Amy Goldmacher, PhD

Here's a collection of practitioner interviews on what workplace anthropologists do, where they do it, and some of the practical and ethical issues involved.

​https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU-1sgZm_Qn8kjHdi03dVUg

​My alma mater, Grinnell College, published a nice feature on my work as an anthropologist in business.

"'The study of humans by social scientists is particularly useful', explains self-employed anthropologist Amy Goldmacher '96, on the “fuzzy front end” of design. 'I...

In honor of World Anthropology Day (Feb. 18, 2016), I wanted to illustrate what a day of work is like when I’m employed as an anthropologist, so I took some fieldnotes on my experiences during the day. Sometimes, when I talk with prospective anthropologists, they want...

One of my personal and academic interests still is the professionalization of anthropologists. To that end, I volunteer on the Committee on Practicing, Applied and Public Interest Anthropology (CoPAPIA) in the American Anthropological Association (AAA). The mission of...

The ability to create insights from understanding how people engage with the world is: 

"a capacity for integrating a vast amalgam of constantly changing, multicoloured, evanescent, perpetually overlapping data, too many, too swift, too intermingled to be caught and p...

How Intel uses anthropology: to understand how people interact with electronics to design new technological experiences:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/technology/intels-sharp-eyed-social-scientist.html?smid=fb-share&_r=1

Prototype and test, prototype and test: part of a healthy iterative product development cycle:

​http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/18/the-xbox-one-controller-projectors-smells-and-other-stuff-that-didnt-make-it-in-part-1-exclusive/

 I like this definition and description by IDEO's Tim Brown:

​“Design thinking” — a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos. By this I mean that innovation is powered by a thorough understanding, through di...

A little design researcher humor for the day:

Q: How many design researchers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Does it have to be a lightbulb?

​Always question the question to make sure you're in pursuit of the right solution.