Challenging Default Thinking: What design anthropology teaches us about context, culture, and global innovation

What does it take to design truly global innovation? In this article, intO’s Founder & CEO Joanna Brassett shares insights from her recent lecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She explores how design anthropology – and intO’s adapted Local Lens Approach to research – helps global teams challenge default thinking and embed local context into strategy, product, and service development.

Too many products are built for the world but shaped by the preferences of just a – typically privileged – few.

In a recent lecture for the University of Applied Arts Vienna, I explored how design anthropology offers a powerful way to break out of that echo chamber, and why understanding local context is essential for building innovation that resonates globally.

As a design researcher and founder of intO, I’ve spent over a decade helping some of the world’s most pioneering brands understand their users in cultural contexts far beyond their own. From fintech and mobility to AI and baby gear, the lesson is always the same: if you want your innovation to be relevant, you must start with real lives and not your own assumptions about them. 

Default Thinking Is the Real Risk

Let’s name the problem: default thinking.

Too many global strategies are shaped by what works “here” – in headquarters, in Western markets and in tech teams with limited perspectives on users in other cultures or other demographics. And when these assumptions get exported into markets they were never designed for, products fall short, users feel misrepresented, and businesses miss opportunities.

When I founded intO 14 years ago, it was with a clear mission: to de-westernise innovation by making multi-region, locally-informed research fast, accessible, and scalable. Today, we have a team of 140 researchers in 60 countries, each rooted in local cultural contexts and fluent in the nuances of global business. Our job is to close the gaps that default thinking creates.

Culture Is the Glue That Binds and Restricts

In the lecture, I shared the metaphor that guides much of our work: culture is like glue. It holds people together, creates norms, and enables meaning. Sometimes it’s strong and rigid; sometimes it’s flexible. Either way, it also shapes how people respond to innovation.

Design anthropology helps us assess that “glue”, to understand how products, systems and services are received in different places. In some markets, an unfamiliar feature may be adopted quickly. In others, it may clash with social values or existing behaviours. Without this understanding, businesses risk building for the wrong context.

And that’s not just inefficient, it’s a form of cultural imposition. When we design only from our own perspectives, we risk exporting our assumptions instead of listening to real needs. As I said in the talk: “If we infuse a product with only our own behaviours, what we’re really doing is exporting our culture. And when we do that, we’re not designing, we’re colonising.”

A Local Lens Approach: Adapting Anthropology for Impact

While traditional anthropology offers deep insights, it isn’t always built for commercial speed or digital-first environments. At intO, we’ve adapted it into a more agile and scalable method we call our Local Lens Approach.

Here’s how we’ve made it work in practice:

1. Define clear boundaries:
In place of the “village” or “tribe” of traditional ethnography, we work within tightly scoped contexts; a particular user group, a household, a digital space. Clear parameters allow us to avoid context overload and stay focused.

2. Follow behavioural cycles:
We research complete user journeys, from discovery and adoption to long-term use and rejection. These might mirror daily routines, financial cycles, or seasonal shifts, helping us surface insights that are relevant and timely.

3. Embrace new ways of storytelling:
From remote video ethnography to collaborative Miro boards, we move beyond academic texts to create fast, visual, and actionable outputs that clients can use.

We pair this methodology with a unique research team model: every intO project includes both insiders and outsiders. For example, in our pushchair innovation research across Brazil, China, Japan and Korea, we combined local researchers with external team members – including parents and non-parents – to create a constructive tension that surfaced powerful insights.

The Glocal Advantage: Research that’s local and scalable

Our ability to run multi-market research simultaneously is a direct result of our model. All of our Local Researchers are immersed in their markets and cultures, yet globally fluent. Many have lived abroad or studied in international institutions. They’re embedded enough to build trust and observant enough to surface what’s often invisible to outsiders.

The result? Research that’s:

• Rooted in the real, lived context
  
• Aligned with commercial and design timelines
  
• Ready to influence decisions at the highest level

In our projects for brands like Maxi-Cosi and Uber, this approach helped teams uncover unseen user behaviours, from symbolic product meanings in Chinese parenting culture to status-driven digital defaults in Egyptian ride-hailing platforms. These are not insights you’ll find in a survey. You find them by living the context, listening with curiosity, and staying attuned to cultural signals.

Ethics and Reciprocity Matter

As part of our commitment to inclusive innovation, we treat our participants with the same care as our clients. Incentives are contextual and fair. Participant data is anonymised and deleted after use. And when appropriate, we work with community gatekeepers to ensure people feel safe and respected throughout the process.

We believe research is a relationship, not an extraction. And in commercial settings especially, it’s our duty to be honest about how insights will be used, and to ensure that participants benefit in some way from their involvement.

Final Thoughts: We’re Not Anti-West, We’re Pro-Context

When we challenge default thinking, we’re not rejecting Western design or innovation. We’re expanding it. We’re saying: you can build something incredible, but it won’t succeed everywhere unless you understand the people you’re building it for.

So, to students of design, to researchers in business, and to strategists navigating global challenges, here’s my invitation:

Build for the world by investigating it first.

Want to learn more about our Cultural Approach?
Drop us a line or explore more of our work. Contact Chloe Amos-Edkins if you’d like to learn more and discuss how we can support your ambitions. [email protected]

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