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Am I ready for this? What will they be like? What will I be like? Nothing is more equally exciting and frightening for a young anthropologist than entering into the field for the first time. As I imagine Margaret Mead daydreamed about the exotic South Pacific before she arrived in person, I fantasize about the corporate world with both excitement and horror. What will it be like? Am I ready?

This article examines how ethics were learned in a design anthropology class. Training in ethics is an essential part of any graduate program in anthropology, and we show how it was built into this course. At the same time, the fieldwork that students conducted as part of a client project for Motorola confronted some of them with unexpected and ethically ambiguous circumstances, which generated experiential learning as well. Regardless of how clearly ethical codes are written, researchers will always encounter gray areas in the field. The article presents a case study of one study participant who may have been intoxicated, analyzing this as an "extreme case" that brought ethical dilemmas into sharp focus. We conclude with suggestions for navigating ethical gray areas, based on class discussions about this and other ethical challenges.

Since March 2020, many employees around the world have been forced to work from home due to the COVID‐19 global pandemic. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have experience in working in isolation and confinement. This paper focuses on a comparison of astronauts on the ISS and Earth‐bound architects and interior designers restricted to working from home (i.e. their sofas) due to the pandemic. Isolation at work emerges as a complex phenomenon characterized by the measured and perceived distances between physical, social, and temporal spaces. By examining the scale‐making activities of NASA and HKS, analogs provide a possible means for studying and predicting the complex dimensions of isolation. The work ecosystem is a useful tool in conceptualizing and operationalizing the employee experience to design the future of work and workspaces.