Ari Nave: Design Anthropology, User Research, Corporate Culture and Culture Change

Ari Nave is a design anthropologist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Trained as an anthropologist at UCLA, he is the founder of The King’s Indian - a strategic consulting firm sitting at the intersection of design and brand strategy.

Focused on evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics, he works to fit ethnographic sensibilities into a start-up environment. Grounded in user-insights, Ari has worked with companies’ design teams to produce products, experiences, services, communications, strategies and brands.

In today’s episode we talk to Ari Nave about his career path and the competitive advantages of using ethnography and/or anthropologists in product design.

We explore the internal politics of corporate culture: ownership of power and control over the product, advocating for user research and adjusting to the corporate world from academia. We touch upon the ethics of user research before exploring the possibility of doing an ethnography of the corporate world itself and how culture change happens, especially in a corporation.

Mentioned in podcast:

Marvin Harris - Cultural Materialism (https://books.google.co.nz/books/about/Cultural_Materialism.html?id=8Xc9DMbB5KQC&redir_esc=y)

Speaker’s work:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rise-partisan-brand-ari-nave-ph-d-/

Follow speaker:

http://www.arinave.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/arinave/