Anthropology and Finance in 2018

Anthropology and Finance in 2018

As we start a new year, the question of which technologies will dictate the tech sphere, becomes salient. From bitcoin and blockchain to augmented reality and affective computing, new technologies are rapidly paving a future that will significantly disrupt key areas of human life, including travel, healthcare and finance.

As we know, technology has changed the very way we experience daily life. Intelligent assistants like Siri and Alexa have altered the way we communicate, and increasingly personalised services are helping us to make informed decisions. Advancements in AI technology – through machine learning algorithms – have changed how we connect with others as chatbots are increasingly being utilised in businesses, call centres and mobile apps.

In this scenario, one would not normally assume the hand of anthropology in emergent technologies and yet, design and anthropology are key players driving the change. It is a useful reminder that anthropology has evolved from providing academic tools within the field, to providing concrete ways of exploring human experience within technology. As companies increasingly recruit designers and UX researchers for projects that utilise AI and machine learning, the role of anthropology has become more relevant than ever.

With the increasingly shifting landscape of technology and data, it has become essential for designers to not simply base their findings on quantitative data, but to practice fieldwork by observing people’s experiences in the real world. This fieldwork aspect can be achieved through utilising ethnography: immersing oneself in real-life situations in order to truly understand the user and their experiences.

Finance, for instance, is a key area in which new technologies have caused major disruption and changing the very way in which we take financial decisions. There are three ways in which design thinking and anthropology work fluidly and in tandem with finance this year:

(1) Fintech and the role of personalisation

The explosion of Fintech has caught the finance world by storm. Traditional financial services companies are increasingly struggling to compete with the emerging disruption and ambiguity caused by Fintech startups, and this trend is likely to continue through 2018.

Fintech uses technology to make it easier for people to invest, make payments and even get a loan – features that are particularly popular amongst today's millennials struggling to advance amidst rising house prices and ruthless competition for jobs.

Crucially, Fintech has levelled the financial playing field by providing access to services previously reserved for those with at least one million dollars in assets. For instance, Betterment – an online investing company – uses AI technology and machine learning to provide highly personalised and curated wealth management services, but crucially, attracts everyday customers who would not ordinarily receive services from traditional banks.

Given this new emergent phenomenon, there seems to be an increasing need for financial services companies to drive customer loyalty, especially among millennials inundated with choice today.

Herein lies the real role of anthropology in navigating the ambiguity of financial decisions. By employing human-driven tools, one can arrive at much greater insights into user preferences and ultimately, develop a human-focused approach to finance. Financial services companies can engage based on unique and insightful data in order to truly understand their product needs, and offer services to users that can incentivise positive lifestyle changes.

Importantly, by adopting personalised and human-focused approaches, financial services companies can develop emotional connections based on empathy. Such moves away from a one-size-fits-all model towards personalisation, would improve user satisfaction, loyalty and trust.

Ideally, then, if we can leverage anthropological insights to develop empathy towards the user and create higher engagement, as well as harness technological tools (chatbots, AI and machine learning) in order to offer enhanced products and services, we can truly humanise the user’s experience.

(2) Blockchain

Blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions that records information across a decentralised network of devices. The emergence of blockchain technology has been a powerful new entry into the financial sphere, revolutionising the financial services industry by allowing customers to make transactions without traditional intermediaries.

Indeed, blockchain has the potential to radically disrupt entire industries, and its impact is not limited to finance, as it can be used as tool to improve efficiency in areas like healthcare, politics and trade.

The organisation Democracy Earth, for instance, has released a programme known as Sovereign, that aims to provide “open source and decentralised democratic governance protocol for any kind of organisation”. This peer-to-peer democratic system combines liquid democracy and blockchains to provide a service in which voters can directly express their standpoint on political issues, as well as cast their votes.

The key point here is that employing blockchain technology is no longer just about disrupting financial services, but also about empowering everyday citizens to feel politically engaged. Given this disruption, we need to question how human-centred design can be employed to not only work with these changes, but ultimately pave the way for a future in which blockchain technology is embedded in most areas of human life. Since blockchain is a radically new technology, it will become imperative to understand this new tool and the way it will impact our social interactions and our digital lives.

Designers and anthropologists will now need to focus on how blockchain technologies can be integrated with human-focused design so as to provide services that understand the user and offer rich experiences. Indeed, as blockchain becomes more embedded within our everyday interactions, designers will need to produce services that communicate trust and security amid a revolutionary and highly adaptable technology.

(3) Gamification in Finance

Customer-centric demands and emerging technologies are disrupting traditional models within financial services companies. Gamification – the application of gaming principles to non-gaming contexts – is increasingly being employed across healthcare, finance and fitness apps as a means of providing an interactive and experiential service for users.

Through gamification, financial services companies can deploy tools to improve user experience and educate users about the products and services they offer. As millennials demand greater engagement, gamification offers a far more experiential and customer-driven approach to financial decision-making.

Indeed, gamification is powerfully human-focused: it emotionally engages users and helps them to achieve their financial goals. Gamification, then, harnesses the power of play to understand the needs and desires of customers.

Anthropologists can harness gamification technology to truly understand users’ financial behaviour and psychology. To truly understand the financial lives of individuals, is to arrive at empathy – the basis for designing useful and beneficial solutions.

So through understanding the human behaviour behind financial decisions, such as exploring how one’s personality can affect the kinds of investments one makes, designers have the opportunity to create solutions that genuinely improve people’s lives.

Finance, then, is not just about financial decisions — it is also a lifestyle, a means of communication and a way of navigating relationships.

Anthropology began as a discipline that explored culture and society and revealed the desires, motivations and vulnerabilities of individuals experiencing everyday life. The pursuit of ethnography was to “grasp the native’s point of view” and to truly immerse oneself in a cultural context. Today, anthropology has taken a new direction: traversing culture and technology and operating in previously unchartered field sites.

Yet, the premise of anthropology today remains the same: to use research as a process of inquiry and discovery and to understand social and cultural change. Indeed, the new technologies we experience today challenge the anthropologist to examine human behaviour in the face of disruption in much the same way that Gluckman (1963) and Barth (1981) examined social change and “dysfunctional” practices in Zambia and the Swat Valley, respectively.

With new technologies impacting significant areas of culture and society and changing the way we experience everyday life, anthropology is not just relevant -- it is more critical than ever.

Virtual Reality And The Future For Design

Virtual Reality and the Future for Design

The phenomenon of Virtual Reality is taking the tech world by storm. In the last month alone, Facebook revealed a new virtual reality headset, Oculus Go, competing against Daydream View by Google and Samsung Gear. The ‘World’s first VR Cinema’ in Amsterdam continues to screen VR films and companies are increasingly utilising Oculus technology to create 360° online platforms.

Then, on 7th October 2017, The Guardian posted a video called The Party, a VR film in which a viewer can ‘experience’ autism through the eyes of an autistic girl named Layla. The setting is a surprise birthday party in which the viewer experiences how Layla is challenged by her environment, providing insight into the difficulties of everyday life for those suffering from autism.

This VR film is one of many new ventures that offers a first-person experience of reality –another step in the direction of technology harnessing the power of embodied presence. Indeed, such technology can spell a radical new future for ethnographic work by capturing social relations of identity, gender and self through the eyes of the subject.

A salient example of such work is the VR film, Notes for my Father, that documents the narrative of an Indian female human-trafficking survivor. The film includes scenes in which the viewer feels objectified by a male gaze when positioned in a train carriage with only male passengers. Due to the immersive sensory first-person perspective of the film, the viewer experiences the male gaze and the associated sexism, misogyny and objectification felt by the female protagonist as if the viewer were the protagonist herself.

Extensive work has been conducted on the gaze in Western discourse from Sartre to Foucault, particularly the way in which it has been imbued with relations of power that emphasise the dichotomy between the observer and the observed. A specific example is Mulvey’s (1972) work that explores the ‘male gaze’ towards women by male spectators in film, noting how patriarchy is embodied within the act of looking.

Yet, VR films go decidedly further than theorisation on the gaze. The ability to embody the female experience and literally step into the shoes of a woman in a VR film is arguably unparalleled by any other medium. These films offer a powerful resource for those seeking to capture the experiences of their subjects within sociocultural contexts.

Immersive experience and the future for design

There is considerable overlap between ethnographic work and design research and accordingly, the importance of VR for design is highly relevant. Akin to the ethnographic methods by which anthropologists investigate why certain aspects of a society are meaningful for its members, designers observe people’s experiences in the real world to gain insight into consumer needs that form the basis of design projects.

Indeed, VR technology can harness design thinking and innovative methods in such a way that designers can create narratives based on a deep understanding of their audience.

VR can offer designers emotionally engaging tools that bring to life key insights through which one can understand user perspectives. Just as Notes for my Father harnessed the ability to embody the female experience, design companies can utilise VR to truly understand consumer desires and correspondingly, build empathy towards their audience.

At a recent visit to London’s Design Museum, I was particularly struck by a mug designed for a person suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. Unlike normal crockery, this mug had a rotating handle such that even if its user’s hand shook, the mug itself would remain stable and the liquid inside would not spill over.

Virtual reality experiences can hence grant designers unique insights into the way in which consumers interact with things in their natural environment.

The company Foolproof, for instance, has recently detailed its use of immersive content in a case study with Suzuki in which it created an online consumer experience where visual stimuli were utilised, such as 360° images of each bike. By showcasing the bikes from every angle, customers were granted an immersive online experience. Research at Foolproof also found that ‘emotions plays an important part in the bike buying process’ (Foolproof, 2017). Accordingly, their immersive content effectively integrated consumer insights with design research.

Immersive content and VR can spell a new era for design research and yield new consumer insights. The more we pay attention to this new phenomenon, the more we can truly understand our audience.

THE VOICE AND ITS RELEVANCE

The Voice and its Relevance

Visual culture is a key arena in which symbolic forms travel across time and space, constituting self, identity and subjectivity. The sheer affordability of various visual media technologies cements their importance in mediating experiences. With the explosion of social media, the need to visually document and chronicle our everyday lives in the form of photographs on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter has all but emphasised the importance and dominance of the visual.

The result of this fascination with the visual is the neglect of research on technology related to the voice. While consumers engage with voice recognition technology on Apple and voice search on Google apps, the voice remains overshadowed by explosive visual media.

Yet, media forms such as the radio or podcasts can relate to large-scale political structures and are a rich source in which to explore issues concerning kinship, political agency and subjectivity. In fact, anthropologists are increasingly exploring the relation between media forms of the voice and broader political conditions, using ethnography to study symbolic forms in their full political context.

The Voice

The voice is a ubiquitous medium of communicative interaction, channel of social contact and a central vehicle for the modern interiorised self. Interestingly, in its ability to disseminate, broadcast and distribute the human voice across time and space, the medium of radio has often been politicised or at least utilised for purposes beyond mere “broadcast talk”.

The voice is often constructed in two ways:

(i) ‘Having a voice’ within political representation or authorial roles

(ii) ‘Claiming one’s voice’ in epistemological questions about relations among identity and the self, as identified by Spivak in her seminal piece, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (1988).

The power dimensions associated with the voice are salient. Gendered and racialised voices in Western cultural production, such as films, music, literature and theatre, have often presented inarticulacy and powerless vocalities, controlled by authorial male or white voices.

So what can the radio tell us about the voice?

The radio is a unique media technology as its directness and transparency derives from the material technology of sound recording (its indexical features), the specific features of its broadcast, but crucially, the sociohistorical and political context in which these broadcasts take place.

It sheds light on three key issues:

(i) The multivocality of voice

(ii) The ideologies of voice (and radio as an arena for these ideologies to be negotiated)

(iii) The power of the medium of radio due to its ability to disseminate, broadcast and distribute the human voice across time and space in various social, cultural and political contexts.

Example:

Fisher’s (2009) ethnography of indigenous-run stations in Aboriginal Australia investigates the interaction between broadcast media and geographical dispersal of kin networks in a wider political context of indigenous kinship in Australia.

After a century of state policies that removed children from their families, as well as the disproportionate numbers of Aboriginal people incarcerated in Australia’s prisons, Aboriginal kinship has been marked by a frequent separation of Indigenous people from kin and community.

Within this political context, Fisher (2015) focuses on call-in request shows to reveal both kinship networks and radio networks.

In these programmes, a process of “linking people up” operates through the radio as listeners are encouraged to call in and address their families with greetings. This process is a means of celebrating kinship connections as well as providing a powerful tool through which Aboriginal Australians can reproduce their relationships with one another.

Indeed, Fisher’s anthropological study of the radio contributes a significant analysis of the political subjectivity of Aboriginals: kinship as a means of shaping an Aboriginal polity. Kinship carries a normative burden, acting as a vehicle of Indigenous cultural reproduction.

With this notion of kinship in mind, the radio indexes intimate relations. There is an important duality to this relationship: the radio provides a stage for affective aspects of Aboriginal kinship and this kinship animates an Intra-Aboriginal radio network.

So what does this tell us about voice-related technology?

Paying attention to the role of the voice with regard to political order is paramount.

Broadcast radio stations have proven to be key staging points for both governmental projects and social movements and scholars have highlighted the use of radio transmitters as tools to promote development and democracy by a variety of communities and NGOs (Bessire, 2013).

While there is reason to understand the ocularcentrism of academic and technological research, we need to acknowledge the importance of the voice, its associated viscerality and the ways in which voice-related technology can play a significant role in its distribution and dissemination.

__

Bessire, L., Fisher, D. (2013). The Anthropology of Radio Fields. Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 363-378.

Fisher, D. (2009). Mediating Kinship: Country, Family, and Radio in Northern Australia. Cultural Anthropology 24(2): 280-312.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak?