Erin B. Taylor & Melanie T. Uy: Anthropologists & Authors of Better Research, Better Design: How to Align Teams and Build a Human-Centric Company Culture.

Dr. Erin B. Taylor has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Sydney and is the founder of Finthropology, a company specializing in insights into people’s financial behaviour. She specializes in how people’s financial behaviour is changing along with innovation in financial services, and has carried out ethnographic research in the Caribbean, Africa and Europe. Erin is especially interested in how culture and group belonging influence people’s actions and decisions.

Dr. Melanie T. Uy is a lifelong learner and known for unexpected questions. She is a ritual specialist focusing on the practices of social connection and disconnection and its impact on work and workplaces. Her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam researched how social detachment was essential to the work of migration brokers in China. She currently works as a user experience researcher in the Netherlands and previously ran consumer studies for the retail and healthcare market in the Philippines.

We are excited to have Erin and Melanie with us to share this joint research project. This project is intended as a toolkit for researchers and their colleagues to help them position the value of their work and bring it forth to a desired organizational level. We ask the authors how did the idea for the project come about? How did they organize the research and what were the unexpected insights that emerged from it? Melanie and Erin ask back whether they were right or wrong with their conclusions. Listen to the episode and feel free to reach out to the authors to share your feedback.

Mentioned in Podcast:

Better Research,

Better Design: How to Align Teams and Build a Human-Centric Company Culture by Erin B. Taylor and Melany.T.Uy

Active8 Planet

American Anthropological Association (AAA)

Applied

Anthropology Network (AAN)

EPIC 2022

Finthropology

Gillian

Tett

Moving Matters: People, Goods, Power and Ideas, University of Amsterdam

Response-ability Summit

The National Association for the Practice of Anthropology

UXInsight 

Social Media:

Erin: LinkedIn

Melanie: LinkedIn; @anthrobuzz on Medium and Goodreads