Thursday, January 7, 2016

Design Thniking and Sex Toys

My first reaction to this story was the commencement address that Intel's famed senior cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell gave at Cal-Berkley in May 2008 - - "Be Naked As Often As Possible: Anthropological Advice":

"And last but not least, in my anthropological advice giving, I urge you to be honest and brave.  For anthropologists this means staying true to the stories we were told in the field, and keeping the details and nuances however inconvenient and contradictory they might be.  It also means telling those stories in a way that is open and accessible.  I remind my students and my employees that they have a responsibility to get it right - that when someone shares the details of their lives with you - you have a duty to do the right thing with that information.  At Intel this means I have fought very hard to give presentations that honored the people whose homes I have visited.  I learnt to resist answering questions like - "what are three key takeaways about China".  Instead I insisted that you had to know about history, and culture, and politics and perhaps then the right answers would be clearer.  It has meant, over the years, that we have haunted Intel with images, photos and stories of the people who would never make it to the corridors of the corporation.  We have tried to give them voice.  For all of you, I hope that this might mean owning being experts and managing the power it accords you - but with humility nor arrogance.  I hope it means asking the hard questions and giving the easy answers.  And I hope it means telling complicated stories not delivering sound-bites.  But most of all, I hope it means speaking truth to power."

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