Design and Anthropology

Wendy Gunn, Jared Donovan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317152613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

Design and Anthropology challenges conventional thinking regarding the nature of design and creativity, in a way that acknowledges the improvisatory skills and perceptual acuity of people. Combining theoretical investigations and documentation of practice based experiments, it addresses methodological questions concerning the re-conceptualisation of the relation between design and use from both theoretical and practice-based positions. Concerned with what it means to draw 'users' into processes of designing and producing this book emphasises the creativity of design and the emergence of objects in social situations and collaborative endeavours. Organised around the themes of perception and the user-producer, skilled practices of designing and using, and the relation between people and things, the book contains the latest work of researchers from academia and industry, to enhance our understanding of ethnographic practice and develop a research agenda for the emergent field of design anthropology. Drawing together work from anthropologists, philosophers, designers, engineers, scholars of innovation and theatre practitioners, Design and Anthropology will appeal to anthropologists and to those working in the fields of design and innovation, and the philosophy of technology and engineering.

Chapter 1
Design Anthropology: An Introduction

Wendy Gunn and Jared Donovan

Design Anthropology is an emerging field and consists of multiple practices. In terms of university educations the institutional context fosters different approaches to teaching Design Anthropology.¹ At SPIRE we worked together as part of a collaborative research team involving researchers with backgrounds in anthropology, design, engineering, language and communication, business and innovation studies. Design Anthropology practices within this context aim towards instigating different ways of designing across different scales for example products, services, policies but also working relationships.² As researchers carrying out research with both our students, the public and private sectors, we often find ourselves dealing with emergent situations engaging with peoples and places where a problem is not always given. In the introduction to this volume, we purport a concept of design that moves away from a problem-orientated approach, away from the standard trajectory of one situated context of use, one problem, and how to solve this. Rather, we argue, the world is more versatile than that; we need to include many contexts and practices.

Engaging with people that have different ways of knowing and doing (Harris 2007) involves a transformation of self (Nafus 2008). Working with difference, be it from within knowledge traditions of anthropology and design, or between the designer and user, also necessitates developing skills of engagement. Central to engaging with others is finding ways of imagining oneself into another person’s world. This however does not mean individuals participating want to be the other. Rather they want to learn from each other’s practices in order to build a closer relation between practices. We would argue that in building closer relations between using and producing, designing and using, people and things, a move is required away from a problem-orientated approach towards designing.

People often use things far beyond what designers expect. This would suggest that people actively intervene in configuring products and systems in the very processes of their consumption. A process of design thus is not to impose closure but to allow for everyday life to carry on. This way of designing according to Ingold requires flexibility, foresight and imagination within processes and practices of designing (2009).³ Flexible structures he says are always responsive to ongoing fluctuations within the environment and are not reversible that is they cannot return to their original state. Foresight is not about predicting the future but responsive to changing conditions. Returning for a moment then to imagination Ingold raises the question, how do speculations, dreams and imaginings of designers become interconnected with the practices of those who will be engaging with the outputs of designing?⁴

Contributors to the volume come from different sub-disciplines of anthropology, design, philosophy, archaeology, engineering, and theatre and innovation studies. As a way of weaving together both difference and similarity across these knowledge traditions, the editors have asked contributors to work with three main themes focusing on: the building of relations between using and producing, designing and using, people and things. The theme set aims towards instigating dialogue between contributors concerning the potentials of building relations between the processes and practices of designing and the fluidity of what people actually do during practices of using. Underpinning our inquiry is the idea that meaningful relationships between people, things and the environment emerge within and through everyday activities. Using thus becomes a form of designing. This approach challenges the idea that the designer’s role is the creator of objects.

Building relations between using and producing, Ingold introduces the concept of ‘user-cum-producer’ in the Introduction to Part I of the volume. He argues that during the processes and practices of enactment people become skilled practitioners instead of consumers. To replace the idea of the passive consumer of a product or system with that of a skilled practitioner is to challenge the notion of the consumer and to attend to local practices of appropriation and enskilment. Re-conceptualization of users as being (or having the possibility of becoming) skilled practitioners of products and systems requires different ways of conceiving of, designing and making things that allows for people to develop skills over their lifetime whereby skills are enriched rather than eroded. In so doing, a meaningful relation is made through use. The basic questions Ingold uses to frame Part I are: Is production equivalent to making, with some idea of the finished thing in mind, or is it better understood – like life itself – as a process of carrying on, punctuated but not terminated by the things it successively brings into being? Is using equivalent to consumption? Does it entail wearing down and/or using up the instruments and materials is starts with? Is it purely instrumental? Or is it a matter of incorporating things into a pattern of customary (hence usual) activity?

During the industrial revolution and in response to economic conditions the focus was on design and finding optimum solutions. Use remained unproblematized. Redström in his introduction to Part II argues a different understanding of relational form is required in order to leave outmoded ways of designing behind. Notions of forms and related acts have to be revisited in order to build a relation between design and use. He considers the basic dichotomy between design and use as a historical artefact of an industry set up for certain modes of mass-production and mass-consumption, and a transitional state rather than a basic condition for design. Two basic questions are posed: Why it is so difficult to articulate different forms of relations between design and use? and What about relations between design and use unfolding over time?

In understanding (and building) relations between people and things, Peter-Paul Verbeek expands on the mediation approach in which objects mediate human beings and human beings mediate objects. The mediation approach according to Verbeek, as it has been developing over the past years, offers an alternative for the predominant separation of humans and things. This approach has been used to inform design practices, enabling designers to anticipate how products help to shape human experiences and human practices. The mediation approach deserves to be expanded, though, in order to further explore the relations between material things and personhood. He proposes two directions: one will include configuration and re-configuration of humans and (technological) products; the other will establish connections to the tradition of philosophical anthropology. The basic questions addressed in Part III are: How to conceptualize the relations between humans and things? and How can Design Anthropology include human–thing relations and the materiality of things?

SPIRE

In parallel to writing and teaching the editors of this volume are actively involved in research activities at SPIRE (2008, ongoing). The SPIRE strategic research centre builds upon 15 years of research by the user-centred design group at the Mads Clausen Institute, University of Southern Denmark. Jacob Buur and Thomas Binder originally founded the group at Danfoss in the early 1990s (Buur 2011). Research activities build upon Scandinavian Participatory Design (Nygaard 1975, 1977, Ehn 1993), Action Research (Reason and Bradbury 2008), Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967), Activity Theory (Vygotsky 1978, Engeström, 1999), Ethnomethodology (Suchman 1987), Anthropology (Ingold 2000) and Philosophy (Wittgenstein 1953).

Underpinning our investigations in ‘participatory innovation’ has been a concern with finding ways of engaging peoples within collaborative designing and participatory innovation activities who otherwise would be excluded from processes and practices of design and innovation (Buur and Matthews 2008). As researchers, we share an interest in how practice informs theoretical inquiry, and how theory is in itself is a form of practice. This of course raises the questions: How do disciplinary orientations influence our understandings and building of relations between practices of designing and using? and How do anthropologists and designers, working as part of a collaborative research group, come to know something of another’s practices in order to learn from another’s practices?

Being involved in SPIRE research activities has afforded possibilities to work closely for extended periods of time with different disciplines, external company and industrial partners, the public sector and local communities. During our daily research practices the editors of this volume are involved in juxtaposing difference and drawing things together. Juxtaposition of different knowledges and institutional structures is a formal way of working with contrast and generating forms.⁵ Drawing things together refers to, as Ehn (2010, after Latour 2005) has argued, working out ways of bringing gestural movements of designing and using closer together. Emphasis is placed on how things come into being as opposed to focusing on the objects of design. Gestural movements of designing and using are considered as being forward and dynamic movements, connected to ongoing continuity of what people actually do within their everyday activities rather than retrospectively (Farnell 2000). Participation within the Indoor Climate and Quality of Life (2007–2010) SPIRE project enabled us to collaboratively explore the dilemma between two meanings of environment. One stemming from techno-science discourse leading to diminishing interpretative flexibility, the other belonging to local practices characterized by a diversity of meanings. In parallel, we were concerned with how people engage with and negotiate ongoing continuity while encountering systems of environmental control.

During processes and practices of designing the challenge for involving people who would otherwise be excluded, is to design in such a way that acknowledges perceptual acuity and improvisational skills of people. After all, as one SPIRE workshop participant commented, ‘If there are no people in a room, it makes no sense to talk about Indoor Climate and Quality of Life’.⁶ Designing thus enables action and allows for skilled practices to emerge through ongoing continuity of use. For example during collaborative attempts to reframe what innovation could be within the development of Indoor Climate products and systems of environmental control, researchers, company partners and users of indoor climate systems were engaged in ongoing reflection with provotypes (Donovan and Gunn this volume, Gunn and Clausen 2010, Gunn, Donovan and Pedersen 2010). Provotypes were involved throughout the Indoor Climate and Quality of Life project to both evoke and provoke reflections upon otherwise taken-for-granted aspects of experience (Mogensen 1991). The provotypes were made in such a way as to allow for an open response during the making process. In order to make a move within such an open-ended design practice, the researcher has to understand what is already pre-structured and what is the ongoing flow of everyday life. Drawing together the forward gestural movements of designing and using allows us to consider innovation concepts and objects as transitive relations. Transitive relations become part of an overall flow whereby designing involves connecting our own lives to that of others. Within such practices, materials play a central role in helping people to imagine and engage with the social and processual aspects of how things come into being. There is of course friction and constraints in the fluidity but that is where improvisation takes a role (Ingold and Hallam 2007).

Skilled Innovation

To call for a crafting of potentials means that our theoretical processes and products should impart characteristics of a generative nature. This approach differs from innovation descriptions of new or novel things that begin by looking retrospectively back at process from the thing made.⁷ Retrospective looking back results in descriptions of innovation which look at previous acts and that differ from the lived actuality of people(s) generating forms. Looking backwards, according to Ingold, is in opposition to the ongoing forward movement of improvisation and a reaction to what has happened (Ingold et al. 2009). A skilled practitioner by contrast involved within processes of making creates form through flow and forward movements. According to Ingold skilled practice is not about imposing. The skilled acts of making depend upon understanding properties of materials; the creativity of making lies in the making itself. Making is always in a process of transformation, it is fluid and improvisational. Making thus gives way to using and designing as a process of carrying on whereby things are not actually finished. As he says: finishing is never finished. Rather meaning is created in the making and skill here lies not only knowing when to grip but also knowing where and when to let go. Ingold’s key argument to understanding skill lies in dexterity. Building upon the research of Nikolai Bernstein (1996) he argues that the differentiation between being skilled and unskilled is the skilled practitioner continuously adjusts his/her movements in response to the emerging task. Movements are continuously being attuned to the nature of the task. Central to skilled practice is the working of uncertainty rather than certainty and co-coordinating perception and action. By contrast instead of working with certainties, working with uncertainty continuously informs judgements and dexterity. Workmanship of uncertainty involves learning as you go along and not before you go. Action thus cannot be understood as a set of instructions in the head of an individual that are simply acted out. Rules as such are not regulated during the course of action but constituted. Workmanship of uncertainty has narrative qualities, tools have a story rather than a function, and gestures are learned through practice.

Learning with Anthropology and Design

Where and when can anthropology inform practices of design? Where and when can design inform practices of anthropology? Both disciplines have distinct identities. Each discipline has its own methods and methodologies. Nevertheless practitioners from within these disciplines continue to realize the benefits of learning with each other. This however does not imply that distinctions between the disciplines should be made equivocal. Within a collaborative process of designing, what do anthropologists engaged in doing Design Anthropology bring to the table? And within a collaborative process of designing, what do designers engaged in doing Design Anthropology bring to the table?

Addressing questions of where and when things could have been different, anthropologists bring a processual understanding, giving a sense of different ways of moving fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Design Anthropology: An Introduction
• Using and Producing
• Designing and Using
• People and Things
• Index