Design Anthropological Futures

Rachel Charlotte Smith, Kasper Tang Vangkilde, Mette Gislev Kjaersgaard, Ton Otto, Joachim Halse, Thomas Binder, Rachel Charlotte Smith, Kasper Tang Vangkilde, Mette Gislev Kjaersgaard, Ton Otto, Joachim Halse, Thomas Binder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000180534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A major contribution to the field, this ground-breaking book explores design anthropology's focus on futures and future-making. Examining what design anthropology is and what it is becoming, the authors push the frontiers of the discipline and reveal both the challenges for and the potential of this rapidly growing transdisciplinary field.Divided into four sections – Ethnographies of the Possible, Interventionist Speculation, Collaborative Formation of Issues, and Engaging Things – the book develops readers' understanding of the central theoretical and methodological aspects of future knowledge production in design anthropology. Bringing together renowned scholars such as George Marcus and Alison Clarke with young experimental design anthropologists from countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Brazil, the UK, and the United States, the sixteen chapters offer an unparalleled breadth of theoretical reflections and rich empirical case studies.Written by those at the forefront of the field, Design Anthropological Futures is destined to become a defining text for this growing discipline. A unique resource for students, scholars, and practitioners in design anthropology, design, architecture, material culture studies, and related fields.

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Introduction: Design Anthropological Futures

METTE GISLEV KJÆRSGAARD, JOACHIM HALSE, RACHEL CHARLOTTE SMITH, KASPER TANG VANGKILDE, THOMAS BINDER AND TON OTTO

The future is here. Or so it has often been proclaimed by futurologists, scientists and engineers, as the fruits of science labs and cutting-edge technological gadgets are showcased, promising to make our lives more productive and more enjoyable. The public facade of design shows grand visions of future possibilities, yet every imperfect Now is also the concrete instantiation of what was once a vision of a bright future. Envisioned futures, as Bell and Dourish (2007) remind us, tend to differ radically from how they eventually unfold in the situatedness of people’s lives. The future is not an empty space awaiting projected visions from an incomplete present; neither is it a predefined destination that we can simply foresee and arrive at in due time (Yelavich and Adams 2014; Mazé, this volume). Rather than seeing the future as a separate space or time, design anthropologists in this book engage with the future as a multiplicity of ideas, critiques and potentialities that are embedded in the narratives, objects and practices of our daily lives. In this sense, multiple, often conflicting, futures are always already here as part of a continuously unfolding present and past.

Design Anthropological Futures explores futures and future-making from a design anthropological perspective. Here futures are not understood as striking visions created and implemented by scientists or designers, but rather as collaborative explorations of situated possibilities, formations and actions at the intersection of design and everyday life. The term futures relates both to the theoretical and practical engagement of design anthropology with futures and future-making as a subject – futures in design anthropology – and to the exploration of possible future directions for the discipline itself through such engagements – futures of design anthropology. Through various design anthropological investigations at specific sites – from care homes to corporate organizations, eco-homes to museums, Rio de Janeiro to Italy – this book critically addresses a number of dominant perspectives on, and approaches to, futures, including implied assumptions of singularity, linearity, locality and novelty. In the following we briefly elaborate on these themes and propose alternative perspectives for a design anthropological approach to futures.

First, ‘The future’ is often referred to in the singular, using the definite article to imply that there is only one version. Assuming eventual singularity of ‘the future’, futurologists, for example, tend to look at patterns of historical continuation and change, seeking to determine the probability of distinct future events. Although the established likelihood of a particular future does not rule out the realization of alternatives, it does foreground and authorize one dominant version of the future over alternative, subaltern ones (Mazé, this volume; Drazin, this volume). This idea of a singular future has political implications. As pointed out by Watts, ‘telling stories of the future is always a social, material, and political practice. It always has effects; it is always non-innocent’ (2008: 188). ‘The future’ is not only socio-politically positioned and negotiated, it is also culturally diverse and geographically dispersed (Appadurai 2013). Acknowledging that there is no single, neutral and shared future for all, contributors to this book discuss ‘futures’, in the plural form, as multiple and heterogeneous versions brought within experiential reach and shaped through uncertainty, experimentation, collaboration and contestation at specific sites of design anthropological engagement. Their concern is with the situated making of particular futures at specific sites, and how they might constitute possible alternatives to dominant perspectives on ‘the future’.

Second, particular perception of time, as being linearly structured in past, present and future, permeates dominant approaches to ‘the future’. Teleological ideas of the future as progress, for example, presenting ‘the future’ as an outcome that follows sequentially from past and present, is underpinned by such ideas of linearity. Seeing linearity as a particular, historical and cultural approach to time, futures and future-making (Grosz 1999; Jameson 2005; Mazé, this volume), the approaches presented in this book take other points of departure. Some focus on emergence and the mutual constitution of past, present and future, through practices of design and everyday life. Others engage with futures as imaginary ‘others’ outside the ordinary and the contemporary – what Rabinow refers to as ‘the untimely’ (Faubion, Marcus and Rabinow 2008) – from where we might question the taken-for-granted, and speculate about alternatives (Mazé, this volume). Foucault’s History of the Present, (1995) showed how analyses of the past may be a powerful means of critical engagement with the present. With Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary, Rabinow (2007) made a similar, but complementary move, by extending the analytical gaze to encompass the near future, still with the aim of critical engagement with the present. Such non-linear understandings of time and causality generally render the present contingent, and imply that things could be different. In this light, the relationship between the here-and-now and the there-and-then is constantly played out and reproduced through practice (Halse 2008: 22). With this book we seek to continue the development of conceptual and practical tools for inquiry into contemporary phenomena that are emergent and under-determined, and where pasts, presents and futures are closely linked and mutually constituted. One way of doing this is to engage in design anthropological speculations about how things could actually – not just in principle – be different.

Third, questions of locality and the politics of claiming a privileged space for inventing the future are critically addressed. Entrepreneurial startups, corporate innovation labs, even whole areas such as Silicon Valley are often seen as privileged centres of innovation; similarly, science, engineering and design labs are described as privileged spaces for inventing ‘the new’. From an anthropological perspective, Lucy Suchman (2011) has critically questioned this localized optimism and hubris associated with design, arguing instead for the acknowledgement of design as just one among many figures and practices of transformation. From a design anthropological perspective, future-making is not the exclusive territory of the privileged few, but dispersed and circulated as a part of the social (re)production of daily life (Ehn, Nilsson and Topgaard 2014; Ingold 2012; Simon 1996). As science-fiction writer William Gibson once said of the inequalities of access to advanced technologies, ‘the future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed’ (Gibson 1999). The approaches presented in this volume are acutely attuned to political issues, socio-economic differences and their effects on future-making practices in situated contexts. Challenging political, methodological and epistemological conventions, they relocate capacities for innovation and creativity among ordinary people in their everyday settings – even among animals and among things – in order to explore, practically and theoretically, how futures are, or could be, conceived and made.

Finally, even the basic assumption of novelty is in question in design anthropological approaches to futures. From science and technology studies, we learn that every new invention has its genealogy; it is composed of something more or less old (Pickering 1995), and made in ongoing everyday practices and places (Watts 2008: 187). Anthropologists also critically address ideas of novelty, arguing instead for dynamic and creative processes of social and cultural reproduction (Ingold 2012; Liep 2001). Ingold and Hallam (2008), for example, showed how the perception of ‘the new’ should not simply be taken for granted, but is underlain by a specific distribution and attribution of creative agency, along with a particular linear perception of the passage of time. Likewise, there is nothing entirely new in the design anthropological accounts in this book, only series of continuous transformations and reconfigurations, grounded in extended forms of the here-and-now. Yet from time to time we find ourselves in real-world encounters filled with the sense that everything has just changed, moments so laden with possibility or threat that afterwards nothing seems to be the same (e.g. see Binder, this volume; Rabinow et al. 2008).

Taken together, these tensions and perspectives fuel this volume, as design anthropologists engage critically, collaboratively and materially with futures from a position between the speculative and the mundane, between design and everyday life, between pasts, presents and futures. Building on previous developments in design anthropology (Clarke 2011; Gunn and Donovan 2012; Gunn, Otto and Smith 2013; Milev 2013; Smith and Kjærsgaard 2015), Design Anthropological Futures moves beyond disciplinary boundaries, to explore design anthropology as a fundamentally transdisciplinary field. In this effort, the contributors do not simply combine, but rework established methods and theories of design and anthropology, allowing new approaches and methodological entanglements to come into view. In some cases, historicity becomes a key to reconfiguring futuring, the everyday serves as a lab for experimentation, intervention becomes a path of speculative inquiry, and the environment emerges as a philosophical agent. In other cases, cultural imaginaries are challenged by fictions and prototypes, design objects are used to enter conversation dispositifs, and non-humans actively raise new social questions.

Together, the chapters provide rich empirical cases and theoretical reflections on design anthropological practices of future-making. In particular, they advance the use of transdisciplinary approaches and concepts while exploring the special relation between theory and practice that characterizes the distinct style of knowing in design anthropology (Otto and Smith 2013). Bringing together young experimental designers and anthropologists, and leading theoreticians engaged between the fields of design and anthropology, the book highlights four key themes that articulate emerging futures for design anthropology as a distinct transdisciplinary field of research. These themes structure the four major sections of the book: Ethnographies of the Possible; Interventionist Speculations; Collaborative Formation of Issues; and Engaging Things.

Ethnographies of the Possible

An often-mentioned difference between design and anthropology is their respective temporal orientations (Hunt 2011; Otto and Smith 2013). Whereas design, as the effort to create new things and solutions, is by definition concerned with the future, anthropology has traditionally been concerned with the analysis of past and present realities. In design anthropology, however, an orientation towards future social transformation is central to shaping the field. This raises epistemological and methodological concerns about how we conceive of what is, or might be, possible, and how we approach and handle the inherent complexities of emergent futures. What might an ethnography of the possible look like?

As they explore the possible, design anthropologists address differing temporalities, materialities and politics of future-making and their inherent relations to pasts and presents. According to Mead (2002 [1932]), all existence is situated in the present, which is always in a state of emergence. In the act of giving shape to the future, ‘we evoke a past that makes this future possible’ (Otto and Smith 2013: 17). This does not leave the future open to singular or arbitrary projections, but emphasizes the temporal entanglement of times and spaces, on the basis of which we may imagine and create possible futures. As Ramia Mazé (Chapter 3, this volume) argues, the future is never empty, but ‘will be occupied by built environments, structures, policies and lifestyles, which we daily (re)produce by habit or with intent in design’. When we explore ‘how things might be different’ (Anusas and Harkness, this volume; Mazé, this volume), we thus engage in different ontologies and politics both in the present and of the possible.

A focus on ‘ethnographies of the possible’ draws attention to the peculiar and transformative spaces entangled in particular pasts, presents and futures – spaces that are highly contested in practice, yet relatively unexplored in theoretical terms (Smith and Otto, this volume; Mazé, this volume; Halse 2013; Kjærsgaard 2011). Design anthropologists engage in reflective and critical positioning within these spaces, in order to challenge assumptions and elicit alternative opportunities for the future. Their explorations of ‘the possible’ move beyond linear processes of artefact design and planning, towards more imaginative and speculative processes of co-producing knowledge with diverse stakeholders. Some core questions addressed in this section are: what characterizes the practices and spaces of the possible? How do the processes through which imaginative practices are conceived and materialized unfold? And what are the epistemological and methodological implications of conducting ethnography in a partly fictional space that resists full articulation?

A design anthropological approach has consequences for the ways in which knowledge is produced so as to open up the space of the possible. For anthropologists, this involves defining and inventing the ethnographic field, as well as acting situationally to co-produce various cultural agendas for the future that are not conventionally a part of anthropological research. This raises central epistemological questions concerning the nature and creation of such transformative knowledge. Rachel Charlotte Smith and Ton Otto (Chapter 2, this volume) work towards maturing a grounded theoretical approach to scaffolding possible futures. Focusing on emergence and intervention as central concepts and orientations for design anthropology, they argue that these concepts may be seen as complementary in a dialectical movement of exploration and knowledge production. Using an interactive exhibition as a research experiment, the authors demonstrate how emerging digital cultures were used as a basis for experimentation, first through a collaborative design process, and subsequently in an exhibition space involving public audiences. Viewing such processes as transformative sites of research and design may allow for the co-creation of ethnographies of the possible in various domains...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Design Anthropological Futures
• Section I Ethnographies of the Possible
• Section II Interventionist Speculations
• Section III Collaborative Formation of Issues
• Section IV Engaging Things
• Index