Road to Customer Anthropology: S2 sounds weird

Whenever I reach a moment of aha!, I always try to reconstruct and see how it came about. My today's aha moment was getting across the concept of Customer Anthropology. Customer Anthropology: the act of observing customers in their natural habitat is definitely a powerful framework. I came across this unintentionally and credit to Dave Pollard's intriguing outline of the concept. The concept can be simplified as yet another approach to perform business process analysis but the emphasis is more closely observing the habitat, recognizing the human experience pain points and identify undiscovered interactions. More of the same but the devil in the detail and approaching with the mindset of an anthropologist. Yes it appears to being recognized now more and more in the industry thought it appeared in Fast Company article almost a decade ago. Anyway it is funny since I fumble on this concept without looking out for it on the internet. On the contrary , I am listening to the author of this new book 'The World Without You'. So I go to Amazon to know more about the book. This book was outlining how the man made infrastructure is going to self destruct and lead to interesting consequences. An excerpt from New Yorker review of the book
"Teasing out the consequences of a simple thought experiment—what would happen if the human species were suddenly extinguished—Weisman has written a sort of pop-science ghost story, in which the whole earth is the haunted house. Among the highlights: with pumps not working, the New York City subways would fill with water within days, while weeds and then trees would retake the buckled streets and wild predators would ravage the domesticated dogs. Texas’s unattended petrochemical complexes might ignite, scattering hydrogen cyanide to the winds—a "mini chemical nuclear winter."
So I read the customer reviews and encounter a series of books compilation on 'Save the World' and encounter this phenomenonally talented personality Dave Pollard. One of his previous works is on Customer Anthropology. Hmm..an interesting way of discovering new ideas. I am not sure search engines and computers will emulate this process of discovery in human brains. What do you think?