How can ethnography which allows us to study human knowledge and practices in situated ways, be applied to the study of what is not current but lies ahead of us? Is it suited at all to help in such an endeavour? In this blog post I want to argue not…

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…

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 helpful notes on common misconceptions that should be avoided (or at least reviewed) when talking about the use, implications, effects or consequences of digital technologies. The virtual/real divide In his ethnography of Second Life, Boellstorff has shown that the dichotomy between virtual and real is not very useful: Someone…

Here are some thought on a possible ethnography of Reddit. Some of these questions do not only relate to the specific case of Reddit but could also be asked more generally for other online ethnographies. What is reddit and how does it work? The idea of reddit is simple: Users…