matterien

ethnography

4 tips for product teams who want to improve their user research

August 30, 2019
Calling customers, reading the comments and traces they leave and following up on their requests, questions and support tickets is a crucial way for product teams to stay on top of what's happing on the user side on things. Listening in, in order to feed back to the rest of…

What’s so different about anthropologists doing user research?

June 12, 2019
– – – – TL;DR – – – – – – – – – – – – While other disciplines in the humanities study humans as individuals, anthropology studies humans in relation to other humans (and non-humans). They do this through ethnographic methods.Anthropologists recognise that technologies are always intrinsically linked…

Problematic UX research: analysing, reporting and presenting

September 10, 2018
A while ago I wrote about what I've come to think as the "many pitfalls of UX, an industry eager to illuminate and provide bright and clamant insights into the world of ‘users’." There, I've touched on some of the problems that arise from the recruitment phase of a research…

Complexity-starved

September 13, 2017
I have criticised common conceptions and industry practices of ‘user-centered’ design on this blog in the past, for example here. However, having now worked alongside designers, project managers, business analysts and executives and having experienced the approaches and processes in the field of UX first hand, I have come to…

What do we really mean when we say ‘user-centered’ design?

February 4, 2016
While I was writing an essay on the question "How is the user as a person differently constituted within the fields of HCI and Anthropology" I realized that from an anthropological perspective the industry's view of 'user-centered' design is in many ways a pretty misleading idea. I stumbled upon a…

Some thoughts on sustainable design

December 18, 2015
In the last blog post I dealt with the question 'What is design and does it make a difference?' Today I want to take those ideas to look at the design of sustainable products. In no way should this be a comprehensive discussion on the state of sustainable design, but more of a…

What is design and does it make a difference?

December 8, 2015
The way one answers the question “Does design make a difference?” subsequently shapes one’s definition of what ‘design’ is. And how one answers this question depends on one’s understanding of the relation between humans and material objects. In this rather long blog post, I want to put forth an understanding…

Preamble

April 7, 2014
matterien: Amalgam of English 'matters' and German 'materien' (meaning the same) matter / noun something that is being done, talked about, or thought about the situation or subject that is being discussed or dealt with the thing that forms physical objects and occupies space matter / verb  to be important "Matter." …