From literary works of fiction to non-fiction works on the human condition, we list ReD’s favorite books of 2021.
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The goal of the course is to clarify the main themes, concepts, and critiques of some of the most influential - and, alas, difficult - texts in the Western canon.
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Professors in Philosophy Taylor Carman and Simon Critchley curated a course on meaning for ReD Associates, to keep our thinking attuned to the explanatory power of philosophy.
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How Heidegger’s notion of dwelling helps understand problems with the vehicle space.
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"Deep listening means dwelling long enough at the unfamiliar, untill something jumps out as meaningful."
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"It's in the tension between how people want to see themselves, and the observable reality of their lives, where there is truth worth taking seriously, and acting on."
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Christian Madsbjerg and Gillian Tett, author and U.S. Managing Editor at the Financial Times, talk about silos, tunnel vision in major coporations, and why smart people do stupid things.
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Anthropologists in popular culture - 6 prominent clichés.
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As a part of ReD's internal training, Taylor Carman, Professor at Columbia and Heidegger expert, gave our staff a course on Heidegger's thinking. This page contains the recordings from those sessions, held at ReD's New York office during the fall of 2013 and spring of 2014.
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Most of our work in health care involves new research and our approach to it always involves more than just one stakeholder, taking several stakeholders in the specific disease ecology into account. In our experience, it is through understanding different stakeholders’ perspectives that new insights can be found and new solutions developed thereafter.
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Building on ReD’s ethnographic study of the condition, the results of a global quantitative investigation of nearly 2,000 psoriasis sufferers was recently published in the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology. The study’s main finding confirmed ReD’s: “the experience of the disease is as much a psychological, social, and emotional experience as a physical one”.
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Economic change in China will move hundreds of millions of households from poverty to prosperity. But what does everyday life look like for a Chinese family? One of our ethnographers shares some intimate experiences from a meeting with a middle-class man who has lived through the country’s enormous transformation.
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For-profit companies, on the other hand, are placing ever-greater emphasis on building a deep understanding of people and are looking to the social sciences for insights to help solve their most complex problems. Nonprofits seem to be lagging behind.
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Media companies are in a tough spot because creating compelling content demands a lot more subtlety than promoting products. To engage teens rather than merely influencing them you have to get down to the feelings teens share and understand the way they respond to the world.
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The hottest media trend in the last few years has been the explosion of hyperlocal content—it has become clear that the masses cared most about themselves and their surroundings.
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There’s a lot of talk about teens being “digital natives” because they text obsessively, play video games, and spend hours online. But for teens technology is just another way to maximize their social connections. There’s a lot of talk about teens being “digital natives” because they text obsessively, play video games, and spend hours online
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This paper attempts to revive Mauss’s concept of the total social fact as a means of understanding new markets. Our case study of alcohol in China illuminates the spirit baijiu’s connections to the total social facts of guanxi and hierarchy.
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For many teachers a totally orderly classroom is now something to be rectified; an iPod Touch is a powerful learning tool, not a forbidden device; good students don’t just do as they’re told — they approach their lessons critically and challenge what they think doesn’t make sense.
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Between June 2009 and December 2010, a not-for-profit Danish and Egyptian cultural institute approached ReD to work on a project with them. They hoped to understand the value systems of everyday Egyptians through a series of research activities and methods. Regardless of class, age, gender, political leaning, religious affiliation, or geographical location, the project intended to explore dialogue-building among Egyptians based on shared values.
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If everything hinges on a survey or two, you may be missing the individual and sociocultural drivers that reside below the surface.
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