Photographic Anthropology?

This is a quote from Laurent Haug's blog (LIFT lab), a post entitled "free to be a clone":

As diversity is diminishing, we end up with what Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek have captured in their work Exactitudes (contraction of exact and attitude), “an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity“. These pictures are fascinating, disturbing, eye opening, familiar but strange. They show that we have reached a point where the more different you try to be, the more similar to others you become. What was true in niches a while ago (think punks, tektonik, black turtle-neck creative directors, etc) is now becoming mainstream.

I think that these pictures are the most powerful means of demonstrating this trend, and it is an interesting way to do ethnography.

(Anyway, I think this research is fascinating and I wish I knew about this when I wrote my undergraduate thesis on consumerism/identity-formation/mental health).

Information Visualization in anthro

http://liftlab.com/think/nova/2008/09/03/diagrams-and-visuals-in-anthropology/

(Thanks for this, Sam!)

Synthesizing my investigations into workspace

I found it very difficult to know how to synthesize the information I had amassed regarding workspace without knowing who the audience was. I somewhat panicked and wrote a stream-of-consciousness style piece at first, mostly because I struggled to find a visual means to communicate what had become a rather complex set of data. Essentially I wasn't willing to let go of some of the complexity in order to make it simple enough to turn into a diagram. I could envision it as a 3-dimensional web of information, but basically it resembled a tangled ball of string.

Once I knew that this synthesis might be shown to people at the conference in California this week, I realized that the best way to communicate this message was visual, so I began unraveling the string. I found that the overarching theme regarding workspace was "comfort." This could further be divided into three sub-categories of comfort: physical, psychological, and practical (i.e. the space needed to fit the purpose or imagined use of the space). These three each were further divided in two... but at this point the divisions began to straddle two of the sub-categories. For example, the "look" of the room, a physical concern, overlapped with the room's "atmosphere", a psychological concern. And one higher level further clouded (or joined) the lower-level divisions.

This made for a complicated information visualization exercise. What I ended up finding was that I could do (what I am dubbing) a "flattened 3-dimensional diagram": the layers preserve the complexity of the data and flattening the view allows for an easily communicable visual display.

How the diagram works: It is a multi-layer nested Venn diagram, sort of. The lowest layers are the most important (according to the data), and generally the broadest. For example, "comfort" is the most important theme, so it serves as the foundation, the bottom layer. And I found that people tended to discuss the psychological aspects as most important, then practical, then physical, so the psychological circle is positioned below the other two, and practical is below physical. There were some outliers that if included inside the circle diagram would look strange, so I extracted them - color, privacy, personalization, adaptability, openness, and clutter. These were the most minor points, and would therefore be the highest up in the layers, but I pulled them out and attached them to their main thematic category(-ies) by a pink line. In this way I was able to preserve complexity while being able to present a simple visual explanation of my findings.

I found this to be a surprisingly elegant representation of my findings. I think it looks cool, but it also contains a lot of synthesized information. Smaller details are available for those who want to read further (pulled to the sides), which is quite similar to the navigation design I used when designing the navigation scheme for my MFA thesis project. It seems I'm still not willing to let go of the details.

Anyways, this is the kind of thing I hope to do in the future: helping with the visualization of complex information and/or presenting ethnographic findings in a visual way.