The Anthropology of Design and User Experience (UX) Research

The field of design and the burgeoning field of User Experience (UX) research has recently applied the methods anthropologists have used for over a century.The methods of cultural anthropology are distinctly aligned to ask questions about motivations, beliefs, values, and relationships within cultural systems through direct participant observation, surveys, focus groups, and archival research. Privileging critical listening, empathy, and perspective-taking, we try to discern why people do what they do, and apply these questions to human-centered design.