We often describe software as a relationship between a user and a tool. It is a useful simplification, but an incomplete one. Most software also coordinates people: the colleague who receives the ticket, the neighbour whose report enters a queue, the worker whose performance becomes a dashboard.
Anthropology begins by staying with those relationships long enough to notice what the interface makes easy, what it hides, and whose work is required to keep the whole thing moving.
This field note is a placeholder for a longer essay about designing for the social systems around software—not only the screen in front of us.