Video: Grant McCracken, PhD
HTML 5 accessible player with share button. This is the player we use on AIGA.org.
Filmed on: October 25, 2008
About this video
Grant McCracken, PhD, talks about how anthropology
should be a core competency of designers because it’s far too important
to be left to the anthropologists alone. Culture is part of the
corporation, he says, but no one owns it—and designers should be the
ones to claim it. Culture matters to corporations because if you don't
understand it deeply, you can miss out on billions in sales. It is up to
designers to know culture on a deeper level and to make it part of
their core competence, which can only make designers more valuable to business.
Speaker bio
Grant McCracken holds a PhD from the University of Chicago in cultural anthropology. He is the author of Culture and Consumption I, Plenitude, Big Hair, Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning and Brand Management, The Long Interview, Flock and Flow and the soon-to-be-published Transforming Selves.
He has been the director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at
the Royal Ontario Museum, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business
School, a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and he is now a
research affiliate at MIT. His blog, Culturby, covers the intersection of anthropology and economics. He lives outside New York City with his wife.