Design Anthropology in Context

An Introduction to Design Materiality and Collaborative Thinking

Adam Drazin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317422020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

This book explores the broad territory of design anthropology, covering key approaches, ways of working and areas of debate and tension. It understands design as fundamentally human centred and argues for a design anthropology based primarily on collaboration and communication. Adam Drazin suggests the most important collaborative knowledges which design anthropology develops are heuristic, emerging as engagements between fieldwork sites and design studios. The chapters draw on material culture literature and include a wide range of examples of different projects and outputs. Highlighting the importance of design as a topic in the study of contemporary culture, this is valuable reading for students and scholars of anthropology and design as well as practitioners.

PART I Why, what and how?

1 WHY SHOULD ANTHROPOLOGY AND DESIGN ENGAGE?

You can argue that humankind has always designed, because design is what makes us human. Every artefactual creation is the result of some kind of intentional activity and cultural work, with the aim of exercising an effect upon the world, large or small.

Alternatively, you can argue that design is a human cultural patchwork, something which happens at certain places and times. There are emergent historical traditions which are called design, and they can be very different from one another; there are groups of people who are designers and others who are not and there are material things and sites which one can say have been designed, while others have not been. We can admire the achievements of extraordinary design movements, such as Silicon Valley in California, Mingei thinking in Japan or Participatory Design traditions in Scandinavia, each of which constitutes design in a very different way. From this viewpoint, we just happen to live at a time when design seems universal because of a global mindset of industrial modernity, but that perception hides the actual diversity.

These two positions are not, as facts, mutually exclusive, but they are perspectives which it is difficult to hold simultaneously. If humankind has always designed, we have no reason to consider why we should design, or engage with people who design, because it is a part of who and what we are. Through design, people exercise thoughts and action in concert, and they coordinate groups of collective thinking and action. Design gives meaning to us ourselves. If, however, we see design as an irregular, diverse and culturally constituted field, we need to think carefully about why to design, why to work with designers and why design should do research with non-designers, because the reasons will change and we will need to adapt. The kinds of work which design involves, the skills, thought acts, relationships and training, may all change according to social and cultural situations and purposes. It is questionable whether better design work emerges from relative monocultures, work teams of people who feel they understand each other and their customers, or from diversity and alterity, in which design works with and across a world of cultural boundaries and many different sorts of people. Design anthropologists work across these cultural and institutional boundaries, and between people who think in terms of universal human sameness, and those who consider themselves to be unique and different, and think that it is necessary to research other peoples’ lives. Design anthropology consequently changes as the nature of boundaries, diversity and alterity change.

It is 2007. I am working on a design project with Intel, Ireland, spending days with different people in their homes in different parts of the country. I do the things which I have learned to do as an ethnographer and an anthropologist – taking notes, asking questions, recording conversations and taking pictures. I am trying to fit in, as much as I can, into peoples’ lives. As the days go by, and I meet more people, what I know and learn will build up into an understanding of something bigger – the many cultural contexts and lives of elderly people in Ireland. I will also begin to behave differently, learning how best to talk and fit in. The experience will change me.

Back at Intel, in a group-meeting room with engineers and designers, I will find ways to communicate these peoples’ lives so we can all try to understand what the key issues are, think about the particular technologies which the company offers which might fit them and explore the particular forms, products, services, conversations or policies which may help the issues and the responses fit together. In order to do this, I do not do anthropology in the traditional way of writing out a book or text. I show videos and images. I draw. I map and sketch. Sometimes I build a little model with someone. I argue and debate with other ethnographers and weigh up different understandings.

Over time, I return to visit the people who I have spent time with and develop the ideas, the designs and the technologies further. My personal aim is not directly the production of better designs, but rather critical social and cultural interpretation. The company is paying me, but as an anthropologist, even in the office or lab, talking with designers, my heart is with my informants and I am imagining myself back in the field.

This type of project is one example of what might be called design anthropology. It involves working with a range of people to explore issues which are relevant to design. But design anthropology is a broad field. As I will later outline, it is only since 2002 that ‘design anthropology’ developed a proper consciousness of itself – and the people with an interest in it work in many different ways and see it as very different things. The project I have just outlined was very corporate, technological and involved engaging with engineering and scientific thinking. Some anthropologists are working in very large corporations in this way. Others are doing art, using ethnographic work to build sculptures or installations. Yet others may be very graphical and do anthropology and ethnography by sketching environments, places, routines and people. Others are working in ways which are very like social or community work, in which the aim is to achieve a more equitable and socially better world. My own motivation, as an anthropologist who is a social scientist, is to think constructively and collaboratively about peoples’ lives, culture and society. My own outputs are mainly textual. While I have worked with projects exploring imaging, audio, memory, independent living in ageing, home interiors, corporate meeting rooms, smart textiles and materials innovation, I am only a secondary expert when it comes to designing, engineering or marketing such things. I am an expert on working ethnographically, and on certain aspects of human culture, with a ‘material culture’ angle. My inadequacy as a designer and my colleagues’ inexperience as social scientists form an important basis for productive collaboration.

Design anthropology is a set of skills and practices which work across the boundaries, relationships and contestations which criss-cross the political economy of design, negotiating the diverse, often unfeasible, aspirations of creativity and innovation. It works across the hierarchies of design, between moments when good design can be done only by trained design professionals and moments when everybody lays equal claim to designing. It works between mutual moments of cause and effect, when change is seen to originate in studios, and when it is seen to originate outside. It works across diversity and unity, where good design is seen to originate from many mutually unaccountable people and communities in a social multiverse and also seen to originate in singular, coherent and clear communities who know what they are doing. In designing for others, we design for social selves, because design is understood as part of a social fabric.

At the heart of design anthropology is working to understand holistically the lives of people in many contexts around the world, and to constructively think about the social and cultural implications of those understandings in design environments, or collaboratively with designers of different kinds.

As well as discussing various motivations for working in design anthropology, I make two key arguments in this chapter. First, the history of design anthropology shows how we are currently living in a social, political and economic environment founded largely on design concepts (see Manzini 2015). This is to say that people understand their societies, environments and roles not only as about a well-made world but a well-thought world. Second, while there are many reasons for design anthropology, they are all founded upon human centredness. People themselves provide sufficient justification. What design anthropology does is work to re-establish a focus on people in a world dominated by things and institutions. To do this, the work involves an ever-changing appreciation of the social and cultural constitution of people and their lives, and especially their capacity to function fully within our new kinds of social organisation founded upon the production, circulation and deployment of concepts and ideas.

The key questions, however, are for you as a reader: Why do you think it is important to ‘engage’? Why talk to other people, different from you and similar to you, and try to participate in their lives? Why conversely would they participate in your own work? Why should you do social research and interpretation within design, and undertake design within social research? Why is it important for design and anthropology to connect? What are your own personal motivations, based on your skills, your interests, your own social and cultural world and background, and the sorts of work environments, teams and projects you see yourself working within? None of these questions are simple ones. Design anthropology work does not just work with other people, it helps create a relationship of ‘othering’. The work is morally loaded, teeming with intrusive goodness and pernicious compromise, because design anthropologists are obliged to take a position on the value of their work for people and for institutions. The conditions of work are by definition changing, so even the subject of your work – the idea of what a person is in a particular situation – will shift. If you work with ‘mothers’, for example, by the time you finish, ‘motherhood’ will have changed. In design anthropology, the most seemingly reliable things, upon which you would have staked your own confidence about what the world comprises, can change by design.

In the rest of this chapter, I address these questions by setting out a brief history of design anthropology and a range of examples of what motivates projects. This territory sets out a foundation for the rest of the book, and parts of it will be explored in more detail later. I start by outlining a history of ideas going back to the 1970s, set out in two important phases before and after 2002, the year when design anthropology ‘came of age’. This history is followed by examples of the aims of design anthropology work, loosely grouped as ‘success’, ‘debate’ and ‘crisis’. I then conclude by arguing that we have now been precipitated into the third age of design anthropology in which the territory of work has shifted.

The story of design anthropology

Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I will move the earth.

(Ascribed to Archimedes, often cited to illustrate living with relativity)

There are many good definitions, histories, discussions and outlines of what design anthropology comprises (Clarke 2017; Gunn et al 2013; Suchman 2011). Increasingly, social research, thinking and consideration are popularly understood as a part of this designed world, and so we have entered a moment when not only design but also design anthropology helps constitute the social fabric in many instances. Let me set out a brief history of how this came about, how design anthropology originated and developed. I suggest thinking about three particular phases – the first a phase of widespread anthropological research for product and service design which was known but not celebrated; the second a phase from 2002 when design anthropology became a self-conscious set of practices and skills undertaken by a self-declared group of professionals; and then an incipient third age at the time of writing in which it has become recognised as normative in an era of dispersed creativity. This brief story of design anthropology work is a story of changing motivations, principles and ways of knowing and representing the social world. It is a history of knowledge as much as institutions and methods.

Anthropologists have been working with designers for decades. During the 1970s, anthropological work formed an important part of technological systems innovation, and the groundwork was established for what it can achieve. In Silicon Valley, at Xerox Parc, anthropologists in the Work Practice and Technology research group, headed by Lucy Suchman, undertook workplace ethnographies which informed various visions of the future of workplaces. They did not invent technologies, rather they tended to build accounts of why various technologies might not work or might work (Suchman 2007). These envisioned technologies, many of which have become mainstream, included e-mail (imagined as textual communication without paper), icon-based computer interfaces and the PC (the idea of individuals having access to their own separate computing power) (Sellen and Harper 2001). Meanwhile in Denmark and Sweden, the roots of a different anthropological research tradition were being laid in Participatory Design (Simonsen and Robertson 2013, Schuler and Namioka 1994). In those countries, social democratic governments passed laws which required consultation with employees when new technologies were implemented. When ethnographers were employed to undertake research in workplaces, it transpired that these engagements were very productive in conceptualising new informational and computational systems and interfaces.

So anthropologists proved their worth during the later 20th century, especially in computing design, but they worked for many different reasons. In some places, the work was about political consultation and workers’ rights, while in others it was about innovation, profit, patented technologies and products. If we look beyond the context of the Euro-American technology–driven economy of the time, we can also see diverse other traditions. In Japan and in India, for example, there had been a long-standing approach in design circles by which designers undertook ethnography with craftspeople and communities, building design concepts in engagements with cottage industry. The Japanese tradition drew on Mingei philosophies (Moeran 1997; Kikuchi 2004), while related Indian work included such ideas as the ‘barefoot designer’ (Balaram 2011; Ory DeNicola and DeNicola 2012).

With each passing decade, the work of anthropologists in design changed. The topics, the questions being asked, the kinds of knowledge developed and the basic understanding of what constitutes humanity shifted (Drazin 2020). During the 1970s, ethnographies were very influenced by ethnomethodological approaches and emphasised the study of groups, group work and workflows within organisational systems. This work led to the establishment of the CSCW movement (computer-supported collaborative work) in the 1980s,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Design and human lives
• PART I Why, what and how?
• PART II Heuristic ways of knowing
• Epilogue
• Index