Core77

Ever find yourself more interested in the thinking before the doing? What exactly should be designed and for whom rather than how should this shoe or television look like for this market? Thinking about design research, ethnography and becoming more human centered? Thinking of going back to school?

Wait, read these wise and insightful words from those who've trod the paths before you. Grant McCracken answers a newbie's questions on his blog, here is a snippet to think about and ponder,

I believe the success of Gladwell's career, and the value he has created for people inside and outside the marketing community demonstrates that while disciplinary and professional training matter, there is no substitute for a very smart person traveling by his own lights, patiently asking of the idea he/she encounters, does this help me think about the world, or is it in some way obfuscating. (My other exemplars are Victorian scholars. Lewis Henry Morgan, for instance. This guy managed to found American anthropology in his spare time. He was a lawyer by day.)

If you choose to be a free standing anthropologist, there are two objectives: the culture below and the culture above. The culture below is the long standing ideas and assumptions with which we make the world make sense, the instrastructure, if you will, of thought and feeling. The culture above is the trends and innovations that pour through our world. We want culture above and below because too often anthropology is reduced to a kind of cool hunting, a search for the latest thing and an investigation of culture above. Certainly, we need to know what social networking is, but if that's all we know, all we can report to the client, we have removed ourselves from usefulness.

More to the point, we have sacrificed our disciplinary advantage. Any undergraduate can pursue cool. Only an anthropologist can observe the larger, richer cultural context from which cool springs and with which it must correspond if cool is to cool into something lasting. Indeed I would argue that it is precisely when culture above resonates with the culture below that things "take," that innovation has a chance to transform us in substantial ways. (And by this reckoning you could say that social networking is now finding its feet precisely because users have found a way to make it responsive to the logic of their social worlds. This is not to say it will not change these social worlds, but first it must find a way to resonate with them.)