matterien

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Exploring the material world through an anthropological perspective I am interested in people's relationship to everyday objects and the environment they live in, the role of consumption and design and the transformative effects of digital technologies. I like to play and creatively experiment with new forms of doing ethnography. These include film and virtual forms of participant observation.

For the past years I have been developing a very specific interest in the study of digital technologies and of material culture more generally. My background in Social and Digital Anthropology has allowed me to approach questions of present-day relevance such as “Does the wide spread use of digital media alter the way we interact and are ‘social’?” or “How do digital technologies affect the ways in which we understand our bodies?“ in ways that not only pay due regard to the cultural diversity of people adopting and experiencing technology but that also eschew simplistic ideas of an all-encompassing ‘advent of the digital age’.

I'm passionate about researching the many contexts in which interactions between humans and the material world take place: I've looked at people’s relationship to everyday objects of mass consumption, how the use of specific software structures and conditions the way people collaborate in work environments, how activities like shopping shape and form identities, how the emergence of digital media transforms people’s relationship to the ‘local’ and how the design of digital platforms mediate practices of consumption.

Working mainly in the field of UX, I'm always keen on adding anthropological perspectives to questions such as 'What is design and does it make a difference?’, and I like to scrutinise commonly held conceptions and industry practices of ‘user-centered’ design approaches. Building from anthropological sensibilities my work focuses more generally on the complexities and real-life messiness at the intersection of people, technologies and the built environment. I don't just look at how people use technologies but also how they fight with, reject and (re)appropriate these in unexpected ways and how, often, practices of use run counter to designers’ envisioning.

My work informs the design of (arrays of) technologies as well as the decisions made along the way. So far, I have gathered professional experience in Europe and Australia, both with public and private sector clients. Instead of stopping at methods such as lab-based usability testing, my work gathers and delivers creative ways of doing ethnography and qualitative research. Allowing for contradictions and tensions of the human experience to emerge, the research I conduct not only produces rich insights from the field site but also reveals the very questions that need to be asked to move forward with confidence.
If you're interested in learning more about the approaches and methods I typically employ in my professional work, I'm more than happy to send through a short services and methods book via email.