Anthropology and the Technology Company

Abstract

Technological devices and information structures change the world we live in. This turn of events opens a field of inquiry for anthropologists to study the development of technology and its uses. Anthropologists do so in an iterative fashion engaging both engineers and potential users of technology for technology businesses. They also create and shape new and exciting processes for anthropologic inquiry within engineering practices producing artifacts-of-evidence. These artifacts may include documentation of human thought processes and/or research methods of interaction or the environment people may use a potential new technology within. Understanding how anthropological methods and artifacts fit into an engineering process is changing and iterating through time however, the relationship of technology companies and anthropologists has solidified as evidenced in projects from New York City to Germany that incorporate both innovative engineering practices and anthropologically-based insights for technology products. This article probes both the technology industry’s use of anthropological insights and the potential changes to the discipline of anthropology driven by the application of these methods in engineering projects