “identities” that may have useful information for us. How do we select how to manage that without devoting a ridiculous amount of time to setting up the hundreds of variables that shape what we do and don’t want at any given time? And all this is couched in a neat little world defined within a single, bounded geographical unit. So understanding device context is as important as understanding physical context.

Information Context

This is the realm of information architecture, plain and simple. But with the advent of pervasive mobile, this topic is becoming even more complex. Specifically, data no longer resides, literally or figuratively, “in” our computers. Our devices are extensions of the cloud and exist as something akin to perceptual prostheses. They exist to manipulate data in the same way a joy stick allows us to handle the arms of robot in a factory. And this is important because it reflects a shift in how we think about and use information because all information (and the aps that carry that information) are transitory and by and large public.

This changes the nature of what the device has to actually be. Storage issues are essentially removed from the equation. Content can leap from place to place and device to device in an instant. All content will be customizable and reflect the human-application interaction rather than shaping it. This leads to the point that devices, and the people who use them, will find themselves in the 4^th kind of context of social interaction, with all its peculiarities and contingencies. Just as our behavior and worldview shapes and is shaped by the moment in which we find ourselves, so too will our apps and information need to adapt to the moment. In other words, devices will need to be more human.

Socio-Cultural Context

The whole humankind is riven with contrasting practices, cultures, tongues, traditions and world views. A cultural context may exist on levels as diverse as a workplace, a family, a building, a city, a county, a state, a nation, a continent, a hemisphere etc. A cultural context provides a shared understanding of meaning provides a framework for what “works” in the world. It is what helps you recognize “your kind” in all senses of the word.

And it is at the point of socio-cultural understanding where gain a better perspective on what will and will not be accepted in the mobile universe. We need to understand the essence behind the veil of design and usage to uncover meaning. Take the beer pouring app as an example. Here we have a simple app that mimics the pouring of a beer when you tilt your device. On the surface it has little relevance to our daily lives. It serves no direct function and yet it has been tremendously successful because of the cultural needs it to which it speaks – workplace breaks from the mundane, the ability to show off the newest thing, male-to-male pair bonding, etc. It’s absurdity is precisely what makes it relevant. But in another context, say Saudi Arabia, the context shifts and meaning change to fit that particular milieu.

The nature of our successes lies in understanding the reasons behind our beliefs and actions, in the symbolic exchanges we are part of and our abilities to code and decode those symbolic exchanges. The nature of our mistakes essentially lie in a lack of comprehension. It leads to UI and app development that speak to a minority of the population even as they try to sell to the masses. Without understand the underlying epistemological constructs of a group (or more accurately, a mix of often associated groups at different points of interaction and interpretation) then we miss opportunities.

So What?

So why does any of this matter? It matters because good design and messaging are increasingly difficult to master. Our great technological leaps forward have also produced more complexity, which in turn leads to a greater need to make sense of what is “going on” in the broadest sense of the term when it comes to gathering insights and translating them into design and business applications. Without a means by which to categorize context, we can’t isolate those things that matter most. And we miss enormous opportunities.

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