Design Anthropologist
Tim Plowman brings more than 10 years of exploratory and design-based anthropological research experience to Cheskin. Tim specializes in designing and conducting ethnographic analyses of user experiences that support the conception, design, and branding of products and services. He also has extensive experience in applications research, design guideline and specification development, interaction design, human factors testing, and multi-modal interface design. Prior to his design-based ethnographic work, Tim conducted long-term ethnographic research in Brazil, Puerto Rico, and San Francisco.
1 February 2005
This morning as I stumbled out of bed and into the kitchen, I began to mentally tick-off an inventory of possible food items that I might put into our two year old daughter’s lunch for the day. Being a devoted working parent, I like to try to give her a variety of healthy foods for her to reject while I am not looking. At the end of the day when I dump the considerable contents of her small Tupperware containers into the trash, I know I have succeeded, at least in giving her variety.
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Posted in
Consumer Goods Trends
by Tim Plowman
6 May 2004
On a recent trip to Tokyo I was struck by the careful attention paid to impression management by many of the city’s residents. Everywhere I looked it was Italian suits and designer purses (granted I spent most of my time in Shibuya). Well, not everywhere but the clothing, gestures, use of space, and communication employed by the people I encountered revealed the contours of “everyday” self-presentation precisely because it seemed strange to me. When you think about it, compared to the rest of the world (even discounting similar, relative income levels), Americans are slobs.
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Posted in
Methods & Techniques
by Tim Plowman, 0 comments
19 February 2004
When Apple released its iLife ‘04 suite containing a music creation program called Garageband in early January, they successfully tapped into a longstanding and deep cultural current. In his keynote address, Jobs cited a Gallup poll asserting approximately half of all US households include at least one member who actively plays a musical instrument. While that number seems high to me, it is historically resonate, if not currently accurate.
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Posted in
Innovation & Design
by Tim Plowman
10 October 2003
I have been thinking about the role brand played in the recent landslide election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the office of governor of the formally-great state of California. All the political pundits could talk about in the post election haze was the role of voter anger in ousting Gray Davis from office. This reductive focus on the mechanics of representative democracy misses a far larger point: Brand.
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Posted in
Positioning & Branding
by Tim Plowman
2 September 2003
The emergence of flash mobs has created quite a media stir over the past few months. Now that they have occurred in many of the world's major metropolitan areas, some reflection on the hyperbole is in order. Opinions about what flash mobs mean or might mean are as varied as the ideological axes each commentator has to grind. Some see it as performance art, symbolic disruption, general goofiness, social movement, biologistic metaphor, information decentralization, Situationist tool, to name a few. I have to say that I take exception to the notion that flash mobs mean anything more than what they are in the moment - a random game of duck, duck, goose, overwhelming retail environments, spectacle, and public displays of seemingly random behavior. Historically, the power of technology (when considered in apart from its social context) has been vastly overrated and astonishingly misinterpreted. I can already hear the far off din of frenzied theorizing shifting into overdrive as I write this. Objectively speaking, flash mobs are largely a middle class, cosmopolitan, technocratic conceit, leaving the majority of the planet's inhabitants far out of the loop. If the global lack of food and potable water got as much media coverage as flash mobs the world would be a far better place. Indeed, the backlash has already begun. One of my favorite screeds about the overwrought interpretations of flash mobs can be found here.
Posted in
Consumer Technology Trends
by Tim Plowman
11 July 2003
Over the past few years ethnography and ethnographers have been popping up everywhere I turn. From human computer interaction, to branding, to computer supported co-operative work, to product development, to tangible computing, to advertising. The value of the unique insights offered by ethnographic approaches in a commercial context is now pretty much undisputed and lots of different entities are willing to meet the demand for ethnographic insights.
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Posted in
Methods & Techniques
by Tim Plowman, 0 comments
