“The anthropologist starts by observing everyday life, with all its odd little patterns, and tries to work out how computers might fit into that”. (That was Gillian Tett in the FT). It sounds innocuous if you believe the insertion of computing into a daily life activity to be an ethically neutral act – but is it? In one of the livelier debates at Doors 8 in Delhi, some people found innovation enabled by anthropology to be neutral, others did not. I later ranted about amoral practices in adland. An opportunity to continue this debate is the first Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) which takes place in Redmond (hosted by Microsoft Research) in November. (The deadline for papers is 17 June, so don’t delay if you want to contribute). The Epic website states that the conference will “promote the use of ethnographic investigations…in corporate settings” – and I found a picture of anthropology students at work in a particularly grim corporate setting in this paper. But the experience of our colleagues in South Asia at the Centre for Knowledge Societies (CKS) seems to be different. Their business clients usually ask them to look at ‘ordinary’ people on the street, or at home – not, per se, in offices.