FAQ

Inductive, qualitative, social science research can find answers to questions that many other research methods fail to adequately address. Does your organisation have trouble understanding why a certain audience does not behave how you expected or would like them to? Have surveys or market research not provided conclusive answers or paths forward? Or do you feel like you might be missing a part of the link between the product or programme and the users of it? This is where anthropological methods can help you.

At Namla we believe that better solutions are possible for commercial, not-for-profit, and governmental organisations, as well as for the clients and citizens they serve. We organise bootcamps where participants use fast ethnography and design thinking methods to create and test prototypes for new solutions.

• We create teams of social scientists and designers to research your question;
• We can also add your collaborators to the teams of scientists and designers, and work together on the question;
• We use a bottom up approach: inductive research with anthropological methods and frameworks;
• Each team pitches their research and proposed solution at the end of the bootcamp;
• The whole process takes only a few weeks.

1. Sustainability: why does your client (either B2B or customer) have trouble (frequently) using the product?
2. Policy decisions: is your organisation’s policy truly helping the people you intend to help? And is it with the problem you intended to help them with?
3. Societal engagement, democracy & citizen participation: why are citizens not showing up to the events you organised to receive feedback? How do citizens wish to engage with your programme or product?
4. Diversity & inclusion: is your approach as successful as you hope? Do people genuinely feel safe at work or have things been misinterpreted, been miscommunicated, or turned out differently in practice?

If you have a question in your organisation that you think our research bootcamp could help to answer, feel free to reach out. Our programme can be customised if this is your wish or if we deem it necessary.

For NGOs, (semi-)government organisations, and social enterprises, we work with a reduced pricing model. Reach out to learn more.

Namla is an educational start-up that supports social scientists in working with design, intervention, and effect to increase the visibility and engagement of researchers beyond academia. 

The original founders, Rosalie and Corina, have had plenty of experience in the applied anthropology space. While working in international organisations, they learned how to negotiate the tensions between what is taught in the university (being ‘objective’, observing, nuancing) with what is asked of professionals in a work environment (giving advice, starting programs, developing products).

At Namla, we work out this tension through an iterative process that has been developed in the field of design. In our bootcamps, participants go through a small project from beginning to end: they design the project; do the research; design interventions; and present them to the stakeholder. The aim here is twofold: 

1. Support partner organisations and institutions to approach and solve wicked problems in new ways.
2. Showing a possible path for the participant to resolve tensions and produce effect in their work.

Academic institutions, especially in the social sciences and particularly in anthropology, have for a while now seen a discrepancy between their graduates and the job market they will enter into. Namla offers ways for students and graduates to get practical experience at low-stakes. This can help them figure out what kind of job is suitable for them, and to be confident talking about their skills in a job interview.

• For graduates (or almost) of anthropology, another social science, design, architecture, journalism, or other related fields.
• Namla’s bootcamps will be useful to you if you want to translate to a future employer what your skills and experience are;
• If you have inhibitions about whether working in industry, government or non-profit is right for you as a nuanced researcher;
• If you are a professional (academic or otherwise) working in or with research who would like to learn more about ethnography, or about translating research into prototypes through design;
• If you would like to learn how to pitch research processes to clients and stakeholders;
• If you are interested in challenging yourself in a team-based pressure-cooker environment.

In the bootcamp, you conduct a small research for a stakeholder, and we guide you through the process from beginning to end. You will learn how to do rapid ethnography, to develop and test an intervention through design thinking, and how to pitch your solution.

Bootcamps can take place digitally or on-site. Each option has its own advantages, but both processes are intense and a little magical!

Anyone can participate in digital bootcamps. We are located in Europe, but have had participants located in almost all time zones and continents in the past. What you need is a stable internet connection, and part-time availability for a two-week period.

Take into account that our bootcamps are an immersive experience: participants will work hard on their research project for a short period of time. However, we don’t expect people to disrupt their life, or work on the project full-time. You are always encouraged to talk honestly about your availability with your teammates.

Live bootcamps are just like digital bootcamps but take place on-site, and thus require a solid time investment of one week. If you want to know more about what bootcamps look like, check out our Services page. If you want to see practical examples of bootcamps done in the past, have a look at our Projects page.

Now, if you want to know more about the experience of participants in our AnthroArt bootcamps, have a look at what the teams have done. Perhaps you would like to read about what participants did in our Winter School project at UvA, and in that case check out this Medium page.

Every two weeks, we send out a newsletter to our community where we talk about new bootcamps and other projects. If you want to stay in the loop about the latest opportunities: Sign up to Namla’s newsletter!