Jacob Heftmann is a designer, teacher/coach, and Co-Founder of XXIX and Index. He’s currently the Graphic Design Director at Grilli Type and co-host of Works But Makes Noises. In this interview, he discusses the challenges of agency life, changes he implemented in his studio to prioritize health, the importance of self-initiated projects, and the evolving role of the designer.

Interview by Jonah Ginsburg, Director of DesignLabs.

Words from the interviewer are in bold italics.

JG: You’re a designer who thinks a lot about design as a discipline, and you help other designers build healthier and more fulfilling careers for themselves. When did you start reflecting on the discipline of design itself and all the ways it could improve?

JH: It started in agency life. The stress, long hours, deadlines, disorganization. There were great things too, and I learned a ton, but there were also things that made it very challenging. I thought that if I started a studio, I’d want to try and fix all the things that I thought were solvable. This led to a kind of manifesto that Jake Hobart and I developed, outlining what we would do differently. And we started to try and implement those things in our own studio.

It’s a process. You implement changes, some don’t work, it’s not as easy as you thought. You understand why certain things existed in the first place, but it’s a work in progress.

That was the first step towards thinking about this stuff. The second step was much more acute. I had a very severe panic attack completely due to work. It put me in bed for a week. I couldn’t get up. I’d never experienced anything like that. It was physically debilitating. I couldn’t work.

Luckily, Jake was super supportive. He ran the studio when I was out. I never had serious issues with mental health before that, and I suddenly felt like I needed to figure this thing out because I couldn’t put myself in that situation again. And I didn’t want it to happen to someone else in my studio. So, how could we build a healthier working environment? From that point basically that became my mission. Before that I would work super long hours, stressing over every single pixel. “Work brain” all the time. Work was the thing I thought was most important. And then I kind of reversed it and health became the most important thing, and if your health is good, your work will be good. It was a complete mindset shift.

JG: What changes did you guys implement in your studio to make things more healthy? And when did you start teaching other designers?

JH: I started teaching at about the same time that I had that episode. So how I thought about the studio was very similar to how I thought about a classroom in that you can do better or worse in school, but no good teacher would make you feel like you were in trouble for learning and making mistakes. And that’s kind of the vibe that I wanted to build in the studio. That’s one way that you can feel less stressed at work. But it was a whole bunch of different things that we wanted to do, ranging from small ones like leaving Slack for a messaging platform that doesn’t ask to be checked constantly, to profit share, which is one of the biggest things we did. All of the profit at the end of the year would go back to all of the employees. So there was never this feeling of “I’m working until 10:00 p.m. so someone else can get rich.”

Typically we say no work at night, no work on weekends, change the deadline. That was sort of the mantra of the studio. But if you decide to work because you want it to be absolutely perfect, at least you’re sharing in the profit from doing that and it’s not going to someone else. And that really changes the whole dynamic. So it wasn’t one thing. We were systematically looking at every assumption that every agency makes and really questioning each one.

JG: What about the role of non-client work? Client projects often don’t fully scratch the creative itch that most designers have. You guys have all these amazing self-initiated projects, almost always community oriented. How might that kind of work help make a career more fulfilling? And how would you suggest others start their own projects?

JH: Yeah, that’s a very good observation. I think another big stressor is how much do you love what you’re doing? Working two hours on something you hate is stressful. Working 12 hours on something you’re passionate about is fulfilling. So making sure that the types of projects that we take on in the studio are ones that the designers are actually interested in is a big way for people to actually enjoy working. And part of that is these side projects which become parts of the business, like Index for example. We didn’t have any money to do conventional marketing when we started the studio and we had all of these interests and curiosities. We were like, what if our studio was a shared working space, instead of marketing with ads or something. And we didn’t have a ton of work at the time so we could just make stuff and see how it landed. We did this studio exchange network and we built a little app for managing emails. Some of them hit and some of them didn’t. Index was one that hit and stuck around. That was our form of basically getting our name out there. Dropbox came to us because they saw the design we did for the studio itself with variable typography before variable fonts were out. That was basically how we got our clients, through experimentation.

I would say if you’re getting started in your career or if you’re looking for clients, unconventional means, just making things that feel authentic and that represent your interests, are a great way to do it.

JG: How has the role of the designer changed in recent years? How do you expect it to change in the future?

JH: That’s a big question, and I think everyone has their own thesis on it. I’d probably feel differently if I were just starting my career, but looking back, I got into design because I believed the iPhone would be a game-changer. That prediction was right, it changed the world, but I didn’t foresee that twenty years later, I’d be on the other side of it. I now feel that the iPhone has been quite damaging to our attention and our mental health. I’ve come full circle: I started out excited about technology, but now I’m skeptical. Is Airbnb actually good for cities? Are phones good for our brains?

We’re seeing a shift in large tech companies, and I find myself wondering if we are building products that help people or hurt them. It’s a mix, of course. There is always a cost-benefit to how technology is used, but I am much more conscious now of where I put my time and energy. I see everyone clamoring to do AI work, and it feels like we’re all frogs, the water temperature is rising, and by building this stuff we might be the ones accelerating the boil.

Personally, I feel a sense of unease about the role of the designer in this environment. We live in an economic system where we have to work, so how much agency do we really have in these decisions? Design has grown incredibly, designers are starting companies and sitting at the top of organizations. Design is recognized as a major differentiator now, but that comes with a lot of responsibility.

Design used to be a trade, almost a blue-collar job related to printing. Now it’s a prestigious white-collar profession. I wonder if our expectations of “what design means” have become inflated and if we might eventually return to a simpler place. There is a ton of uncertainty, and I feel a fair amount of anxiety about it.

As I move into the next phase of my career, I’m asking myself personal questions: I built my early career through connections on Twitter, but I don’t want to participate in that platform anymore. So, what is the community-building tool now? How do we make those connections today? Then there are the macro questions around AI. It’s on every designer’s mind. I get emails from students who are worried, and it’s not just a prediction anymore. They are seeing the effects on the job market in real-time. It’s an interesting and difficult moment.

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Erika Hall has been a voice of reason in the design community for over two decades. She is the author of Conversational Design and the industry-standard Just Enough Research. She is the co-founder and Director of Strategy at Mule. In this interview, she discusses the origin of her work, misconceptions about design research, and what it actually takes for organizations to learn and make better decisions.

Interview by Jonah Ginsburg, Director of DesignLabs.

Words from the interviewer are in bold italics.

JG: I really enjoyed reading Just Enough Research. It’s been incredibly helpful for me and many of the people I work with. What’s the backstory behind the book? What was the catalyst for writing it?

EH: When I got my first agency job, it was during one of those boom-and-bust cycles. I’d come out of a tech publishing company that had spun out a startup, so I “speed-ran” a few different types of companies already. I happened to get an agency job through a friend, and I immediately realized it was the kind of work I wanted to do.

Because they were hiring so fast, I was seated next to a researcher who had just come out of academia. He was an anthropologist and ethnographer by background. He was essentially a mentor to the whole team. So a few years later, when we started Mule Design, that way of working felt normal to me. But when we worked with clients, they would say, “Can we just skip the research part and get to the design?” I thought that was nonsense. You can’t make a thing until you know what you’re supposed to make. Even illustration should be research-based.

I was so tired of having the same conversation over and over again. I looked for reference material to point people to, but I didn’t find anything. The design research community at the time was small, and while I had friends who had written great books, they were 600 or 800 pages long and cost over $60. You can’t hand a client a giant, expensive book to convince them that research doesn’t have to take a lot of time or money. I wrote the book I wished existed. The title came to me first: you just have to do enough research to make the decisions you’re going to make.

JG: What do you think causes that typical feeling of wanting to skip over the research? What are the common misconceptions people have about it?

EH: There are so many misconceptions about design research. “Research” is a confusing word. People think it will feel like homework. The two biggest misconceptions are that design research is the same thing as academic research, and that you’re doing it to get “an answer.”

Design research shouldn’t be an academic exercise to generate a paper; it’s about learning what you need to learn in order to make a better-informed decision.

The decision is central. Once you talk through it like that—asking clients if they want to make good decisions or if they want to waste time and money—they get it. You do research so you don’t end up setting fire to a lot of money. The output you want is the best possible decision given your available time.

Another challenge is that most information about design research today comes from people trying to sell you software. They want you to believe that using the tool is the work. Organizations buy the most expensive or robust platform because they conflate the tool with the practice. You can do this work with a pencil and paper. The most useful approaches often don’t have a marketing budget because they don’t have a thing to sell.

JG: Do you have examples of what might go wrong without design research?

EH: Negative examples are much easier to find because if you do design research well, the result is often not doing something stupid or offensive. Success comes when the people creating a service truly understand the context and constraints.

Research isn’t a vending machine for insight. It all depends on your goals. What are your goals? And how did you choose those goals? The worst thing about “design thinking” when it’s practiced at a shallow level is that it doesn’t interrogate the goals. If you come in with a bad goal, research won’t help you.

A classic negative example is Walmart’s “Project Impact” from around 2009. They hired executives from Target and did a survey asking customers if they wanted the stores to be less cluttered. Of course, people said yes. They used that “bad” research to justify a massive redesign to attract customers during a financial crisis. They lost over a billion dollars, not counting the cost of redesigning the stores, and eventually had to undo it.

Every time you see a startup launch some nonsense that nobody wants, that’s a case for research.

A good exercise is to just walk around and start observing the world. Look at the things that are good and working and ask why are the good things like that? And then look at the things that are frustrating or bad or broken and ask why are the bad things like that? And you can find out why pretty quickly. But people just don’t do that.

JG: How does research in startups differ from research in more established organizations?

EH: This connects to the larger issue of financialization. In many startups, the real customer is the investor. Success is based on crafting a narrative to get more funding. At Mule, we generally have a rule against working with startups because they often don’t actually want research; they’re just “trying stuff.” It’s gambling versus science. If you don’t have a reality-based business model, research only gets in the way because real-world material conditions harsh your storytelling. We’ve seen a shift recently from huge research budgets to massive layoffs because these businesses are just selling a narrative to investors.

But research should look the same for them. They should be asking, “what information are we missing in order to reduce risk and increase the chance of success.”

JG: Let’s say, at some point, a startup has to confront reality and generate revenue from real customers. What would need to change organizationally? How does an organization learn how to learn?

EH: The basis of everything is collaboration. If you don’t have functional, collaborative decision-making, you cannot bring new knowledge into the organization. I see organizations bring in PhDs and specialists, but the decision-making culture is still one person’s word against another’s.

Researchers are often confused about why their work is being ignored. It’s because the organization isn’t set up to metabolize new information. If people aren’t allowed to ask questions or criticize ideas, research is just window dressing. I often see situations where the people making decisions will cherry-pick any data that supports what they already want to do. The only way to fix that is to have the organization commit to evidence-based collaborative decision-making.

JG: What’s the role of “Research Ops” and research infrastructure in turning an organization more evidence-based?

EH: You cannot operationalize a practice until you have a functional practice. If an organization has a broken culture and throws Ops at it, you just end up with a lot of repeatable processes for things that will be ignored. You have to start with a commitment from the top that it is safe to ask questions and perform critical thinking.

But absolutely it’s great to have people who can see across an organization. Something that functions like a corpus callosum, connecting the different parts of the organization through a research practice. Fantastic. But that doesn’t create the culture.

JG: Are there team structures that are more conducive to building the right kind of learning culture? And how do external partners fit in?

EH: It depends on the business, but ideally, all learning functions should be grouped together. What doesn’t work is having market research, user research, data science, and analytics all siloed. If the “quant” people and the “qual” people are fighting for legitimacy in the eyes of leadership, you won’t have good learning. The organization should operate like one brain.

I also hate the phrase “democratization of research.” Democracy is when you distribute decision-making power. Usually, when I hear democratization of research it’s just shitty delegation.

If you can do the work, you can learn the research tasks. People who are designers or technologists or product managers can do research. You don’t need a PhD to do the vast majority of product research or to figure out what your copy should sound like. I do wish everyone had taken a course in statistics, though. Most decision-makers who demand quantitative data don’t actually understand statistics; they just want a number to justify what they already want to do.

External partners like Mule are helpful when an organization has a lot of data but no shared understanding. We operate like a nimble management consultancy. We can go in and settle fights because we can’t be fired for asking the questions everyone else is afraid to ask. When design went in-house, the practice changed because job number one for an internal employee is not getting fired. To do good design, you have to be able to tell the truth, even if it’s “the emperor has no clothes.”

JG: What’s the story behind people’s bias toward quantitative research?

EH: It goes back to wanting an unambiguous answer. But you can’t measure what you don’t understand. You need to understand the phenomena in the world (qualitative) and then quantify it (quantitative).

In daily life, everybody knows how to do this. I use the vacation planning example all the time. If you’re planning a trip, you look at photos, you talk to friends who’ve been to Hawaii or Cancun, you compare prices, and you look at the weather. You do this whole mixed-methods research project to make sure you don’t regret your decision or end up on a crappy vacation. Everybody knows how to do that. But you put those same people in a corporate structure and they suddenly want “the one answer” that feels secure.

Many people talk about “hypothesis-driven research,” but you have to observe the world before you can even form a hypothesis. Measuring feels secure and depersonalized, whereas qualitative work is terrifying because you don’t know what you’re going to find. You might find out your whole strategy is wrong. Most dysfunctional research approaches are just people managing their own discomfort.

JG: What can teams do to get beyond discomfort-management and start actually learning?

EH: It all depends on what decision you’re making, what your goals are, and what you already know. The exercise I recommend is getting your team in a room and making a list of what you actually know vs. what you assume or hope to be true. You have to separate out the load-bearing assumptions that have no evidentiary basis. A couple of years ago I was the foreperson on a murder trial and I did this and it worked great.

But it can be scary. I’ve worked with clients who claim to know something only to realize later that it was only true for them personally.

Sometimes we’re working on something very complex and nuanced and we can’t get it wrong. Like when getting it wrong might mean harming a population or losing a tremendous amount of money. The amount of research should scale with the amount of risk and the amount of unknowns.

When you reframe it from “we need to do research” to “we need to learn” then you can get a lot more creative with your study plan. For example, you may not always have to do original research yourself. There’s so much work that’s already been done. You can read existing studies or good journalism. If you have the critical thinking skills to evaluate sources, the world is your research repository.

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Geoff Cook is a Partner at Base, a creative studio with offices in New York, Brussels, Geneva, Melbourne, and (as of recently) Saigon. In this interview, he discusses the state of Base, the increasing importance of producing exceptional, “net new” creative work, and two compelling recent projects (12 and Le Printemps).

Interview by Jonah Ginsburg, Director of DesignLabs.

Words from the interviewer are in bold italics.

JG: With the world transforming so fast, how is Base doing these days?

GC: The honest truth is that we have never been busier and the business is extremely healthy as a result. While many other firms are laying people off, our biggest challenge is finding world class people to add to our team across all disciplines, from strategy to design to digital. However, as the world changes, we have noticed that industries affected by tariffs are being extremely cautious. This is particularly true for consumer goods companies that manufacture in China. Yet in other areas like culture, tech, real estate, hospitality, and finance, business remains quite strong. This suggests to me that there is still confidence at the executive level that the economy is doing well despite the outside noise.

JG: You’re contrasting Base’s success with other firms. You think they’re in a different place?

GC: I know for a fact that many are in a different place. I do not know if it is due to the specific sectors they operate in or if they were simply overstaffed and running a little fat. I cannot say for certain what it’s attributable to, but I know from talking directly with others in the industry that the climate is affecting everyone differently.

JG: How much do you think AI is contributing to those layoffs?

GC: I don’t think AI is playing into layoffs yet. Currently, people are using AI as a tool rather than a replacement. The cutbacks are likely more attributable to general uncertainty or sector specific weakness. At Base, we are talking about AI endlessly. Because we have a digital innovation team within our firm, we have a deep bench that allows us to take greater advantage of these tools than the average studio.

We use it today in all aspects of our business. Project managers use it to write better proposals, it’s making our developers more efficient, and our business team uses it for basic contracts. I actually think lawyers at a basic level will see their work greatly diminished because agencies will be able to get a contract to eighty percent completion using AI before seeking finishing touches. We are even building our own agents to search our internal databases for files in minutes rather than days.

I think the replacement of the agency is just now starting. The mid-tier agencies producing good enough work are the ones that will get hit. This actually bodes very well for people at the top who are developing “net new” creative ideas. The top companies will seek out studios that develop truly original work in order to stand out from an increasing homogeneity, and they will pay a premium for that.

JG: What’s the process for producing “net new” work? What differentiates the top tier from the mid-tier studio?

GC: It’s quite simply about having the best people. Sure, we have to set up the parameters for people to do their best work. Like we don’t have people working late nights or weekends, and our project managers are excellent at gathering the right information from the client and doing check-ins at the right time. All of that is important, but eighty percent of it is just having the most talented people. It is like asking why Radiohead is better than other bands. Thom Yorke is just better… more creative. I am not sure there is a better answer than that.

JG: How do you find talented people?

GC: Most often, they find us. We are very rigorous about choosing projects that are compelling and ambitious. When we work with clients who want to do something fresh and out of the box, it leads to press coverage. Publishing that work within our network often attracts people who will fit well within Base. It is a pull rather than a push. For example, our recent work for 12, the matcha brand, resulted in design we’re really proud of and it garnered a great deal of press. Now we’re pulling in both talent and clients because of it.

JG: I would love to learn more about 12. How did the project come about?

GC: The family behind 12 partnered with one of the world’s great matcha farms in Uji, Japan, located in the hills outside of Kyoto. This is where the finest matcha in the world is produced, and this particular farm is even a step above, supplying the emperor of Japan’s matcha. Our clients acquired the rights to supply this matcha to the rest of the world and originally approached us about opening a retail brand in Hong Kong. After some discussion, we proposed a different route, which was to establish it as a Western brand.

As a matcha drinker who knows the market well, I felt there was a significant opportunity to take a big swing. In the market, there were independents like Cha Cha Matcha doing their thing and incumbents like Starbucks essentially making matcha milkshakes, but there was no equivalent to Blue Bottle. We wanted to go after that specific gap in the market. To achieve this, we orchestrated a world-class team. This included Ciguë, the renowned architecture and design firm out of Paris, and Sean Dix, an industrial designer and Tom Dixon alumnus, for the packaging. There was also Sue Chan, who was David Chang’s right hand, for the opening events and PR seeding. The client brought in their world-class tea master, along with Dr. Chris Loss, a professor at Cornell in the food science division. He created special blends of matcha designed to appeal to the American palate.

We coordinated every detail to create the finest matcha brand possible. Five weeks into our soft launch, the brand became a TikTok sensation. People today still wait in line, sometimes up to two hours on weekends, for a latte.

While many investors place small bets to see what sticks, I believe in a different approach that requires a greater investment of money and, most importantly, time. If you invest the time to do things correctly from the beginning, the results will follow.

JG: And what about Base’s recent work for Printemps in New York?

GC: Le Printemps is a heritage brand with over a hundred years of history in Paris. Coming into the New York retail market is incredibly competitive. The US CEO, Laura Lendrum, wanted to disrupt retail and asked Base to help shape those ideas. Our response was to treat it as a hospitality brand rather than a department store: we’re not going to design a department store, we’re not going to act like a department store, we’re not going to service people like a department store. We’re a hospitality brand. You’re going to feel as if you walked into one of the world’s finest hotels.

We also built the strategy from the inside out. Instead of doing the normal move of going after tourists, we catered first to the residents of the building, then, we worked our way outward in concentric circles. We next addressed the immediate neighborhood, then downtown New York, then greater New York, and then the tourists.

We wanted to break every rule and be completely unexpected. Our guiding principle was to be mischievously playful. The architect, Laura Gonzalez, developed a flexible design featuring transformative spaces with a unique flow. We integrated champagne and food at every turn. The merchandise is organized by theme rather than by brand, which is a total departure from how every other department store operates.

We created a high-concept document that we understand is now referred to as “the bible.” This was handed to everyone working on the project so they understood the sandbox they were playing in and the rules of engagement.

JG: Both of these projects seem to involve orchestrating a large team of carefully chosen collaborators. How else do these projects exemplify “net new” work and what can we learn from them?

GC: Several common threads make these projects successful regardless of the sector. The first is developing a clear concept and adhering to it through every stage. This requires a significant investment of time and energy. In our business, some subscribe to that level of commitment while others do not, but ensuring every person who touches the project follows that foundational concept is a vital first element.

The second is the commitment to hiring world-class talent. While it is more expensive, there must be a fundamental belief that top-tier talent will deliver exponentially greater results than the cost of the investment.

A third trait is found on the client side. It requires the ambition to be fearless and to trust talent to break rules or tropes to create something unexpected. Many investment firms try to de-risk by repeating what has worked before or copying the latest trend. It takes an ambitious vision to reject those common paths in favor of something “net new.” While this approach may appear more risky, hiring talent with established track records actually mitigates that risk.

The fourth through line is the intensity of the execution. The orchestration for a project like 12 involves many different experts and requires highly skilled point people on the client side to manage those processes. Alternatively, a client might invest more in a lead agency to handle that complex orchestration. It all comes down to time, money, and energy. If you invest in all three, the results will follow.

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Sam Ladner is a sociologist and one of the leading voices among applied ethnographers. She wrote the go-to handbook on the subject, Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector. More recently, she wrote Mixed Methods: A Short Guide to Applied Mixed Methods Research. She was the first Senior Principal Researcher at Workday and, before that, the first Principal Researcher at Amazon. In this conversation, she discusses her transition from academia to the private sector, the emic vs. etic approach, and the “luxury of insight” in the age of AI.

Interview by Jonah Ginsburg, Director of DesignLabs.

Words from the interviewer are in bold italics.

JG: I’m curious about your academic training and how it led you to applied ethnography.

SL: I was originally a journalist. I practiced interviewing and writing up observations in a journalistic way for years. I was a technology journalist, so I studied how people use technology, but the deep ethnographic part of it, which I did not even have a word for at that point, escaped my view. When I arrived at grad school for sociology, I figured my research training was going to be mostly quantitative, which it was, but I also took qualitative methods. By the time I finished my PhD, I had more qualitative experience than most of my classmates, partly because of that journalism background.

When I went into the private sector, it was good timing because people were starting to realize that technology was being built without much forethought or user centricity. I was able to bring my qualitative and quantitative skills to help people build technology that worked in both a business sense and a human-centric sense.

The biggest issue I found in the transition was that many people in the private sector were completely untrained in qualitative methods. They thought of research as rigorous only if it was quantitative, and they didn’t understand that qualitative research could actually be very rigorous and systematic, with checks and balances at every stage. Bringing qualitative methods into the private sector was difficult because good training didn’t exist at the time and people thought of it as a time sink.

JG: You then wrote a book on that transition, Practical Ethnography. Why did you write the book?

SL: I knew I wanted to teach this work. I did a couple of workshops and was looking at the literature, but there was literally nothing. There was the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community, or EPIC, but they mostly published case studies and papers rather than how-to manuals. I used those as examples, but I needed more. I thought I had to do it myself. I needed something that I could teach, and I also wanted to figure out what I had learned and make sense of my own journey.

JG: For people reading this who might not have any background in the field, how do you define ethnography?

SL: I usually define ethnography (from the Greek “ethno” and “grapho”) as writing about folk. Writing about what they do and how they live. I use the word “folk” on purpose because it’s an everyday, mundane description of what is actually a very complex topic, which includes customs, rituals, and the social reality that they find themselves within that is often invisible to them.

Ethnography involves not just interviews, although that’s a big part of it, but also observation. Observation is the big difference that people have to get used to. They may have heard of focus groups or light versions of research like ride-alongs, but what’s different about ethnography is the observation of everyday life. It’s about deeply understanding the social reality that people live in.

JG: Ethnography is usually done in-person and on-site. Why meet people in their own environment? And what gets lost when doing things remotely or in a lab?

SL: In journalism, there’s a saying: go, don’t phone. If you go to a person’s environment, you get more details. I used to think of it as just details, but after I got proper training, I realized that the details are about revealing everyday rituals, habits, experiences, and mental models. The objects around us say so much about why we believe what we believe and why we do what we do.

There’s also another part of it that took me longer to figure out. The contextual nature of ethnographic work in the private sector is extremely important because it reverses the power dynamic. Typically, the participant is the object you are interrogating to extract information. But if you do ethnographic work and you go to their context, they control everything. It’s their office or their home. They control the temperature, it’s in their language, it’s their place. This subtle reversal is important for people who build technology because they often have a lack of awareness of what matters to the end user. They think they can get a proxy for that by interrogation and pulling information out of users, but when you physically go to those people’s contexts, it completely changes your sense of humility and your approach.

In the book, I label this as “emic” versus “etic” perspectives. An etic position is one where the researcher defines the categories and the importance of everything. On the other hand, the emic position involves meeting the participant where they are and letting them take the lead.

JG: So a researcher with an emic approach doesn’t try to squeeze the participant into predefined categories. They leave things more open-ended and let the participant guide them.

SL: Exactly. Most people understand this from taking a survey where none of the answers fit them. The etic position tells you what categories you’re in and forces you to pick one. I remember doing ethnographic work with a physician. At the end of the day, he explained that he had done many focus groups in the past where researchers would ask him which party hat he liked. He would keep telling them that he didn’t want a party hat, he wanted an elephant. He much preferred talking to us, since we were there to understand what he wanted in the first place. He would never end up with a party hat category in an ethnographic study because he led us to the elephant.

JG: How does letting the participant lead the discussion affect the insights that ultimately come out of the study?

SL: Many people veer away from that open-endedness out of anxiety. Researchers have stakeholders who think they need to know X and Y, but really they need to know Z instead. A lot of researchers get anxious by opening things up because they worry they will not get the insight they promised. With an open-ended approach you can get the insight you planned on getting, though it may be reframed.

If you find during a participant-led interaction that your assumptions are wrong, it can be very stressful. However, it should be a wonderful opportunity to ask how you were so wrong. You can use that opportunity to gain new knowledge about something you thought was a closed case.

For example, let’s say you’re doing a study on radio listeners. You’re going to talk to people and ask, “Do you like talk radio or smooth jazz radio or contemporary hits radio?” And they say, “I don’t listen to the radio at all.” You might initially get worried that you’re in the wrong place. But then you find out the reason they don’t listen to the radio is because none of those categories make any sense to them. They’re far more eclectic in their listening and in their music choices, and they actually listen to music all the time. They just don’t listen to the “radio.” The reason your radio client is not getting this person’s business isn’t because they have too much smooth jazz and not enough contemporary hits. It’s because they have presented the product in a way that’s incompatible with that type of listener. Maybe nine out of ten participants you talked to really enjoyed listening to the radio because they didn’t like making choices. But that tenth person considers making choices core to their music listening. In order to appeal to those people, you need to give them choice first. That assumption busting is priceless. You don’t get that very often.

JG: Do you have some examples of when this kind of approach has been particularly helpful in guiding decision-making or directing a design project?

SL: During my time at Amazon I was researching an Alexa-enabled device. Leadership only wanted to do quantitative research, so I had to prove the method. I allowed the quantitative research to go ahead, I oversaw survey design and device analytics, but I convinced them to let me do some in-home observations as well.

A marquee feature emerged that everyone on the team loved and had put so much energy into. However, when we had people use the device naturalistically in their homes, we discovered the feature did not work at all. Worse, it was so incomprehensible that it made people question the entire device. It undermined the whole opportunity. I would never have gotten that insight had I not been in people’s homes with them, getting their realistic reactions. We managed to get that internally loved feature removed, which was a big deal.

Another example comes from my friends Charley Scull and Jay Hasbrouck, who wrote a paper on the sustainability of fishing. They hung out with fishermen and learned that there’s a concept called the “daily catch” which is more than just a number. It’s a mental model and a cohering metaphor that helps them understand their job. It gets in the way of sustainability because sometimes there’s no daily catch in sustainable practice. If you look at the daily catch objectively, it’s just a bunch of fish, a number. But if you do it ethnographically, you see that it weaves into everything: daily practice, ritual, employment incentives, even recruitment for the next generation of fishers. It changes how people think about sustainability, because sustainability sometimes doesn’t include catches. You’re basically asking people to reinvent everything.

JG: After the fieldwork is complete, once a researcher has their big pile of notes, transcriptions, photos, and videos, how should they begin to make sense of it all? The practice of finding patterns and themes throughout the data aligns with the emic standpoint, but in your book you also mention using existing social theories. Doesn’t that risk slotting people into predefined categories, which was one of our concerns about the etic perspective?

SL: The essential concept that you need to employ is reflexivity. I often think of Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography. She argued that the goal is not to research the people, but the institutions with which they interact. The people lead you, and then you turn your lens onto the institution to see how it enables or constrains them. If you keep in mind that your job is not to investigate people but the institutions they interact with, it’s so much easier to avoid slotting people into boxes.

Another way is through reflexivity checks. You can show a participant what you wrote about your experience with them and ask for their comment. Very rarely do I find that I have completely missed the mark, but if you give them the opportunity, they will tell you.

You can also use inter-rater reliability tests. You can code all your transcripts and then do a comparison with somebody else’s code. In the tool I use, MAXQDA, there is an AI feature that lets you chat with your coded segments. For example, I can ask if the data represents what Veblen called “conspicuous consumption.” The AI will look at the transcripts and tell me if that is a reasonable inference or point out exceptions. It acts like a research partner, but only after you have done the hard work. You cannot get AI to do everything for you.

JG: Do you see AI tools as a new way to scale up ethnographic research?

SL: I’m bored with the conversation around AI because it’s not revolutionizing my life, though it does offer an opportunity to relieve burden. Coding large transcripts has always been the bane of my existence. Once upon a time I used to write my own transcripts by hand with a foot pedal. AI came for the transcripts. I love it. AI can take that over. AI is now coming for first pass coding, I love it, fantastic, take it over.

But AI cannot come for interpretivist perspectives or emic perspectives. It can help me stay true to my emic perspective. The problem is that the opportunity to scale is not being employed correctly. Scaling should be about minimizing the burden on the human researcher and emphasizing their ability to do interpretive work. Instead, we see AI taking over everything and flattening interpretations into a laundry list of things that happened. Researchers who lack a theoretical background are the most threatened by AI because they do not know how to make that next level of interpretation.

JG: There are now tools for conducting AI-moderated interviews with real people. You wouldn’t call that ethnography, I don’t think anyone would. But at the end of your book, you talk about not being a purist and allowing for a plurality of approaches, because reality is complex and no one method is going to reveal every facet. Is AI-led interviewing a useful new tool to have in the kit?

SL: I rarely condemn any tool wholesale. Some research indicates an AI interviewer may allow participants to feel more comfortable sharing very personal histories, such as medical issues or abuse. However, it is self-defeatingly ironic when stakeholders choose to understand people through a technologically mediated method while claiming to be human-centric.

Deep understanding is not about interviewing thousands of people. AI-driven interviewing often equals zero human exposure. There is something philosophically important about seeing “the other” in a human encounter. You have no soul connection to your users if you use AI for everything. If we can demonstrate that AI interviewing is less triggering for victims of abuse, for example, we should use it. It’s like taking a painless breath sample instead of a blood sample. Of course we should use a less invasive form of interviewing. But do not be fooled into thinking you are changing your human centricity by doing so.

JG: It seems that as people start outsourcing more and more of their work to nonhuman intelligence, the need for real human-centricity becomes only more important. What role do you see ethnography playing as we move into this new technological era?

SL: It’s an opportunity to show unique value. High-touch human experiences are becoming a premium, luxury service, and the same can be said for ethnographic work. It is expensive in terms of time and travel, so ethnographers must demonstrate the “luxury of insight” and the unique value they offer.

The opportunity for ethnographers is about offering the only way to deeply understand other people, which is through visceral connection with another soul. How do you communicate the value of that in your research findings? You’re going to talk about emotion. You’re going to talk about story. One of the things I’ve been noticing a lot lately is that AI-written posts and “articles” are so meandering and boring. They’re not compelling. They’re not surprising. That’s where ethnographers can come in. Telling full, coherent stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Providing satisfying callbacks. Demonstrating double entendre and unintentional meanings. These are the kinds of values the human ethnographer can bring. But it’s on us. We’ve got to demonstrate it. We’ve got to bring that value.