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  • Featured Articles

    Building an Anti-Racist Organisation

    The deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd at the beginning of an already difficult year...

    Hybrid working: How to get the best of distributed and colocated collaboration

    At this point we’re well into the Covid-19 remote work experiment. The result? From the looks of it, work...

    Alone together – How are people and communities adapting to living with coronavirus?

    As the coronavirus pandemic unfolds we are entering into a global societal experiment: what happens when we...

    The Age of the Ear

    In the early days of the iPod, Apple’s adverts drew attention to the distinctive white headphones by cont...

    Room for Improvement

    Office design is always transforming, reflecting different types of work and ever-changing organisational n...

    My AI versus the Company AI

    How Knowledge Workers Conceptualise Forms of AI Assistance in the Workplace

    Gods in the Cloud. How Indian Mysticism Influenced Tech

    Guest Post: “When you next go through a four-way crossing, take these lemons and throw them out the ricks...

  • Weekly Stripe

    The Weekly Stripe – 05.03.21

    Recently Bitcoin has come under fire for its negative environmental impact, where the act of ‘mining’ b...

    The Weekly Stripe – 26.02.21

    This week an era came to an end. After 28 years, the French DJ-duo Daft Punk split up. Their original style...

    The Weekly Stripe – 19.02.21

    What is public space? What are we allowed to do in it? According to whom? This week we look at how communit...

    The Weekly Stripe – 12.02.21

    A global pandemic, mutant viruses, crowds storming the Capitol, cryptocurrencies more valuable than gold: o...

  • Guest Posts

    Gods in the Cloud. How Indian Mysticism Influenced Tech

    Guest Post: “When you next go through a four-way crossing, take these lemons and throw them out the ricks...

  • Mobility

    Give Way? People and the AV-ready city

    To date, research on autonomous vehicles (AVs) has focused on their potential impact on society, public res...

    Friction an elegy

    Much of the modern world feels like a crusade against friction. It’s an evil to be removed and replaced w...

    Riding smartly with CityMapper: Ethnographic snippets from a Smart Ride journey across Central London

    “Get me to Covent Garden”, I ask CityMapper. I choose the Smart Ride option, recently added to the trav...

    To Have and Have Not: Exploring Grammars of Sharing in the Context of Pooled Mobility

    We saw what sharing a vehicle actually meant for commuters around the world. And for many of them, it meant...

  • AI and Assistants

    The Age of the Ear

    In the early days of the iPod, Apple’s adverts drew attention to the distinctive white headphones by cont...

    My AI versus the Company AI

    How Knowledge Workers Conceptualise Forms of AI Assistance in the Workplace

    Learning to live with alexa

    Robots are coming to live amongst us. Some of the best selling books of 2015 have been about the impending ...

    The ai mirror

    As AI powered smart assistants find their way into our lives, we seek reference points to help us deal with...

    Radio and the rebirth of social computing

    There’s a time when all technologies are new. Understanding old technologies can help us see how new ones...

    How to talk to your robot

    In the latest Keynote from Google, Sundar Pichai played several phone calls made by Google Assistant to sma...

  • Technology

    The Age of the Ear

    In the early days of the iPod, Apple’s adverts drew attention to the distinctive white headphones by cont...

    Give Way? People and the AV-ready city

    To date, research on autonomous vehicles (AVs) has focused on their potential impact on society, public res...

    My AI versus the Company AI

    How Knowledge Workers Conceptualise Forms of AI Assistance in the Workplace

    It’s Still Time to Celebrate Maintenance: 4 Themes from the 2019 Festival of Maintenance

    Last weekend was the second annual Festival of Maintenance. I volunteered with the first Festival of Mainte...

    A Confederacy of Devices

    Once upon a time, in or around 2014 and 2015, wearables were set to be the next big category in technology....

    Gods in the Cloud. How Indian Mysticism Influenced Tech

    Guest Post: “When you next go through a four-way crossing, take these lemons and throw them out the ricks...

    Puppets, Animation and VR

    After what has felt like a long wait, VR technologies are gaining momentum. Witness the critical acclaim fo...

    Wearable Futures

    With the dust settling on CES2014, the annual gadget show, it’s clear that the winners of most column inc...

    Menus mental maps and voice

    For many decades now touch and sight have been the senses we use to ‘do’ computing. The dominant intera...

    Frightening internet of things

    Recent news of a spamming fridge highlighted some of the oddness in store for us as the Internet of things ...

    Problem sharing spotify

    Spotify is encouraging us to ‘send a song’. You’ve probably seen the ads.

    Cracking the cultural code of wearables

    This is a talk Simon gave to the Cambridge Wireless network on wearables. The event was a good opportunity ...

    It’s Time To Celebrate Maintenance

    Shopping behaviour is going through a metamorphosis – new priorities, new behaviours and an unpredictable...

  • Retail

    Cash, staff and people free retail

    What do you do when your cafe staff are taking money from the till? Last week the owners at my favourite Be...

    Bad queues and why shopping can’t wait

    We’ve been out and about exploring customer journeys and shopping with teenagers and twenty-somethings. O...

    Dàigòu Agents: Outsourcing taste in search of the ‘real deal’

    I’m in Rome to visit my family and make a stop in Via del Corso, the long road that connects l’Altare D...

    The Subscription Convenience Myth

    Subscription retail is sold as something that delivers many benefits

    How do consumers feel about the Amazon retail takeover?

    In 1820 Charles Caleb Colton wrote, “Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.”This is pa...

    Subscription and a well ordered life

    Digital-driven product subscriptions have become key tools for consumers to hack their day-to-day lives. Su...

  • Organisations

    Hybrid working: How to get the best of distributed and colocated collaboration

    At this point we’re well into the Covid-19 remote work experiment. The result? From the looks of it, work...

    Room for Improvement

    Office design is always transforming, reflecting different types of work and ever-changing organisational n...

    My AI versus the Company AI

    How Knowledge Workers Conceptualise Forms of AI Assistance in the Workplace

    Putting Food to Work in the Workplace

    Every Friday at 1pm Stripe Partners comes together for a team lunch. Usually this takes the form of an indo...

    Know-How Moves Markets

    In early 2018, Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, a $155bn US media company, began an attempt to take over the ...

    What research can learn from start-ups

    It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally. Apple happened because Steve ...

    Insight hidden in plain sight

    This is a piece about things getting missed. It’s about what happens when organisations don’t get the i...

    5 lessons on how to hack in big organizations

    In our first post in this series we talked about how to define hacking, in the second we explored the impac...

    Useful strategy isn’t just a document, it’s an unfolding network of association

    At the EPIC 2016 conference held in Minneapolis, MN this year, we shared some significant findings

    Subverting the structure of meetings to help teams go further faster

    These are the images and text of the Pecha Kucha talk that I gave at EPIC 2017 in Montreal. Given the forma...

    The Cube Farm on a Stud Farm

    Lots has been written about modern organisations moving fast – including by us (see The Ux-ification of R...

    Aligned teams that just know what to do

    It’s a word you hear a lot in modern organisations and there’s a reason for that. It’s a good thing b...

  • Culture

    Alone together – How are people and communities adapting to living with coronavirus?

    As the coronavirus pandemic unfolds we are entering into a global societal experiment: what happens when we...

    Room for Improvement

    Office design is always transforming, reflecting different types of work and ever-changing organisational n...

    Putting Food to Work in the Workplace

    Every Friday at 1pm Stripe Partners comes together for a team lunch. Usually this takes the form of an indo...

    Segments, Social Facts and Shared Experiences

    In a general election that didn’t lack for tension and excitement, one thing was missing. Mondeo Man. He ...

    Coca-Cola Life – why full fat is more natural

    Coca-Cola was invented by John Pemberton, a pharmacist. His mission? To devise a drink so deliciously addic...

    Why qual researchers are hipsters

    I visited a new cocktail bar in Brixton recently, The Shrub and Shutter.

    Making Meaning in AirSpace: How an aspirational aesthetic is standing in for real culture

    When Stripe Partners moved offices to Bermondsey, South London one year ago, we tacitly knew what we wanted...

  • Society and Social Change

    Alone together – How are people and communities adapting to living with coronavirus?

    As the coronavirus pandemic unfolds we are entering into a global societal experiment: what happens when we...

    Knowing a country a post brexit polemic

    The rise of populism has coincided with politics and political campaigning becoming ever more machine-like ...

    Investment as consumption why crypto works

    A couple of months ago now I bought £200 worth of Ether before using that to buy the crypto currency EOS...

    Think Piece One

    Why cool and hedonism alone will no longer cut it for brands trying to connect with youth.

    Unemploy...

    The age of Ageing Societies

    The move of humanity to cities, and the ageing of the world population, are the two major transitions at th...

    All change india 20 years on

    Talking about how much things have changed is an easy thing to do. Human brains are well tuned to notice sh...

    The Death of the Green Deal

    In 2013 the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) launched its flagship home energy improvement s...

    The fool on the hill

    Identity Politics: Tread lightly when jumping on the bandwagon

    We’ve all cringed over the Pepsi advert seen round the world, and it only took the collective internet-mi...

  • Innovation

    Give Way? People and the AV-ready city

    To date, research on autonomous vehicles (AVs) has focused on their potential impact on society, public res...

    It’s Still Time to Celebrate Maintenance: 4 Themes from the 2019 Festival of Maintenance

    Last weekend was the second annual Festival of Maintenance. I volunteered with the first Festival of Mainte...

    Hack culture and the death of strategic research

    In the second post in our series on the impact of hacking on big organisations, Tom explores the relationsh...

    Minimal viable innovation

    The Laggards of Innovation: on using old theories to explain new trends

    The secret to what makes innovations spread has always been sought after – both within and outside the wo...

    The Magic of Innovation

    One of Arthur C. Clarke’s most famous sayings is his Third Law, which states that: “Any sufficiently ad...

    Co-Living: Housing as a Service

    We’re living through what seems like a perfect storm for new players in the housing market. Young peop...

    It’s Time To Celebrate Maintenance

    Shopping behaviour is going through a metamorphosis – new priorities, new behaviours and an unpredictable...

  • Embodied Strategy

    Going with the gut the case for combining instinct and data

    “The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my ...

    Why footballers aren’t stupid

    Earlier this month Charlie Adam scored the goal of the season against Chelsea. After the match he was inter...

    10 steps to Embodied Strategy: EPIC 2015 paper summary

    Last October we presented a paper at the EPIC conference in Sao Paulo. The paper is an important landmar...

    Bring back the bodies

    I want to start with a question. Please be honest in your response. Have you ever had the feeling that t...

  • Ethnography

    Ethnography in a Parallel World

    My first post in this series argued that the market research industry commoditized ethnography and failed t...

    Ethnography Magpies and Shiny Things

    This is the first of a three posts exploring the rise, fall and possible futures of ethnography in commerci...

    Reflecting on EPIC 2014

    The view from the Hudson river during the conference dinner cruise.

  • Research and Methods

    Method Anthropology. 10 lessons that commercial researchers can learn from method acting

    This piece makes a case for Method Anthropology, an approach to commercial research inspired by an unexpect...

    Injecting Insights

    The world of research, innovation and strategy likes to see itself at the cutting edge. We develop methods ...

    Why hedgehogs shouldnt hack

    The first of three articles discussing the proliferation of hacking culture and its implications for large ...

    Coping with the complex

    Life in a state of war, Thomas Hobbes observed, is “nasty, brutish, and short”. Much the same could be ...

    Material Abstractions: using maps in ethnographic research

    When I first saw a map of St Petersburg, my hometown, I was in my mid-twenties. I remember being at a loss....

    The UX-ification of research

    A more thoughtful mode of research enquiry will lead to better product. It also creates better attuned orga...

    Why we need to make research harder to understand

    A recent article by BBH head John Harrison called on advertising to become ‘harder to understand’. Harr...

  • Reviews

    2018 Year in Review

    It’s easy to feel that we live in less tolerant times, but social progress was pronounced this year. Saud...

    Is the Internet The Answer

    Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters recently announced that he

    2017 Back And Forward

    As the year comes to a close it’s hard to find the single thread that ties it together.

    That Was The Year That Was

    Looking back the passing of David Bowie in January was not the greatest of omens.

    The Ideas Factory Book Review

    Before my grandmother learnt to drive, she stripped down a car engine and put it back together again.

    It was the research what did it – Rupert Murdoch in consumer research shocker

    Recently I went to see Ink, James Graham’s play about Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Sun

  • Home
  • Our writing
  • What we do
  • Clients
  • Who we are
  • Stripe Studios
  • Snippets from the field
  • Working at Stripe Partners
  • Case Studies
  • Contact

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