Design Episodes

Bill Fleming stops by to chat with Adam about branding, marketing and design. Bill is a Boston-based Independent Brand & Marketing Strategist, and Business Consultant for Designers. On this episode we talk about what brands are, how the cultural work of branding has changed in recent decades with the advent of new and easier to use technologies, and how we can think about brands as conversations - not just between businesses and customers but also between businesses. Transcript of this epi...

At long last we are back! In this episode host Adam Gamwell talks with Design Researcher and Strategist Amy Santee. This is one of these conversations that's a few years in the making. Adam has been following Amy's work for a while now both on her blog anthropologizing.com where she writes about anthropology in industry, design and business, on LinkedIn and other social media sites as well as at conferences sharing the good work of doing anthropology in industry. Adam and Amy discuss what Des...

Adam and Andrea continue the conversation with Julie Lesnik, author of Edible Insects and Human Evolution, but this time they’re going prehistoric. Oh, and they’re talking about gorillas and chimpanzees too. Learn how to fish for termites, why we wish we had more baskets, and why any of those things matter to understanding human evolution. Edible Insects, part 3 Check out discussion questions here: https://www.thisanthrolife.com/insects/ More about Julie: https://www.entomoanthro.org/about-jul...

Think you could eat a cricket? What about a spider? In this episode of TAL Adam Gamwell and guest host Andrea Eller are chatting with Julie Lesnik about her new book, Edible Insects and Human Evolution. Listen in as they discuss why Americans tend to be so grossed out by bugs, and if it’s always been that way. Edible Insects, part 2 We know many of you are educators, and some are already using TAL in the classroom. Great! To help support the educational impact of TAL, we are including some disc...

Part 2 of The Social Life of Robots, with Emma Backe. In this episode hosts Adam Gamwell, Ryan Collins and Emma Backe tackle sex and gender norms underlying digital voice assistants like Siri, Cortana and Alexa, the history and gendering of science and technology studies (STS) and what this means in an era of AI and robots, and third, theories of rights such as the right to work, the right to sex and how robots clarify and confound these issues. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/t...

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move, an audio collaboration from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association, and This Anthro Life Podcast. In this episode, Adam Gamwell, Leslie Walker, and Ryan Collins dive into the topic of curation. What does it mean to put on a festival or put on a museum exhibit? How can we understand culture on display and introduce outsiders to other social realms? Sharing their narratives and experiences with...

On this episode of This Anthro Life, hosts Adam Gamwell and Matt Artz are joined by assistant professor and musicologist Nate Sloan and music journalist and songwriter Charlie Harding, the hosts of Switched on Pop, a podcast about the making and meaning of popular music. On Switched on Pop, Charlie and Nate break down pop songs to figure out what makes a hit and what is its place in culture. They also help listeners find "a-ha" moments in the music, make you laugh, dance, and dig deeper into the...

Design and anthropology have been seen together with increasing frequency over the last few years, but how do design and anthropology fit together in relation to industry? And, how does this pairing create insight? Adam and Matt (a guest host at This Anthro Life) are joined by Dr. Natalie Hanson to explore these questions and more. Dr. Hanson has been working at the intersection of business strategy, technology, social sciences, and design for nearly 20 years. This gives her a relatively unique...

In this Conversations episode of This Anthro Life, Adam Gamwell and guest host/TAL correspondent Matt Artz explore the world of Design Anthropology with the help of Dr. Elizabeth “Dori” Tunstall. Design Anthropology is a subject near and dear to our hosts, who have been excited to devote an entire episode to the subject. But, what is Design Anthropology? If you’re scratching your head, no worries. Adam, Matt, and Dr. Tunstall have it covered and describe the five iterations of design anthropolog...

This episode of This Anthropological Life presents a little differently from our normal episodes. The Society for Applied Anthropology generously allowed us to release the audio from Adam’s presentation at the SFAA 2017 Annual Meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, so this episode is based entirely on this presentation. Adam discusses a quinoa gastronomy project he is working on in conjunction with Dr. Alipio Canahua Murillo and Chef José Maguiña. They are designing an agricultural-gastronomy project ...

With the yearly release of new mobile phones, companies like Apple and Samsung have to sell the idea that we need a new device. With the release of wearable peripherals like Google Glass and Apple Watch, information communication technologies (ICTs) are becoming seemingly more personal. But are they? Will Near Field Communication (NFC) tech change how we exchange information, pay for food, or play games? How are different ICTs adopted, contested, altered and adapted across the world? How does te...

Join us for our funnest episode yet! Amy, Aneil, Ryan and Adam Exploring humans as a playful species through the world of gameshows, trivia, and popular culture – from TV to Movies and Music. Michael D’Angelo is the writer, producer, host, and star of the hilarious Old School Game Show which is a mixture of gameshow, alt trivia, pop culture reference show, dance routines, comedy and music! oldschoolgameshow on Facebook Episode 42, Season 4 Recorded 9/17/14 --- Send in a voice message: https:...

Episode 28 Season 3 “Up in the Cloud: Computing in the 21st Century (so far)” online now! The idea of a cloud evokes an immaterial floating world of information. Adam and Aneil turn the anthropological lens towards this idea to deconstruct the hidden material world required to support the immaterial network of cloud computing. We explore the changing relationships and meanings of ownership, exchange, and materiality through the rise of cloud computing. We further delve into different uses of c...

Episode 23 Non-Human Rights Available now! Join us as we dive into the world of non-human rights centered around recent court cases dealing with the rights of chimpanzees, our closest non-human cousins (though some might say they are, in fact, human). What are rights, exactly, and who gets to choose who (or what) does and doesn’t have rights? Turning our anthropological eye to the world or rights tells us a lot about how we define others and ourselves. Tune in for an awesome season finale and ...

From the farms of Central and South America and Africa to your favorite neighborhood coffee house, join us as we turn our anthropological eye towards the world of coffee! Connecting the ‘dark beverage’ from across the ancient Americas, to the change in coffee culture in the United States from the 1970s to today, plus Fair Trade, identity, and class coffee cross cuts an immense realm of human social and material life! So grab a cup of joe and join us for a ‘stimulating’ foray into the world of co...

Turning 75 isn’t only a big deal for Batman, it also marks a generational tradition of using graphic media to illustrate, comment on, and showcase different aspects of our own society. Even so, comic books have their roots in ancient media from sculpture, paintings, and hieroglyphic writing. What is it about the image and text, which draw us in, get us talking, and thinking of alternative stories. Tune in to This Anthropological Life as we talk about superheroes, supergods, and spandex! #comics...