About ReD > The Partner Group > Maria Cury
Maria Cury
U.S.
Maria is a lead on ReD’s technology practice, studying the role of new technology in daily life to advise on product development, visioning, and strategy. She has led projects on AR/VR, haptics, and autonomous vehicles and conducted foundational studies on the smart home, computing, the role of entertainment media and social media in people’s lives, and the human senses in tech. Her research interests include advancing applied ethnography and developing mixed methods approaches to ReD’s work, topics in which she is widely published. She is a native speaker of Portuguese and English, and is fluent in Spanish.
Maria has a background in anthropology and in the arts and cultural institutions, having received an MSc in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from Oxford, and a BA in Anthropology with Visual Arts certificate from Princeton.
Maria Cury is a partner at ReD’s New York office.
Latest perspectives from Maria
Episode 2 of our new podcast, Leading with Perspective, where Alvin Lu, CEO of Kodansha USA Publishing, speaks about how to embrace uncertainty and channel chaos as the leader of a legacy brand.
Our paper on three productive frictions in today’s business setting, presented by Maria Cury at EPIC 2023.
Our perspective on how to anchor emerging technologies in a deep understanding of our sensory experiences.
There’s an assumption that people want algorithms to serve up frictionless experiences, but our work shows something different. People want to have relationships and dialogues with algorithms and hack them toward different ends – in other words, social algorithms.
Tertulia co-founder Lynda Hammes on the power of books in community-building, how to use AI to go beyond personalisation and towards belonging, and her future vision for Tertulia.
Is an overemphasis on shallow belonging contributing to a crisis of loneliness?
The feeling and function of belonging in building community in sport and music – with author David Sikorjak and musician Clyde Lawrence.
From fashion brands to Silicon Valley giants, virtually every company is trying to make algorithms work for their business.
As people flock to the fields of 'responsible AI,’ ‘AI ethics,’ and ‘AI governance’ that are all about shaping AI towards what is helpful for humanity, it is time we ask: where are the ethnographers and applied anthropologists?
Camila sentou-se em seu sofá rosa desbotado, desenfaixou a atadura em torno da panturrilha e me mostrou um ferimento roxo, uma parte da pele em crosta e uma parte úmida. Sua filha Cecilia sentou na beirada de uma cadeira no canto, completando os vazios na história:
ReD hosted Max Brooks to discuss the power of metaphor to strengthen storytelling and why the tech industry should ban the word “disruption”.
Mikkel Krenchel and Maria Cury discuss the potential promise and pitfalls of the synthetic data revolution underway.
As companies roll out haptic technology that mimics the sensation of weight and touch of real objects when handled in virtual space, it’s important we keep the technology in the background to ensure our hands, and humans, can learn, collaborate, and shine on their own.
A ReD paper based on work conducted with Facebook Reality Labs offers reflections on why context matters and how to study abstract concepts in everyday life.
As businesses scramble to understand the digital revolution of the home, they have misunderstood many of the realities of modern domestic life.
The not-too-distant future may bring more ubiquitous personal computing technologies seamlessly integrated into people's lives, with the potential to augment reality and support human cognition. For such technology to be truly assistive to people, it must be context-aware.
Applied ethnography still struggles with the fundamental challenges of framing research to obtain ‘thick’ data, making sense of data in teams and with clients, and making a convincing case with data in challenging environments.
In applied ethnographic praxis, how should we use theory? Exploring how existing theory from a variety of domains has supported and advanced our work, this paper justifies and demonstrates how theory can be used in an accessible and practical manner when framing research and analyzing experience in the field.