The Office, Media, and Embodied Computing. With Simon Roberts

Response-ability.Tech

In this episode we talk to Dr Simon Roberts, business anthropologist and Partner at Stripe Partners, a strategy and innovation consultancy based in London. He's also the author of The Power of Not Thinking. Simon was a keynote at our inaugural summit. And Stripe Partners sponsored both the 2019 and 2020 events.

During our conversation, Simon shares how he started out as a business anthropologist. We talk about his 2018 article, The UX-ification of Research in which he decried the fact that research is being squeezed into a new temporal rhythm — being thoughtful is out, speed is in — and how optimistic he feels now, at a time of economic crisis, when budgets are being squeezed.

We also talk about the office, now that working from home is a reality for most of us for the foreseeable future, and how do we utilise offices to do what they do best.

We discuss his article, The Age of the Ear, in which he calls for a deep understanding of how people experience the aural dimensions of life. Which leads us to think about embodiment, the subject of his book, and embodied computing more generally.

Lastly, Simon shares a couple of his favourite reads from 2020.

We hope you enjoy the show.

Mentioned in our conversation:

• ‘The Big Shift’: Internal Facebook Memo Tells Employees to Do Better on Privacy
• We will miss the office if it dies. Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times, May 15 2020.
• The rise and fall of the office, Henry Mance, Financial Times, May 15 2020.
• James Rebanks: nature is my office, come rain or shine, Financial Times, December 29 2020.
• If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore; Caste by Isabel Wilkerson; These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore; India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha; Unchartered: How to Map the Future by Margaret Hefferman; and Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart.