Design Anthropology

Theory and Practice

Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, Rachel Charlotte Smith, Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, Rachel Charlotte Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000189544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Design is a key site of cultural production and change in contemporary society. Anthropologists have been involved in design projects for several decades but only recently a new field of inquiry has emerged which aims to integrate the strengths of design thinking and anthropological research.This book is written by anthropologists who actively participate in the development of design anthropology. Comprising both cutting-edge explorations and theoretical reflections, it provides a much-needed introduction to the concepts, methods, practices and challenges of the new field. Design Anthropology moves from observation and interpretation to collaboration, intervention and co-creation. Its practitioners participate in multidisciplinary design teams working towards concrete solutions for problems that are sometimes ill-defined. The authors address the critical potential of design anthropology in a wide range of design activities across the globe and query the impact of design on the discipline of anthropology.This volume will appeal to new and experienced practitioners in the field as well as to students of anthropology, innovation, science and technology studies, and a wide range of design studies focusing on user participation, innovation, and collaborative research.

1
Design Anthropology: A Distinct Style of Knowing

Ton Otto and Rachel Charlotte Smith

DESIGN AND ANTHROPOLOGY

This book is about design anthropology, which is a fast-developing academic field that combines elements from design and anthropology. The following chapters comprise innovative case studies and theoretical reflections that provide an introduction to the field from the perspective of anthropologists participating in its development. In this introductory chapter, we sketch the contours of this new field and its emergence from the early uses of ethnography in design in the late 1970s up to the present. We argue that design anthropology is coming of age as a separate (sub)discipline with its own concepts, methods, research practices, and practitioners, in short its own distinct style and practice of knowledge production. But first we discuss the two separate knowledge traditions from which this new discipline has developed.

Design is a pervasive aspect of modern society with a large number of practitioners and a great range of subfields, such as industrial design, architecture, systems design, human-computer interaction design, service design, and strategic design and innovation. Design as a process of thought and planning is often depicted as a universal human capacity that sets humankind apart from nature (Cross 2006; Friedman 2002; Fry 2009; Chapter 8, this volume). To design is to conceive of an idea and plan it out, “give form, structure and function to that idea” (Nelson and Stolterman 2003: 1), before executing it in the world.¹ In this general sense, designing is a universal aspect of human practice, but the way it is carried out varies considerably across different societies and cultures (Chapter 5, this volume). In contemporary (post)industrial and digital societies, design has become a separate domain of activity because economic and organizational developments have engendered a specialist workforce of designers. These specialists create a variety of solutions in different social and economic contexts: they generate ideas for products that are mass produced by industry; they develop digital systems that perform new functions in workplaces as well as private homes; they design services for public sector institutions; they create strategies for innovation in business and marketing; and they develop plans for urban and rural developments and sustainable forms of living. Design professionals are trained in design schools and other higher education institutions, as well as within companies, and are increasingly supported by a range of academically based design studies. In modern societies with their emphasis on innovation and change, which are often considered as intrinsic values (Suchman 2011), design has arguably become one of the major sites of cultural production and change, on par with science, technology, and art.

Anthropology² is the comparative study of societies and cultures, based on detailed empirical research in concrete social contexts. When it was established as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, its focus was on studying the cultural institutions and practices of non-Western societies. Today anthropologists carry out research in almost every imaginable social context, from high-tech companies and scientific laboratories in urban centers to remote rural villages in developing countries. A key characteristic of the discipline during the twentieth century was the development of participant observation as the dominant method of field research. Considered the core of ethnography,³ which is the description of cultures, participant observation involves the long-term immersion of a researcher in a social setting with the aim to observe and document everyday practices comprehensively and in detail. In order to get access to everyday events and actions and understand their meaning for the participants, the researcher has to spend time with the people and engage with their lives. The result of an ethnographic study is an ethnography—usually a written report or book, but possibly also a film or exhibition—representing a particular social setting and cultural context and producing theoretically informed arguments about it. The term ethnography refers thus both to the process of inquiry—the immersion in social life to understand and describe it—and to its product: the final ethnographic representation.

As the comparative study of societies and cultures, anthropology has an obvious and long-standing research interest in processes of social and cultural change, human creativity, and innovation (Barnett 1953; Hallam and In-gold 2007; Liep 2001). This includes design, even if the anthropological study of design as a modern phenomenon is still in its infancy. However, the major relationship between design and anthropology has been through ethnography. From the late 1970s, designers became aware of the value of ethnographic data and methodologies, in particular to get a better understanding of the needs and experiences of users and the contexts in which products and computer systems were used (Blomberg, Burell, and Guest 2003; Reese 2002). But it is not just the usefulness of ethnographic research and information for design that is at stake here; there appears to be a genuine affinity between design and ethnography as processes of inquiry and discovery that includes the iterative way process and product are interconnected and the reflexive involvement by researchers and designers (see Chapter 14, this volume). Tim Brown, the CEO of the international design and innovation firm IDEO, clearly acknowledges this affinity when he writes that designers need to go out and observe people’s experiences in the real world rather than rely on extensive quantitative data to develop their insights. He continues: “As any anthropologist will attest, observation relies on the quality of one’s data, not the quantity” (2011: 382). Like ethnographers, designers have to begin with immersion in real-life situations to gain insight into experiences and meanings that form the basis for reflection, imagination, and design (Nelson and Stolterman 2012: 18). Or as Friedman states: “The design process must integrate field-specific knowledge with a larger understanding of the human beings for whom design is made, the social circumstances in which the act of design takes place, and the human context in which designed artifacts are used” (2002: 209–210).

There are, of course, also significant differences between design and anthropology. The main aim of anthropology, like in most academic disciplines, is to produce generalizations and theories about human societies based on but reaching beyond the particularities of ethnographic case studies. Design, on the other hand, is directed toward the future and the creation of specific products and solutions, an “ultimate particular” (Stolterman 2008). Although the design process may start from “wicked” or ill-defined problems (Buchanan 1992; Gaver 2012), integrating processes of observation and reflection similar to anthropology, its purpose is to create products, processes, and services that transform reality. Its success is measured by the material and social impact of particular solutions, rather than by the validity of its generalizations.

As the differences between design and anthropology give design anthropology its special character, we will now sketch what we see as the major contributions by these two fields to the new subdiscipline. Further details of specific design anthropological practices and concepts are discussed in the final section of this introduction and in the following chapters. Here we only give a brief characterization of the constitutive differences that produce the creative tensions in this new field and set the conditions for both its challenges and its potential.

First, design is clearly future oriented; its success is measured by the relevance the designed products and conceptual solutions have for people’s everyday lives. Although anthropology has an interest in social change and people’s imaginations of the future, as a discipline it lacks tools and practices to actively engage and collaborate in people’s formation of their futures. One of design anthropology’s challenges is to develop such tools and practices of collaborative future making (see especially Sections I and III, this volume). Second, whereas participant observation by anthropologists might be considered a form of intervention, its ultimate purpose is to observe and document rather than to effect change. Generally anthropologists have been quite concerned to minimize their impact on the people among whom they conduct their studies. In design, the situation is radically different, with both process and product aiming specifically at intervention in existing realities. Learning from design practice, design anthropologists are developing methods that employ various forms of intervention, both to create contextual knowledge and to develop specific solutions. The field of design anthropology is thus more oriented toward intervention and transforming social reality than traditional anthropology has ever been.⁴ Third, design is (almost) always a process of collaboration between different disciplines and stakeholders, including designers, researchers, producers, and users. Anthropology still maintains a tradition, which is only slowly changing, of the lone researcher who conducts individual fieldwork and produces a solo piece of scholarship. Design anthropology radically breaks with this tradition as its practitioners work in multi-disciplinary teams, acting in complex roles as researchers, facilitators, and cocreators in processes of design and innovation (all chapters but especially Section IV, this volume).

Anthropology also brings three key constitutive elements to design anthropology. First is the key role of theory and cultural interpretation. Whereas ideation, the generation of design concepts, is a central element of design, it does not have a sustained tradition of theorizing the context of usage and interpreting the cultural meaning of things.⁵ This is the forte of anthropology, with a long history of cultural interpretation (Geertz 1973), contextualization (Dilley 1999), and holistic explanation (Otto and Bubandt 2010) through cross-cultural comparison and the development of theoretical concepts. Design anthropology integrates this rich tradition of contextualization and interpretation into the tasks of design, emphasizing the generative role of theory in developing design concepts and critically examining existing, often implicit conceptual frameworks (see Sections I and II, this volume). Second, against design’s concern with creation, innovation, and “future-making” (Björgvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2010), anthropology systematically investigates the past to understand the present, including its modes of anticipating the future. It is a great challenge for design anthropology to extend the temporal horizon both forward and backward, to anchor images of the future in reliable constructions of the past, thus avoiding the risk of “defuturing” that is inherent in design (Fry 2011) and of generalizing and essentializing modern values of innovation and change (Suchman 2011) (see Chapter 7 and Section III, this volume). Third, especially through its hallmark practice of ethnography, long acclaimed as useful by designers, anthropology endows design anthropology with a unique sensitivity to the value orientations of the various groups affected by design projects—including disem-powered groups, consumers, producers, and audiences. The task for design anthropology is to integrate and develop these traditional qualities into new modes of research and collaboration, working toward transformation without sacrificing empathy and depth of understanding (see especially Section IV, this volume).

THE EMERGENCE OF DESIGN ANTHROPOLOGY

In this section we point to central historical developments in the collaboration between anthropology and design that reflect our anthropological vantage point and interest in the field.⁶ Design and industrial communities have generally been much more prone to adopt approaches of social research, hereunder ethnography, and to invite anthropologists into their fields, than vice versa. Management researchers and designers collaborated with anthropologists in industrial settings as early as the 1930s to study social and physical aspects of workers’ productivity, beginning with Lloyd Warner’s involvement in the well-known Hawthorne study⁷ (Baba 1...