Our discipline fetishizes ethnography yet tends to keep the prize out of undergraduate students’ reach, citing practical constraints for letting students do real fieldwork. This leaves students already struggling with the question of what to do with a cultural anthropology degree in a difficult place. Anthropology's main promise—to understand other cultures through a deep engagement with ordinary people—is one they have never experienced personally. Yet they will have to justify their choice of university degree in years to come. This article discusses an experimental course at Colorado State University in the growing field of design anthropology in which a student team of researchers collaborated with a team of product managers, innovation strategists, and designers at Otterbox, a locally headquartered company that makes protective smartphone covers. Students practiced a condensed form of ethnographic research with smartphone users in Northern Colorado and investigated the theme of “disconnection” from technology. [design anthropology, technology, business anthropology]

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Ethnographic methods have filtered from academia to product development, particularly in the technology industry, and into the broader ‘human-centered’ design practice. In the process, the ethnographic influence has entered the toolkits of other practitioners. This article argues that, despite an overall positive impact, the implementation of ethnographic methods has had less of an impact on the tendency to think of people primarily in relation to a specific product or service as “users”, “customers” or “clients”, which results in both a simplistic and individualistic view of human experiences. I argue that there is untapped potential in our discipline’s holistic thinking as applied to our work outside of academia. One existing avenue that lends itself to translating holism into design is service design, a field of practice that shifts the focus from the design of one-off solutions (material products, digital products and others) to the design of a system of products, interactions and processes intended to serve ordinary people, often with the objective of improving their lives and well-being. These services can encompass, but are not limited to any one, digital interactions, physical products, communication materials or human interactions, and address the behind-the-scenes organizational change that must occur to support the creation and maintenance of services focused on people. Anthropologists can bring a special perspective to service design through their attention to understanding whole systems and, in the process, can counteract the individualism inherent in some design practices and corporate frameworks. The examples used here reflect my own experiences as the anthropologist informing service design projects.

In the village of Yapatera, Peru, there exists a folk theory of race which posits that humans cannot be divided into mutually exclusive racial groups and that personhood is both physiologically and socially 'mixed'. By engaging with the psychological literature on racial essentialism (i.e. the tendency to view humans in terms of discrete categories, as if they were natural kinds), this article digs deeper into the local folk theory of race. Experimental tasks were designed to test the inductive potential of race and revealed that villagers are far more likely to use other social categories (class, religion, kinship and place of origins) than race to base their inferences. The article discusses the use of experimental tasks as a vehicle for a different sort of conversation between ethnographer and informants.