Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang is a technology ethnographer who studies how people use technology and how organizations use data. She holds a PhD in sociology from UC San Diego and co-founded the research consultancy Constellate Data. She is known for the term “thick data”, for the qualitative insights that big data misses, and has worked with organizations including P&G, IDEO, Nokia, Microsoft, Kickstarter, the United Nations and NASA. Her work has been featured in Wired, The Atlantic, Slate and Fast Company.

Tricia Wang’s talk here is The human insights missing from big data, recorded for TED Talks in 2017. As the title suggests, it looks at what large data sets fail to capture about people, and why human insight still matters alongside the numbers.

The talk is filed under big data, algorithms, artificial intelligence, behavioral economics and decision making, making it relevant for anyone in product and design who relies on data to decide what to build.