An Engineering Anthropologist. With Astrid Countee
My guest today is Astrid Countee. Astrid is an anthropologist and technologist based in Houston, Texas. She is co-founder of Missing Link Studios. In 2016, Astrid wrote an article for Ethnography Matters on why tech companies need to hire software developers with ethnographic skills, and it's this article I explore with her during our conversation.Astrid shares her journey from dreaming of being a surgeon to studying forensic science and then medical anthropology before becoming a software engineer.Astrid explains what she thinks the skills are that anthropologists and ethnographers bring to a development team and we talk about the benefits of technologists who have social understanding.Astrid shares some advice and tips for social scientists and researchers working alongside technologists and how we can work together.We also discuss the topic of whether anthropologists need to learn to code and she likens it to learning a language, which anthropologists doing fieldwork often have to do.Lastly, Astrid discusses how anthropologists might be seen as more than the people who 'make technology usable', and that anthropologists should play a bigger part in tackling the wicked problems of this century.You can find Astrid on Twitter or LinkedIn.