5 posts tagged cultural anthropology

Halloween is easily on of my favorite holidays and I bet, during my 10 years of Catholic School, if they had told me November 1 was The Day of the Dead instead of All Saints’ Day I would have been far more excited.  

1. M&M’s Dark Chocolate Dark Movies. God, this is old. But I still love it. The concept and the execution are so simple. Great tie in with the brand.  I never did solve the damn thing.

2. Tim Burton’s Cadavre Exquis. Didn’t have the luxury of 3 years of Latin? Too bad, cause the language isn’t dead. Cadavre Exquis = Exquisite Corpse. It’s not a Walking Dead episode. It’s a technique that essentially crowd-sources a story - each contributors adds to the story building on the last line revealed. People used to do this passing around paper or mailing manuscripts.  Tim Burton just used Twitter. Instead of a platform that just shares information, he saw it as something that allowed his fans to personally contribute to a piece of his work.  

3. Rise of the 5th screen.  We talk a lot about the “4th screen” in advertising - a mobile device of some sort: your mobile phone, tablet, or even an iTouch. Screens 1, 2, and 3? Cinema, television and the PC (or some may argue, gaming console).  But now researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon have created a device called OmniTouch that can turn any surface into an interactive touch screen. Give it a few years, the technology will scale down in size and be built into your mobile device. Then any surface - a notebook, a floor, your hand…will be a surface that you can project on and interact with. 

4.  Place Pulse. A project from the Macro Connections Group via MIT Media Lab, Place Pulse is

a website that allows anybody to quickly run a perception study and visualize the results in powerful ways. 

Right now, Place Pulse is focused on urban planning, but is it possible to use this in the qualitative research that we do for our clients? The obvious answer is yes, since focus groups are very similar in structure. But what makes Place Pulse so much more interesting is how the results are broken out and then visualized. 

5. Finally, an interview with cultural anthropologist, Dr. Genevieve Bell at the Web 2.0 Summit 2011.  What she talks about is not just applicable to technology and product design - it’s indicative of how we should approach everything we do for brands - from the perspective of the people who actually USE the product:

The first question is not ‘tell me what you are doing with the ipad’, but ‘tell me what you care about, tell me about your life’. Let me unpack your car or unpack your backpack or see what’s in your home office. Because I really want to have a sense of the context.  

…when you understand what it is that people value, what they care about, what their aspirations and their frustrations are..it’s something about being willing to ask the bigger set of questions about what is it that people care about and what do they value.