Design Anthropology @ Swinburne
In the beginning I thought that Design Anthropology meant a sort of ethnographically-informed design of new products, services and system for consumers and businesses (Gray, 2010) but today I realized through the Swinburne approach that we can both conceive insightful ideas from the ethnographic research on one side and on the other we can make the difference with a positive impact on people and communities. This objective can be accomplished by a hybrid methodology that combines theoretical studies with practical field-research.
When I realized that I wanted to study Design Anthropology I was at a cross road; In 2013 I have been selected in two universities in England for an Interior Design Ma degree but after a bachelor in Industrial Design here in italy I thought that I wanted to do something more concious and less dictated by fads; at the same time I wanted to work practically on objects and artifacts.
In this sense I was searching for a hybrid way to endow my projects of meaning; in fact I firmly agree with Tunstall that argue that "the form has just as much meaning at the content", a perspective that is pretty far from the idea of Design taught in a Polytechnic as the one in Turin, a post industrial city specialized in car manufacture.
Today, I recognize just one lack that is mainly given by the fact that I am an online student, as such my only contact with the university and peers occurs though a web site, so no human face-to-face contact which is considered necessary in order to establish effective distributed work teams as stated by Gray. Furthermore Design Anthropology aim to constitute holistic and multidisciplinary teams, so for my future I wish to attend the "physical" course at Swinburne in order to fill this gap of human interaction and complete a path started 7 months ago with this insightful formative experience.