Before stepping into the classroom, Professor Eric Minzenberg was stepping into entirely different worlds.

His journey into anthropology began as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador, where he lived in a remote mountain village without running water or electricity. As the first American to live in the community, he found himself not only observing a new culture, but also being observed in return. That mutual curiosity became the foundation for a lifelong commitment to understanding people through immersion. This experience was pivotal, as he “fell in love with living and working with people of very different lives than mine.”

“I learned a lot from them, and a lot about myself,” he reflects.

Years later, that same curiosity led him to the Amazon. While pursuing his PhD, Professor Minzenberg conducted National Science Foundation-funded research in Acre, Brazil, where he spent over a year studying the socio-cultural dynamics of hunting and household life. Accessing these communities meant traveling by river for hours at a time.

His early experiences shaped the way he approaches research: not as something distant or extractive, but as something deeply human and relational.

Today, Professor Minzenberg brings that philosophy directly into the Interaction Design classroom as co-instructor of Ethnographic Research Methods for Designers.

For him, understanding people isn’t about quick interviews or surface-level data. It’s about asking deeper questions: What do people do? When? Why? How? And just as importantly, how does their experience reshape our own perspectives?

His teaching extends beyond theory. He has led study abroad programs to Brazil, Belize, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Mexico, where he created opportunities for students to live with local families, contribute to communities, and experience cultural exchange firsthand. These moments, he believes, are where real learning happens.

“What I want students to take away is the richness of human diversity… the joy of experiencing difference, and the fun of learning new things.”

In a field like interaction design, where understanding human behavior is essential, Professor Minzenberg’s approach offers something increasingly rare: depth. His work reminds students that good design doesn’t start with solutions. It starts with presence, empathy, and a willingness to understand others.

“I am still curious to learn. This is a prime reason why I agreed to develop and teach our Anthro 300 class…I am now able to interact with, and hopefully share some of my ideas, experiences, and insights with the program.”

Professor Gillian Grebler’s career has moved across disciplines and continents. From doctoral research at Oxford and linguistic fieldwork in Jerusalem to policeresearch in London and community-building at Santa Monica College, she has always been interested in how systems people create shape justice, belonging, and human possibility.

After studying medieval and early modern European history at UC Berkeley, Grebler continued her doctoral studies at Oxford, where her academic focus shifted toward linguistic anthropology. Her fieldwork in Jerusalem examined the language practices of Moroccan Jewish immigrant communities, where she observed speakers moving fluidly between French, Arabic, and Hebrew in ways that revealed language as something alive and collaborative.

That insight became foundational to her work. Language, for Grebler, is never static. It is something people actively create together, revealing relationships, identities, and systems of power.

Her research in Jerusalem also took her into the city’s courtrooms, where she observed how language operates within legal systems. When she moved back to London, Grebler worked alongside police teams responding to encounters with people experiencing mental health crises and contributed to emerging research on police interviewing and false confessions. She supported advocacy work forthe BBC’s Rough Justice and served as an expert witness in U.S. court cases.

Before leaving London, Grebler co-ran the Cahill & Grebler Gallery, an art gallery known for exhibitions, performances, and lively gatherings that transformed a neighborhood storefront into a place of creative exchange and connection.

Across these worlds, Grebler was asking the same questions: Who is heard, who is excluded, and how might shared spaces create new possibilities for belonging?

Those questions eventually took her to food justice.

After joining Santa Monica College, a student’s question “What about hunger here?” redirected her attention to the inequities shaping students’ daily lives. In 2011, she helped launch the Food Justice Project and played a role in shaping SMC’s Organic Learning Garden, whose opening was marked by a community blessing. For Grebler, the garden became more than a teaching site, it became a living space for shared care, reflection, and community.

“I love to make my classes experience-based,” she says. “I believe that is when we learn the most.”

That philosophy shaped her work as co-instructor with Professor Eric Minzenberg, of Ethnographic Research Methods for Designers, the first course of its kind in the Interaction Design program.

By asking students to engage directly with communities through observation, field research, and hands-on participation, Grebler teaches that meaningful design begins with presence, by paying close attention to people, systems, and the relationships that shape everyday life.

Her work offers Interaction Design students an enduring lesson: the most transformative systems are not simply designed, they are cultivated.