A little over a century ago Bronislaw Malinowski sailed to the Trobriand Islands, an archipelago now part of Papua New Guinea, to carry out anthropological research. At the time, the kind of research he intended to conduct was novel. For it was predicated not on armchair reflection (or self-referential assumptions) but instead, observed and lived in the field, with the people it sought to study. It championed ethnography as a methodological immersion in the lives of others. The book Argonauts of the Western Pacific followed in 1922/23, laying the ground for a science which asked why people behave and organise themselves the way they do. As Malinowski writes:
“…in every act of tribal life, there is, first, the routine prescribed by custom and tradition, then there is the manner in which it is carried out, and lastly the commentary to it, contained in the natives’ mind.”
Today this quote might be considered problematic and anachronistic, and not in the least for the colonial gaze it perpetuates (who really, is the native?). Yet implicit in these lines, and as Malinowski documents throughout his seminal tome, is what most design thinking professionals would likely recognise as the contours of that enduring tool of their practise, the empathy map: asking what people say, do, think, and feel.
Fast forwarding the narrative to a more contemporary setting, Jay Hasbrouck (the resident anthropologist and strategist with Facebook) describes how ethnographic thinking provides “an interpretive lens to see how cultural worlds are organized …[as well as]… frameworks for thinking about how they’re formed, and how they evolve and interact”. Moving through the ‘empathise’ and ‘define’ stages of design thinking, and upto the ‘generation of ideas’, insights rooted in ethnography permit the designer to analyse and ask why, before turning to the synthesis of the what. Even in the latter stages of ‘prioritising ideas’, ‘prototyping’, and ‘testing’, the designer returns to ethnographic insights to anchor their solution (which touchpoint on the user journey might it warrant designing for?). As my colleagues and I often submit, ethnographic thinking and design thinking are thereby in fact coterminous. In its essence, anthropology is the study of lifeworlds and how and why they come to be. It studies the spaces and places we inhabit, the relations and flows which structure our societies, the cultural rubrics which define our everyday, and the lived experiences with humans and non-humans (consider technologies, apps, and objects on one hand, and policies and programs on the other) from which we derive meaning and construct our identities. And thus I argue, where ethnography is practised in engagement with anthropological theory and with the comparative perspectives it permits (how do other people use the app?), anthropology proffers itself as a veritable yardstick by which to gather how acceptable the design is to the user. Or in short, to what extent will the solution work?
As an example, I turn to an anthropological study we carried out at LagomWorks earlier this year, wherein we sought to understand teleconsultation’s limited uptake in India by doctors and patients alike, notwithstanding its promise for leapfrogging healthcare. After all, teleconsultation was not new to the country, having been introduced over a decade and half ago. The ongoing pandemic had given it a significant filip, with the entry of multiple platforms, better technologies, and improved access. It also commanded administrative attention now, with an evolving digital health policy and a supporting national skills framework.
