9 Going Home: From Fieldwork to AI and Back Again

Abstract

This essay traces a 25-year career demonstrating anthropology’s enduring relevance across government, healthcare, design, and technology sectors. Part One (2001-2018) examines how anthropological methods translate from studying material culture to understanding digital artifacts in healthcare, design, and architecture. Part Two (2018-present) explores how anthropology, reconceived as applied philosophy, addresses AI governance challenges. Throughout this journey, a central thread emerges: whether analyzing AIDS quilts or AI systems, anthropology helps us understand how humans create meaning and organize social life—essential knowledge for designing technologies that support human flourishing.

Introduction: The Path Home

When I graduated from the University of Queensland in 2001 with degrees in anthropology and journalism, I couldn’t have predicted spending the next 25 years designing and running healthcare innovation studios, researching Japanese baseball fan culture, or helping government agencies procure AI. Yet there’s a clear thread connecting my early career to where I am today.

The “going home” metaphor comes from an early project with Aboriginal Australian communities, helping create a film about a man’s journey back to Country and initiation. What struck me then continues to resonate: the fundamental skills from anthropological training—understanding how humans create meaning, organise social life, and adapt to change—keep surfacing in unexpected professional contexts. This essay explores how that journey led me full circle, back to core anthropological questions in the age of AI.

Part One: Building the Toolkit (2001-2018)

Foundation: When Objects Became Questions

My anthropological path began with a single undergraduate course: Material Culture 101. I was captivated by how objects carry cultural significance beyond function and were tools of political action (Appadurai, 1986). One project crystallised this: analysing the AIDS Memorial Quilts in the early 2000s.

These textiles functioned simultaneously as intimate memorials and powerful protest tools (Hawkins, 1993). Each panel, approximately the size of a grave, combined multiple materialities including fabric, photos, and words into impossible-to-ignore stories. When displayed on the US National Mall, the quilts covered vast areas, symbolising the epidemic’s devastating impact while bringing thousands together to challenge government inaction. They revealed something profound: material culture can carry both personal grief and political resistance.

This insight—that investing meaning in objects is something central to being human, and that meaning changes based on context and location—proved foundational to everything that followed, whether understanding clinicians’ relationships with digital health tools or Tokyo baseball fans’ arena and game day experiences.

Learning Culture is Everywhere

What anthropology taught me—and what I now help clients of my consultancy practice in design understand—is that culture shapes everything. Culture isn’t just about studying Indigenous societies; it’s the “software of the mind” shared among groups, shaping what we make, say, do, and think (Hofstede, 1980). A business isn’t fundamentally different from a village: hierarchies, power structures, identity formation through rituals operate similarly (Schein, 2010). Understanding cultural values and practices becomes key to understanding why people do what they do—and what to design that fits their world and is then more likely to adopted.

Throughout my career, I’ve come to understand anthropology as applied philosophy: using deep cultural analysis to answer “How might we change the current situation into a preferred situation?” while working with rather than against existing cultural patterns.

The Healthcare Laboratory

In 2008, I joined The Map of Medicine, implementing clinical decision-support tools in Queensland Health and the UK’s NHS. Healthcare settings are complex cultural environments with distinct hierarchies and rituals. Introducing digital technologies often challenges professional identity and deeply ingrained practices.

My work to rethink the internal organisation of a health organisation (with the job title “Innovation Lead” at the organisation NPS MedicineWise) perfectly illustrates how anthropological thinking challenges conventional wisdom. The organisation wanted field staff to replace printed materials with iPads when conducting educational visits with GPs—mimicking Big Pharma’s successful approach. Essentially using their own tools against them. My ethnographic research revealed a critical problem: GPs perceived NPS Facilitators using iPads as “too much like Big Pharma,” undermining the trusted, independent image central to NPS’s effectiveness. The artifact was already embedded with unwanted meaning (Winner, 1980).

The research question became: How might we change the iPad’s meaning to gain GP acceptance? We couldn’t abandon iPads—they offered genuine benefits. We needed to solve the cultural meaning problem.

This period taught lessons that echo throughout my career: technology adoption happens within cultural contexts that shape what is made and adopted (Bijker et al., 1987). People don’t just use tools; they adapt, subvert, reject, and make them meaningful within existing social networks (Oudshoorn & Pinch, 2003). We design ourselves, our values and understanding of others into material things. The most sophisticated technical solution fails when it ignores cultural realities.

Design Evolution: Making Anthropology Commercial

After completing a Masters in Design Anthropology at Swinburne University (2012-2014), I joined Fjord as Design Research Lead. We delivered many service design projects to reimagined things like grassroots cricket participation, Posting-in and Posting-Out for the Australian Defence Force, and reimagining retail that is both human and commercial. The Preston Market Identity Study exemplifies applied anthropology at its best. Partnering with urban design firm Hello City, we combined ethnographic observation and interviews with urban planning knowledge and practices to understand what made Preston Market valuable beyond commercial metrics. And why the local community was so passionate about it not changing.

The market functioned as far more than retail space—it was a cultural hub where recent immigrants maintained heritage connections, multi-generational relationships flourished, and Melbourne’s multicultural identity was actively performed. It was a site of cultural reproduction and integration that, if lost, would erode social cohesion.

Our project translated these findings into practical guidance for the Local Council and developers: what to preserve, change, or remove. We combined urban planning and anthropological frameworks to show connections between place, people, and culture, thereby informing design decisions (Smith et al., 2016).

Global Perspectives

My move to the global architecture and design firm Populous, where I was employed as Experience Design Strategist, opened new applications. The Tokyo Alvark Basketball Arena project required understanding how Japanese fan culture differed from Western experiences. A key research question was: what creates meaningful engagement for Japanese sports fans? Research revealed what fans loved and disliked about Western stadium design, translating into experience strategies that were culturally appropriate, supported fan rituals, and remained commercially viable. Importantly, the designed experience and built form needed to communicate the team’s owner, Toyota’s, own brand and values.

Airport experience studies across Australia and Europe revealed how cultural approaches to travel, time, and public space influenced passenger behavior. Northern European passengers expected self-service options and minimal staff interaction, while passengers from other backgrounds valued personal service and face-to-face confirmation. The design challenge: how do you design when everyone is your customer?

From the outside, my career path—including stints at the global design and technology consultancy Accenture Song, and at Atlassian, an Australian software company, where I researched developer productivity—might look like professional wandering. But anthropologically, each role involved the same core activities: observing and understanding complex social systems and understanding how people make meaning within them. Whether studying software developer productivity or architectural experience design, I used the same fundamental toolkit developed studying those AIDS quilts: understanding how people invest meaning in objects, spaces, and systems and how to bring about change that is useful, usable and valuable without creating new problems.

Part Two: Anthropology in the Age of AI (2018-Present)

The fifteen years described above taught me to see anthropology as more than research methodology—it became a philosophical framework for asking what we should build, not just what we can build. This realisation became urgent as I moved into AI work, where technical capabilities increasingly outpace cultural wisdom and acceptance about their use.

AI as Cultural Artifact

In my current role as Lead Researcher and Strategist in the Digital Sourcing Branch at Australia’s Digital Transformation Agency, I led the research and development of a practical guide—a checklist—to help government agencies make better decisions when buying AI systems. Procurement, in this context, means the process by which government evaluates, selects, and purchases technology. The checklist I developed gives agencies a structured way to assess AI products: not just whether they work technically, but whether they align with public values, treat people fairly, and can be properly explained and overseen.

This work directly reinforced in me that AI systems are never purely technical—they reflect the values, assumptions, and relationships of those who make and govern them.

For example, in developing these frameworks, I collaborated closely with procurement teams, policy leads, and data scientists to ensure that our approach extended far beyond technical metrics like processing speed or cost. We embedded critical questions about how AI systems align with public service values, impact staff-citizen relationships, and address both accountability and transparency. This meant introducing new criteria into procurement, such as requiring evidence of explainability and human-centered risk management in vendor proposals.

The connection to my early studies is clear: just as AIDS quilts carried both personal and political meaning, AI systems carry embedded values extending beyond technical functionality. Anthropological research has shown how the introduction of new tools—such as steel axes among Aboriginal Australian groups (Sharp, 1952)—can reshape social hierarchies, gender relationships, and political structures in ways their creators never intended. We should expect AI to bring similar transformations and ethical and moral challenges. You need to look for subtle signals.

Applied Philosophy in Practice

This is where anthropology functions as applied philosophy. While much AI ethics discourse focuses on abstract principles—fairness, transparency, accountability—applied anthropological thinking grounds these in specific cultural contexts and lived experiences.

When developing AI procurement checklists, I don’t just ask whether a system is “fair” in the abstract. I ask: Fair according to whose definition? Fair within which cultural context? How do different stakeholder groups understand fairness, and how might their definitions conflict?

This reveals ethical challenges that purely technical or legal frameworks miss. An AI system might be statistically unbiased but still perpetuate cultural patterns of exclusion invisible to technical audits. As AI systems become ubiquitous for some parts of society understanding these dynamics requires cultural analysis that anthropological training provides (Star & Griesemer, 1989).

For example, research has shown that large language models trained predominantly on English-language internet text significantly underrepresent the perspectives and knowledge systems of women, Indigenous peoples, and minority groups (Bender et al., 2021). This is not simply a technical gap—it reflects and reinforces existing power structures, making anthropological analysis essential for identifying whose voices are missing, what the consequences are and how to fix or at leaset moderate the consequences.

Human-AI Relationships as Cultural Practice

One fascinating aspect of current work is observing how people develop relationships with AI systems. Government workers using AI-powered document analysis don’t just “use” technology—they develop mental models of how it works, create strategies for better results, and form opinions about its reliability and trustworthiness (Suchman, 2007).

The shift from seeing AI as a tool to having a relationship with it says something profound about being human. AI systems don’t just solve technical problems—they encode particular ways of thinking, understanding and organizing social life (Latour, 2005). When we deploy AI, we implement a philosophy about how society should work, preferencing one domain over another. Anthropological training makes these implicit philosophies explicit and subject to democratic deliberation.

Conclusion: Coming Home to Fundamental Questions

Twenty-five years after being captivated by Material Culture 101, I find myself working with humanity’s most advanced technologies. Yet the fundamental anthropological commitment remains unchanged: understanding how humans create meaning, organise social life, and adapt to changing circumstances paying close attention to the ethics and morality of technology.

From studying AIDS quilts to contributing to the development of AI, governance frameworks reveals anthropology’s enduring relevance. Whether analysing textiles, markets, or algorithms, core questions persist: How do people invest these objects with meaning and why? How do they express values and resist unwanted change? How can we design interventions working with rather than against cultural patterns? How do we manage, adapt and control the unwanted consequences?

In this sense, I’ve come home—not to a place, but to foundational questions about human culture. The methods have evolved, the contexts have changed, but the intellectual project remains: understanding what makes us human and using that knowledge to create better futures.

For students considering applied anthropology careers, this represents enormous opportunity. The questions anthropologists ask—about culture, power, meaning, social organisation etc.—are exactly what we need for AI. The methods we develop—ethnographic observation, cultural analysis, systems thinking—are essential for designing AI that serves human needs.

But this work requires us to evolve beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. The anthropologists shaping AI governance won’t only be academics writing papers about and designing technology. They’ll be practitioners inside technology companies, government agencies, and international organizations, using anthropological thinking to influence technological development in real time.

The future of applied anthropology lies not only in studying culture from outside, but in helping create cultures supporting human flourishing in an age of artificial intelligence. This is anthropology as applied philosophy: using deep understanding of human social life to guide decisions about technological futures.

As we create technologies increasingly shaping human experience and knowledge, we need perspectives asking not just what we can build, but what we should build, and how we should live with what we create. This work has never been more important or more urgent. The journey home continues.

References

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