Synthesis of Thought

Back in February I attended the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) in Miami and BarCampMiami held in the same venue. My boyfriend is a developer so he wanted to attend this conference. I decided to go with him since it was semi-close to home and I wanted to learn more about the tech industry.

Essentially, my experience at FOWA was doing participant observation of the developer side of the tech industry. A large part of the speakers and materials covered was over my head since I have a limited knowledge but I learned a lot. I did walk away learning like I knew a bit more about their processes but more importantly I feel like I gained insight into their world. The majority of the talks focused on the development process and excluded user-centered research, or mentions of users in general. To be fair, the audience was likely interested in the former more than the later. I commented to someone that FOWA felt very developer-centric and lacked a focus on users. Their response was something to the effect of “users aren’t part of the process.” To be sure, they *should* be.

BarCampMiami was useful in that the presenters only focused on the basics of what they were discussing, i.e. OpenID, OAuth, etc. I actually learned about the subjects they presented rather than gained insight into the tech industry.

Last week I attended SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX and BarCampAustin. My experience at BarCampAustin was similar to that of Miami and I learned a lot (and had fun, BarCampAustin rocked!). SXSW was a different experience from FOWA for me though. In addition to gaining insight into and about the development process of web apps, software, etc. I became inspired by listening to the developers talk about their research.

This process of listening to people talk about their experiences to gain insights in/for research is nothing new if you’re familiar with anthropology. In listening to the developers, etc. discuss their research I discovered/thought of many ways that anthropological research could help their processes and goals. This is good knowledge to have when you’re looking for internships (me or if you want to do consulting work.

All and all, I really enjoyed FOWA, SXSWi, and both BarCamps. Given that most practicing/applied anthropologists will have a professional counterpart (for tech design research it’s designers/developers, for medical anthropology maybe it’s doctors, for educational anthropologists it’s teachers, etc.) and I believe that attending your counterparts’ conferences, etc. will be very valuable for you to be able to communicate with that communicate.