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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 to social relations. However, it’s not a simple matter of ‘technology’ impacting on ‘society’ or a question of what technologies do to people – ethnography shows us that it’s way messier than that.

By looking at how technologies ‘act’ in the world we become aware of how diverse and dependent their effects are on where we look:

1. When we look closely at how technologies are used, we see that just as much as technologies and their affordances shape and influence people, it’s never a one way street: people also (re)appropriate technologies and tinker with them in many creative and unexpected way.
2. When we look closely at how technologies are designed and developed, we realise that the forms and artefacts as we know them today are not just the most effective solution that made its inevitable way into being, but actually a more arbitrary product of multiples of people working together and against each other, rejecting and dismissing numerous other (technical) possibilities along the way.

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How might I, as someone with a training in anthropology understand and approach user research differently from other user researchers? Although an answer to this question can never be black and white and will obviously depend on who that other researcher is, there are some aspects of how anthropology studies the world that open up new pathways for how to think about user research.

Before we explore this question in more detail , it’s helpful to understand that the most widely applied user research frameworks and approaches come from the field of Humans-Computer Interaction (HCI). The field itself draws heavily on disciples like psychology and behavioural and cognitive science. And again, these are diverse disciplines, each with their own competing ways of understanding what their discipline actually does. However, what all of these disciplines tend to have in common is that their focus is on humans as individuals. Anthropology, on the other hand, can be described as the study of social relations.

Anthropology studies social relations. What does that mean?

Anthropologists (the ones that do social and cultural – not forensic or physical- anthropology) see people first and foremost as members of groups. Groups can be anything from a few people to what we might call ‘cultures’ and ’societies’. In very simplified terms, psychologists and cognitive scientists tend to look at the mind and body in order to get a sense of what makes up a person and the self. For anthropologists, it’s a person’s relations with the ‘outside world’ that is seen as making up who they are: the places they live in and move through and the people they share these spaces with. In fact, to a great degree, anthropology is about the shared. Instead of looking at individual motivations to understand why people behave the way they do, anthropologists look at actions as products of shared values, norms, patterns of meaning and taught ways of doing things.

There is very little that anthropologist think of as arising directly or naturally from the mind. For example: Perceiving red as a colour that indicates danger is by no means seen as a universal fact, something that, say, could be explained by some evolutionary framework and that would apply to people across the world and across cultures equally. Rather, in their work, anthropologists uncover that even things that we might perceive as universal are matters of cultural interpretation, values or norms.

Anthropologists have traditionally shown these cultural differences through ethnographic approaches that they employ as part of their extensive immersion in particular sites and with particular groups (often several years). Ethnographic approaches encompass methods such as participant observation or qualitative interviews. By living with the people they study and participating in the things they do, learning their language, their rituals and ways of being, anthropologists try to understand groups from an insider perspective. They don’t try to impose external descriptions onto the things they encounter in fieldwork, or try to fit their understanding of the world and schemes of thinking to the things that strike them as new or strange. In their writing techniques, anthropologists often aim to challenge a reader’s taken-for-granted concepts about how the world works by introducing radical different ones. Anthropologist try to make the familiar strange by making the strange familiar.

Technologies are always intrinsically linked to social relations, but it’s not a simple question of one impacting the other

Anthropologists (and sociologists) who look at design practices and (digital) technologies tend to go a step further in the study of social relations. Through fieldwork, they recognise that objects sometimes have as much of a capacity to act (‘agency’) than people/subjects. What those scholars conclude is: it’s not only the relationships between humans that we need to look at. It’s the relationships between humans and non-humans (‘objects’) that are equally (!) important. However, these relationships are not straightforward. In fact, there’s an entire sub-field of anthropology and sociology (Science and Technology Studies) dedicated to unpacking what this complex entanglement of humans and non-humans look like.

How do we understand and see the world when we look at it as an entanglement of humans and non-humans? Most importantly, we recognise that technology can never be neutral. It’s neither inherently good or bad but always intrinsically linked to social relations. And while many scientists study the impacts of technology on society, it’s specifically those in Science and Technology Studies who have tried to show, again and again, that it’s not a simple matter of ‘technology’ impacting on ‘society’ or a question of what technologies do to people. The question ‘How has the internet or smart phones changed society?’ is just not the right one. Rather, it’s about looking at how technology is used and developed, not in theory, but in the messy practice – through ethnographic research.

Anthropologists recognise that technologies don’t just affect people in universal or pre-defined ways

By looking at how technologies ‘act’ in the world we become aware of how diverse and dependent their effects are on where we look. Just because smart phones have certain material components that make them all technically similar, doesn’t mean that they are used or understood in the same way by all people that adopt them. The same goes for social media. This is an incredibly important statement to make because it allows us to see technology in a much less static and much more malleable way, as we recognise that just as much as technologies and their affordances shape and influence people, it’s never a one way street: people also (re)appropriate technologies and tinker with them in many creative and unexpected ways.

Studying technologies from a cultural perspective, that is, as tightly embedded in social relations, also allows us to better understand the process of how technologies are designed and developed. We can uncover (forgotten) histories of how technologies came to be, showing that the forms and artefacts as we know them today are not just the most effective solution that made its inevitable way into being, but actually a more arbitrary product of a contest between numerous other possibilities that are rejected and dismissed along the way. A famous example of uncovering these stories is Wiebe Bijker’s case study of the history of the bicycle. But these stories can be found anywhere. A look at the history of the World Wide Web, for example, reveals discarded elements and projects such as ‘Xanadu’, Ted Nelson’s original, broader vision for the hypertext.

When anthropologists think of technology development they constantly challenge the idea that there’s one great individual inventor that somehow remains untouched from the social influences that surrounds them and is therefore able to give birth to a radically innovative and original idea.

Using insights about technologies to redefine user research

Recognising that technologies are tightly entangled in the social fabric and have messy stories of ‘it could have been otherwise’ opens up new perspectives, it lets us critique and challenge the way we understand technologies and see all their potential and possibilities anew. This concerns all type of technologies, even the most mundane (and seemingly neutral) ones such as a digital database.

When we employ an anthropological lens to user research, we start to become aware of the complexity of social relations that are played out, not only in user/technology interactions, but in the design and research process itself. This forces us to think in a more nuanced way about the social setting and dynamics that are at stake in even the most ‘basic’ usability testing sessions.