Co-creative design as ethnographic practice
I’m currently reading Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice in order to orient myself around what I want my flavor of applied anthropology to look like. I’ll begin fieldwork in Japan in the spring of 2023, but between now and then I’m also laser focused on building my skills as a product manager, information architect, and designer in the edtech space. My first impressions of design anthropology were that it might be just the right theoretical fit for how I design my workflows in my job, and how I design my upcoming fieldwork.
Ethnography has seen a few variations, from a way to satisfy an imperialist’s worldly curiosity to a concentrated effort to decolonize Western academic thought. Long-term, ongoing participant observation has been the foundation of the practice. However, design anthropology puts forth a new paradigm of ethnographic fieldwork: one that is short term and decidedly interventionist.
Why? According to Ton Otto and Rachel Charlotte Smith, the incorporation of design thinking into ethnographic practice encourages a future-oriented mindset that gives greater weight to emergence. In other words, the past converges with the present to produce the future - meaning the human capacity for change is appreciated, analyzed, and participated with by the fieldworker. The design anthropologist doesn’t use ethnography as a tool to freeze a culture in space and time, but to contextualize the now while participating in future-building.
"Since the present includes both its past and its future potential, anthropologists have to develop ways to include the anticipation and creation of new forms in their ethnographic descriptions and theorizing. ... A new criterion of success would be how design anthropologists are able to correspond and collaborate with people as co-creators of desirable futures and to be the facilitators of knowledge and meaningful practices that transform the present.”
Otto and Smith acknowledge that this is a significant step for anthropologists who typically take great efforts to either blend into their community of study or disappear. There is a treasure trove of analysis and theorizing around the possible changes in a community’s or informant’s behavior caused of the very presence of the anthropologist. The assumption in many of these discussions is that a change in behaviors caused by the anthropologist’s presence has a negative effect on the data gathered. How can one be sure that certain behaviors were performed, adapted, or hidden from the fieldworker?
Design anthropology embraces this problem as an opportunity. Thoughtful interventionist strategies can benefit the community, and anthropologists are uniquely positioned to engage in these transformations.
“We consider this a necessary step in the face of contemporary local-global transformations and the corresponding academic requirement of developing responsive conceptual frameworks and interventionist practices. A growing body of literature addresses the entanglement of culture and design from a more transformative and imaginative stance (Balsamo 2011; Dourish and Bell 2011). What emerges from these interdisciplinary approaches to technology and change is that culture and design are not separate analytical domains or extensions of each other. Rather they are deeply entangled, complex, and often messy formations and transformations of meanings, spaces, and interactions between people, objects, and histories. It appears now an accepted premise that culture is always already an ingrained and situated part of design practices, but the reverse is equally valid and relevant: by designing objects, technologies, and systems, we are in fact designing cultures of the future."
Quotes from the chapter "Design Anthropology: A Distinct Style of Knowing" by Ton Otto and Rachel Charlotte Smith in Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice
Image sourced from @bamagal on Unsplash