Charles N. Darrah

Charles A. Darrah (or Chuck) is an emeritus professor of San Jose State University and an applied anthropologist who has done research on manufacturing and the service industry within Silicon Valley. Previously he was the chair of the Anthropology Department at San Jose State and a lecturer who supported students by understanding the value of their skills.

Academics Chuck Darrah studied at the University of Alberta where he completed his Bachelor's in Anthropology and completed his Master's in Health Education at San Jose State University. Later in his academic career, he attended Stanford to finish his Doctorate in Anthropology of Education. Before that, he has done previous work as a lecturer at a community college after his graduation as well as conducting field research on manufacturing jobs in Silicon Valley. Busyness has become saturated in American society as the material that Americans surround themselves with is made to remind people to be busy such as alarm clocks, pagers, emails, and other items of convenience that were seen as quality-of-life improvements have instead made Americans more work-oriented, even at home.

Career/projects His anthropological research is focused on the study of organizational structures within manufacturing and has written extensively about the service field.

Human Aspirations and Design Laboratory It was a program to familiarize anthropology students with applying ethnographic methods in a workplace setting. For the program, students would learn how to use the research they collect from ethnographies then apply it to design to see if a solution can be found in the process. From there they have to analyze and review their research to find bias within their work and avoid falling back to their original expectations and aspirations for the design that may have not been realistic to human needs. One of the goals of this project was to design a workspace for Herman Miller as they provide the information as they chose to work with Chuck Darrah as part of a contract. This has resulted in design ideas that have been reiterated many times as students began to identify faults in their original plans and made use of ethnographic case studies from Herman Miller workers to understand how they understood the use of space, what activities happened consistently in certain space, how artifacts in workspaces affected productivity and their implications on design concepts. These skills allowed the students to create designs that met the expectations of the project's clients as they revealed other factors such as workspace use and artifacts in those spaces that employers may not have considered before because the students took the perspectives from the ethnographies into account while designing their concepts.