Anne Cohen Kirah, Researcher and Design Anthropologist
Anne is a design anthropologist and psychologist who studies how people actually experience services, places, and technologies, and how that understanding can shape better ones and also shape society. She is a researcher and faculty member at Kristiania University of Applied Sciences in Oslo, where she teaches and practises service design in the programme “Design, Strategy and Society”.
Earlier in her career she was Chief Design Anthropologist at Microsoft, and she has also worked at Boeing flying around the world. That path, from large-scale technology and aerospace to academia, gives her a rare view of how digital innovation succeeds or fails in human terms.
Her training spans social anthropology (University of Oslo) and clinical psychology (University of Washington). She has lived in Taiwan, Japan, France, Denmark, the United States, and Norway, and she brings that cross-cultural perspective to questions of hospitality and destination experience: what travellers need, what they notice, and what makes them feel welcome both online and offline.
She splits her time between Norway, and Washington, DC.
