business-anthropology
What do I do in Business Anthropology?
Since 2023, my concern as a service designer for a deeper understanding of the groups under study in design projects has led me to anthropology. My goal was to be able to proceed in the solution design process based on a deeper and more accurate understanding of the real daily lives of target groups in society, especially in projects aimed at social impact.
To achieve this goal, I participated in the theoretical and practical anthropology courses of Asghar Izadi Jeyran, Associate Professor at the University of Tabriz. With his guidance and based on my professional resume and personal spirit, I chose the field of business anthropology to focus on. As my first project in this field, I chose “the work life of service design practitioners” as my research topic. Accompanied by my colleagues at a service design agency who hosted my observation, and by adopting the research method developed by my supervisor, Mr. Izadi, I conducted the project “Organizational Anthropology of Service Design” as my first work in this field.
Research in business anthropology and conducting practical projects in this field is a topic that has been added to my work schedule in recent years and will continue to be so, although conducting projects in this field, as a "participant observer," will inevitably be tied to my personal career path.
Service Design Organizational Anthropology Project
My study focused on a service design team in Tehran. I observed this team, which was part of a service design agency, on a project related to one of the agency’s employers for six months from July 2023 to January 2024. My presence in the field was both in the online space of the team’s communication with each other and in person at the employer’s organization, accompanied by team members. The team did not have a fixed office space at the time of my observation. The field study was conducted by observation, and a few informal interviews were also conducted during the observation. However, my own 8 years of experience in this field is both part of and complementary to the observation, which can also be considered a form of autoethnography. Therefore, in the texts presented, you will sometimes see scenes from my personal experiences. After completing the field observation in January, I completed the descriptive field notes. After reviewing my notes, the themes and categories covered in these descriptions were extracted.
This study aims to reflect a small part of the vast world of Iranian service designers so that both those working in the profession and those unfamiliar with it can see a brief picture of what service designers experience in their work and their internal and external communications. The results of the study were communicated in detail to the manager of the studied team, and a small number of them, whose topics seem to be common to many service design teams, were selected for public publication. Sixteen essays, which are categorized under two main sections: 1) Challenges related to the design process and 2) Challenges of intra-team communication. In the first section, the emphasis is on the specific characteristics of service design that affect or are affected by its implementation and communication with the client and other project stakeholders. The second section is a more general topic that may be seen in non-design teams too, in the human and communication aspects of team members. On this website, the first section will be published first, followed by the second section, in order.
I hope that reviewing the results of this study will lead to some clues to improve service design practice. It would be a great favor not to leave me and the audience without the opportunity to express your opinions on the material.
Note: All names and, to some extent, the location information of the studied sites have been changed to respect the privacy of individuals.
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