This Anthro Life

What is it about coffee and tea - two simple drinks - that both transcends culture and is intimately bound up by it? In this episode, Adam talks with Independent documentary filmmaker and coffee anthropologist Brooke Bierhaus about her film "The Connected Cup" which explores the heart of coffee and tea as global human connectors across cultures and backgrounds. For the film Brooke traveled to over 9 countries to film and capture intimate moments, stories, and portraits of human life around the connected cup. We dig into:Brooke's process for filming across 9 countrieshow coffee and tea provide a window into what makes the good life and happinesscultures of coffee and tea around the globenarrative and ethnographic voice as part of filmmakinghttps://www.theconnectedcup.com/https://www.instagram.com/itsbrookebierhaus/https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10149658/Brooke's Bio from IMDB: Brooke Bierhaus is an American award-winning documentary filmmaker and visual storyteller. Brooke is known for her feature film, "The Connected Cup", following the heart of coffee and tea around the world as a global language of connection. Brooke has worked and produced stories in 22 countries.--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

Today we talk with Voltage Control president Douglas Ferguson and we're taking you beyond the prototype. If you ever run a design sprint, or even if you simply sat down at your desk to think through a really cool idea for a product or a new podcast or how do we improve something in your neighborhood. You started the design process. The question is, how do you go from a good idea to putting something out into the world? Douglas helps us find out. "You gotta slow down to go fast" - Douglas FergusonVoltage Control president, design thinking facilitator and innovation coach Douglas Ferguson recently published a book called Beyond the Prototype that aims to help teams and organizations (and individuals!) go from generating awesome ideas to implementing them. Over the course of our conversation we cover:the power of systems thinkingseeing variables in the design ecosystemfacilitation as model through systems thinkingThe connections between organizations and society.HR departments using design thinking to point the lens inwardCaution that when we compress ideas there is opportunity to meaning to be lostWhy facilitation is such a crucial rolefor example, realizing if you’re using one word to mean two things, or two words to mean the same thing - skilled facilitating brings these discrepancies and differences in meaning into focus for teams to help them overcome roadblocks in understandingWhy so many start up founders get stuck on the idea of scale rather versus pursuing a smaller, but passion-driven ideaHow design facilitation sessions are about harnessing the power of the child’s mind - playful energyand debriefing as a crucial stage in any process: can you answer the question of why did we did this?Links and Resources mentioned in today's episodevoltagecontrol.combeyondtheprototype.comstartwithin.comBeyond the Prototype bookJake Knapp - Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five DaysGreg Satell - Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational ChangeDavid Epstein - Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is a next-generation observatory currently under development that has created a watershed moment for the scientific community and Hawaiian society. This is because of its planned location on Mauna Kea… the most sacred mountain in the Hawaiian religion. But the case of TMT and Mauna Kea is not an outlier because mountain summits often have profound meanings to both indigenous cultural practitioners and technology developers. For example, Kanamota is another sacred mountain that is the site of technological development. It's also known as Mount Saint Helena. Ian Garrett is the co-founder and director of the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (CSPA) and an Associate Professor of Ecological Design for Performance at York University. He's collaborating with indigenous communities to understand and express how contested spaces are experienced through virtual reality. In this second installment of Starstruck, we talk with him about his ongoing collaborations with indigenous communities and explore the use of diminished reality to make the observatories on Mauna Kea disappear.Starstruck Episode 001Check out our Prelude episode on the background of the Thirty Meter Telescope, Will We Find God with this Machine? Produced by Adam Gamwell + Missing Link Studios + Mindshare--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

Produced in collaboration with Experience by Design.  We are witnessing a moment in our lifetimes that we will hopefully never see again. The world is gripped in a pandemic of a scale unseen for a  century. Beyond the human toll, we are seeing how healthcare systems  people once had trust in crumble before their eyes. In this episode,  Adam and Gary talk with Shelley White and Meenakshi Verma-Agrawal of the  Simmons University Masters of Public Health program on what we learn  from this moment, and how we can design a more inclusive healthcare  system.Shelley White is an Assistant Professor of Public Health and Sociology, and Program Director of the Master of Public Health.Meenakshi Verma-Agrawal is the Assistant Program Director and Associate Professor of Practice at MPH@Simmons.What  a difference a week makes. Or does it? With the expanding pandemic of COVID-19 disrupting more lives, many here in the United States might  feel caught off guard, or that things have changed to rapidly. Now  health care is a constant concern.What Shelley White and  Meenakshi Verma-Agrawal help us put in perspective is that even though  we can all get sick, public health and care has always been political,  and who has access to care, and even what diagnoses one gets, have been  deeply tied to class, race, ethnicity and other socioeconomic  classifications. Public health, in fact, is designed. Moments of  pandemic, where a virus crosses borders and bodies with no care for the  social structures we’ve erected, brings to light the radically unequal  way our public health systems are designed. For middle class families  who find themselves for the first time concerned about the lack of  available health care or beds at a hospital, must now contend with the  fact that this is a common reality for many poorer communities and  communities of color.But moments of crisis like this are also  moments of hope. As Dr. White notes in the conversation, we have to  remember that there are more people who seek equity and change than  those who benefit from the status quo. What's radical is to acknowledge  the racial, social, and economic injustices that frame our public health  system and to then set about to change those inequities for a more just  world. covid-19 public health healthcare design experience design health inequalities--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

Gigaom CEO, publisher and author of "The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity" stops by virtually to chat with Adam and guest host Astrid Countee to help us make sense of just what Artificial Intelligence is, what are its promises and limits, and what this means for the possibilities of conscious computing and smart robots. Byron breaks down the philosophies behind our ways of thinking about AI in way that gives us new social tools to approach the deep technological revolution we are undergoing in a more human and even optimistic manner. Website: https://byronreese.com/Twitter: @byronreeseFacebook: @byronreeseLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/byronreese--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is a next-generation observatory currently under development that has created a watershed moment for the scientific community and Hawaiian society. This is because of its planned location on Mauna Kea… the most sacred mountain in the Hawaiian religion. Dr. Mindshare been studying this issue from their perspective as a cultural anthropologist for over a decade. This prelude offers a brief history of the controversy.TMT reveals the value of systems thinking — or thinking like a social scientist — for understanding the human experience more fully. Over the course of 2020 Mindshare will be collaborating with anthropologist Adam Gamwell, of This Anthro Life, alongside thought leaders from various disciplines to provide another level of insight as this story unfolds. Everything Dr. Mindshare posts can be used freely under a Creative Commons-ShareAlike license, including the audio version of this paper below. Feel free to register/log in to Mindshare if you would like to follow this project and join this conversation about TMT.Link: Original Article/Transcript: https://www.mindshare.app/home/provocations-public/starstruck-how-science-sparked-an-uprisingTwitter: www.twitter.com/drmindshare--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

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 episodeBillfleming.comBill on TwitterIdeas and Articles we referencehttps://www.commarts.com/columns/the-sensitive-anthropology-of-brandinghttps://raleighgreeninc.com/blog/2011/07/31/an-anthropologists-approach-to-branding/https://lippincott.com/insight/b2b-brands-in-the-human-era/This episode is brought to you in part by Experience By Design, a new sister podcast Adam makes with sociologist of work Dr. Gary David. ExD explores all things at the intersections of experience and work, from employee experience at Amazon to escapee experience with Escape the Room adventures to making people love Jet Blue despite hating airports. It's a fascinating world, come explore it with us. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

A happy New Years! Enjoy this mini-episode with Adam and Dr. Ryan Collins exploring happiness and the good life according the Aztecs. New Years is a great time to reflect on where we've been, where we're going, and what's it all for. We find some answers and surprising wisdom with the Aztecs. Purcell - The Aztecs on HappinessCarrasco - Daily Life of the Aztecs--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

Special guest podcast! - Adam Gamwell guests on Trending in Education with Mike Palmer.  For this week’s extra, Mike is joined by Design  Anthropologist and Podcaster, Dr Adam Gamwell, to explore how robots,  science fiction, and anthropology are interrelated. In a free flowing  and imaginative conversation, we explore how the narratives and secular  myths of pop culture and our collective consciousness provide insights  into how we understand what it means to be human, how we engage with the  Other, and how we grapple to understand how new technologies are  driving profound changes to the world around us.Listen in for an illuminating conversation. We hope you enjoy!Catch more great episodes of Trending in Education over on Stitcher--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message

Why More Security Never Feels like EnoughStoryslamming Anthropology Series, Story 3. Written and Performed by Astrid CounteeIn recent years, the terms Public and Anthropology have been paired with more frequency. Yet, what this seemingly suspect partnership is, how it could function, and what goals it could have are still in relative formation. Today, public anthropology might mean several different things ranging from jargony lectures that are “open to the public”, digital media (like blogs, videos, or podcasts) that are generally accessible online, or presentations given to an informant public on work produced by a researcher. Large voids remain. We ask, then, why not turn to already publicly oriented writing for inspiration? What if “Guns, Germs and Steel” (Diamond 1999), “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, (Harai 2015) or “Freakonomics” (Levitt and Dubner 2009) were written by anthropologists?What if we told you that once upon a time, they were? When Margaret Mead wrote “Coming of Age in Samoa” in 1928, anthropologists and non-anthropologists alike flocked to her work because of its accessibility - and felt topical relevance. Could such an achievement be attainable today?While some scholars might reject an approach based on “popular” writing, we argue that the enormous success of the above books (as well as the podcasts, YouTube videos and Netflix series based on them) demonstrates a general interest in theories of humankind, what it means to be human in the contemporary world, and throughout history. We ask why have anthropologists not followed suit? Despite the massive amount of scholarship published each year by anthropologists, none seem to crack that elusive space between rigorous research and “pop-science.” While there are trade offs between academic complexity and writing for a lay audience, the theme of the 2017 American Anthropological Association conference, "Anthropology Matters!" speaks to our need to talk across (and storytell) different worlds. Our goal with this experimental panel was to invoke the public spirit of Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Melville Herskovits and others to speak to 21st century concerns from a comparative perspective in clear language. We picked papers that revealed juxtapositions, seemingly counter- or non- intuitive links between subjects, objects, ideas, emotions, practices, or traditions that we felt can intrigue, educate, and delight participants. The goal of this series of to expand our genres of sharing ethnographic and anthropological insight. We hope you enjoy!Story 1: #MeToo: Stories in the Age of Survivorship by Emma BackeStory 2: Fear and Loathing in Truth or Consequences by Taylor Genovese--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisanthrolife/message