With astronaut eyes and ethnographer curiosity, Tricia Wang is obsessed with discovering the unknown. Tricia is a global tech ethnographer living at the intersection of data, design, and digital. Her passion is to help organizations uncover how our bias towards the quantifiable comes at the expense of profits and people, and how to fix it. She is the co-founder of Sudden Compass, a consulting firm that helps enterprises move at the speed of their customers by unlocking new growth opportunities in their big data with human insights in their digital transformation. Organizations she’s worked with include P&G, Kickstarter, Spotify, and GE. She also co-founded Magpie Kingdom, a consultancy that helps globally minded companies gain actionable insights about the Chinese consumer. Their newsletter, Magpie Digest, unpacks trending conversations in China to reveal insights about youth culture and macro social implications.
Tricia’s work with Fortune 500 companies and her fieldwork research have been featured in Techcrunch, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Slate, Wired, The Guardian and Fast Company. She has taught global organizations how to identify new customers and markets hidden behind their data, and amplified IDEO's design thinking practice as an expert-in-residence. She is a pioneer in popularizing the need for companies to integrate Big Data and what she calls, Thick Data, which she describes in her talk on TED, that received over 1 million views in just under six months.
Tricia is a sought after keynote speaker, having spoken at IBM, National Health Institute, Procter & Gamble, Nike, CISCO, TED, Wrigley, 21st Century Fox, and Tumblr. Her most recent talk at The Next Web is about how marketing sold its soul to ad tech by believing that it would be the magical big data solution to understanding customers. Her favorite talk that’s she ever delivered is the opening keynote at The Conference, where she zipped through the wild history of linear perspective and its influence on how we think and form organizations.
She has spent 20 plus years researching the social evolution of the Chinese internet, and written about the "elastic self," an emergent form of interaction in a virtual world. Her writings on China cover her time living with migrants to spending nights in internet cafe and working with internet policy-makers. She was the first Western scholar to work at China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), China’s equivalent to the USA’s FCC (Federal Communications Commision).
When not working with organizations, she spends the other half of her life researching the intersection of technology and culture--the investigation of how social media and the internet affect identity-making, trust formation, and collective action. Particular topics of interest include social media, personal data, China, anonymity, and the bias towards the quantifiable. Through extensive fieldwork in China and Latin America from living in internet cafes with migrants to working undercover alongside street vendors, her style of hyper-immersive ethnography gives her a unique perspective on what is actually happening on the ground, an outcome that she believes is critical for organizations to understand if they want to form a lifelong relationship with their consumers as people. During her projects she has pioneered ethnographic techniques such as live fieldnoting, which uses social media tools to share real-time fieldwork data.
Tricia has a BA in Communications and Ph.D. in Sociology. She holds affiliate positions at Data & Society, Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet Studies and New York University's Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP). She is a Fulbright Scholar and National Science Foundation fellow. She co-founded Ethnography Matters, a site that publishes articles about applied ethnography and technology. She co-started a Slack community for people who use ethnographic methods in industry.
Wang began her career as a documentary filmmaker at NASA’s Earthkam, a program started by Sally Ride to give students opportunities to interface with the International Space Station. She transitioned into social justice work in NYC by running the world’s first television station for youth-produce media. She went on to design after school tech and arts programs for first time college attendees in underserved communities and develop cultural programs for youth around hip-hop. She is also proud to have co-founded, H2Ed, the first national hip-hop education initiative in collaboration with Bronx Museum of Arts, Queens Museum of Arts, and The Schomburg Center; eventually turning into the Hip Hop Education Center at New York University. Having worked across four continents; her life philosophy is that you have to go to the edge to discover what’s really happening. Recently, she realized she prefers the misery of uncertainty over the certainty of misery. She's the proud companion of her internet famous dog #ellethedog.
