Serendipity and business development – Design anthropological investigations at The Post
Mette Gislev Kjærsgaard · Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings · 2013
This paper describes how ‘The Post’ (a postal service company in the northern part of Europe) sets out to design an online digital platform for involving their employees in developing new services for the company. It is a story of a design project that failed to accomplish this task, but through sensitivity to serendipity disclosed other and potentially more valuable business opportunities in the process. It is also a story about design anthropology as a particular way of engaging with ‘the field’; challenging assumptions and eliciting insight through design orientated investigations of actual and potential relations between people, things, practices and contexts.