Design Anthropology: Understanding, Utility and Engagement
A three-day workshop at the University of Aberdeen
Convenors: James Leach and Caroline Gatt
Design Anthropology home
Background
The Workshop
Practicalities
Programme
Participants
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Background
Over the last decade anthropological methods of research and analysis have gained increasing visibility and currency in industrial contexts. Corporations such as Philips, Pitney Bowes, Hewlitt Packard, Microsoft and many others recognise that the qualitative data gathering techniques of anthropology are of benefit in understanding markets and consumers in new ways. Further, the discipline’s attention to cultural differences has promised to generate tailored innovation in product and service design. Finally, recent developments in the discipline which have brought sustained attention to technology, to architecture, to materials and objects, and to knowledge production and exchange offer opportunities for engagement with external partners and users.
These developments in industrial contexts and within the discipline have made it possible to question how Social and Cultural Anthropology can best interface with ‘industry’, broadly construed. This stimulates further questions about how anthropology can contribute to novelty, consider utility in new ways, and investigate the potential impact the discipline can have beyond the academy. One key aspect to be explored will be methodological innovations that might facilitate or even participate in this potential.
The Workshop
The workshop will explore in some detail if and how anthropological methodology should be recast to be of practical use to those beyond the discipline. We envisage that these discussions may bring various theoretical issues to bear on such a recasting of methodology. Participant are asked to contribute towards long-term research goals of expanding understandings of ethnographic practice in academia and industry, and developing a research agenda for the emergent field of design anthropology, and what a programme in Design Anthropology should consider and cover.
The question becomes what that potential may be able to offer various “users”. At this point it seems that the best route to take is to develop a network of interested people who could both contribute and benefit from such a project. The aim of the workshop is to create a space in which productive exchange can occur with an emphasis on what anthropology might practically offer and what people trained in Design Anthropology might be able to do. For this reason the workshop will include elements of practical making as well as facilitating different structures for discussion.
The workshop brings together a group of interested people from various backgrounds, namely software design, political and social activism, art, including new media art, the corporate world, existing design anthropology programmes and social theorists interested in both methodological and theoretical developments.
The third day will be dedicated to pinning down the practicalities of developing a taught programme in Design Anthropology at Aberdeen. The aim is to develop a postgraduate course having a core extended course in anthropological method and theory and various short intensive modules both in Aberdeen and in other places. One idea might be that particular students’ interests can be better accommodated elsewhere than Aberdeen, by intensive contact with particular supervisors or facilitators.
Practicalities
Meals: A sandwich lunch, and both morning and afternoon refreshments (tea, coffee) will be provided on all three days of the conference. Participants are invited for dinner on the evening of Monday 7th TBA. Participants are also invited to lunch at Zeste on Tuesday 8th at 13:30 (building number 40 on the campus map).
Location: On Monday 7th and Tuesday 8th the workshop will be held at the Linklater Rooms (building number 26 on the campus map).
On Wednesday 9th the workshop will move to the Divinity Library (building number 28 on the campus map).
Map of Old Aberdeen Campus
Programme
Monday 7th September
09.00 – 09.30 Introduction: James Leach, University of Aberdeen
09.30 – 11.00 Methodological Innovations 1.
Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen
Catching Dreams and Making Do
George Marcus, University of California, Irvine
Ethnography by Design
Dawn Nafus, Intel Portland, Tom Yarrow, University of Wales, James Leach, University of Aberdeen
Digging Outside the Academy
11.00 – 11.30 Tea and coffee
11.30 – 13.00 Methodological Innovations 2.
Discussion led by Arnar Arnason, University of Aberdeen, Mette Kjaersgaard, University of Aarhus, Maggie Bolton, University of Aberdeen
13.00 – 1430 Lunch
14.30 – 17.00 Making things 1.
Matt Ratto, University of Toronto
Critical Making
17.00 – 1800 Making Things 2.
Discussion led by Tom Yarrow, University of Wales and Jen Clarke, University of Aberdeen
1800 End Day One
18.30 Dinner
Tuesday 8th September
09.00 – 09.15 Introduction: Caroline Gatt, University of Aberdeen
09.15 – 11.00 Exploring Interfaces
Rachel Harkness, University of Aberdeen
Pragmatism and Hope in Eco-Design
Jacob Buur and Wendy Gunn, Mads Clausen Institute
Design Anthropology as a Way of Crossing Disciplines
Alberto Corsin Jimenez, School for Industrial Organisation, Spain
What does an anthropologist do as dean of a management, design and industrial innovation school?
11.00 – 12.10 Break Out Groups
12.10 – 12.30 Presentations from break out groups
12.30 – 13.15 Design Anthropology?
Discussion led by Laura Watts, University of Lancaster and James Leach, University of Aberdeen
13.30 Lunch at Zeste
Wednesday 9th September
09.00 – 09.45 What have we learnt?
09.45 – 10.30 What would an MSc look like?
10.30 – 11.00 Tea and coffee
11.00 – 12.00 Planning the MSc continued
12.00 – 13.00 Practicalities
13.00 – 14.30 Lunch
14.30 – 15.30 Developing the Report – Groups work on ideas for each section
15.30 – 16.00 Tea and Coffee
16.00 – 18.00 Combine sections and conclude
18.00 End
Participants
Mike Anusas is Design Lecturer in the Department of Design, Manufacturing and Engineering Management (DMEM) at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. As an undergraduate he studied 'Product Design Engineering', a joint-institution course at The Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow focused on developing human-centered approaches to technological design. During 1997-2004 he worked as a multi-disciplinary designer in product, exhibition, packaging and architectural design for a range of research, consulting and manufacturing organisations. His current teaching is concerned with drawing and making, ethnographic observation and social theory within the design process. His research projects and PhD are in collaboration the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen and are concerned with theories and practices of designing and making and their relationship to cultural perceptions of nature and environment.
Arnar Árnason is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has spent most of his working life doing research on death, in particular with regards to the politics of therapeutic interventions in grief. Lately he has done some work on landscape, sometimes even on how death and landscape meet. He is tempted to do a project on the Icelandic horse as a companion species.
Maggie Bolton came to anthropology after an earlier career as a physicist/engineer in industry. She completed her PhD in social anthropology at the University of St. Andrews and worked at the universities of Manchester, Bradford and Hull before joining the anthropology department at Aberdeen. Her ethnographic area of research is the Bolivian Andes, and her most recent research has looked at interfaces between scientific and indigenous knowledge in the context of livestock development projects aimed at llama herders.
Jacob Buur is professor of User-Centred Design at the Mads Clausen Institute, University of Southern Denmark, and research director of the SPIRE strategic research centre. SPIRE aims to establish the theoretical foundation for 'Participatory Innovation' - a new approach to user-driven innovation. SPIRE is cross-disciplinary, uniting researchers from design-antropology, interaction design, interaction analysis, business and innovation management, and the centre collaborates with the theatre company Dacapo and Danish and international industries. Prior to his appointment at the Mads Clausen Institute he was manager of the user-centred design group at Danfoss A/S for 10 years. He takes a keen interest in methods for studying and involving users in design, and in particular he has worked with video as a means of bridging user studies and innovation. He has designed user interfaces for a range of products, including joysticks for excavators, electronic controllers for heating and refrigeration, valves and frequency converters.
Jen Clarke is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. She will be working in collaboration with the Forestry Commission and TSG who are keen to explore how art comes to be made in forests. Jen graduated with a Masters in Anthropology (Distinction) from Goldsmiths College, in 2007; prior to this she completed an MA (Hons) in Literature at Glasgow University in 2003. Jen has worked as a teacher in the UK and in Japan, in the charitable sector (in grants giving, events management and fundraising) as well as in programming in the Education department of the art gallery Tate Britain.
Alberto Corsín Jiménez is Dean at Spain's School for Industrial Organisation (EOI) and Senior Scientist at Spain's National Research Council (CSIC). Previously, he was University Lecturer in the Anthropology of Organisations at the University of Manchester (2003-2009). He is the editor of 'Culture and well-being: anthropological approaches to freedom and political ethics' (Pluto 2008) and 'The anthropology of organisations' (Ashgate 2007), and is currently finishing a book on the political anthropology of the economy of knowledge.
Caroline Gatt has done anthropological research and worked with environmental non-governmental organizations since 2000. Between 2003 and 2005 she was the coordinated for Friends of the Earth Malta of “Community Centres for Sustainable Living”, an applied anthropology project funded by the EU’s Grundtvig programme. For a short while she also worked with Startup Malta Foundation for Entrepreneurship, and has always been interested in startups. She worked with two research theatre groups, Icarus Performance Project in Malta and C.I.R.T. in Italy, as a practitioner/researcher during which time she co-organised Malta’s first Summer University of Performing Arts. She is now a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, having done fieldwork with Friends of the Earth International. Her research explores environmental politics, perception, group constitution and maintenance practices, with a particular interest in ecological phenomenology. Her publications include “Emplacement and Environmental relations in Multi-sited theory/practice” in a volume edited by Mark-Anthony Falzon (2009) and together with Jeremy Boissevain “Environmentalists in Malta: The Growing Voice of Civil Society” in a volume edited by Tom Selwyn and Maria Kousis (in press).
Mette Gislev Kjærsgaard has worked for the past 10 years as an anthropologist with product development, design and architecture in various industrial, organizational and academic contexts. She is interested in applied as well as academic aspects of the combination of design and anthropology. She has a background in social and visual anthropology and hold MAs from University of Manchester and the University of Aarhus. Presently, she is a lecturer at the department of anthropology and ethnography at the University of Aarhus, where she is responsible for courses in design anthropology and organizational anthropology. Simultaneously she is writing up her PhD thesis on design anthropology, which is based on research conducted in collaboration with the Mads Clausen Institute for Product Development at University of Southern Denmark, where she was employed for a number of years.
Wendy Gunn is Associate Professor of Design Anthropology, SPIRE, Mads Clausen Institute, University of Southern Denmark. Gunn's focus here is on the design of technologies that would build upon and enhance the embodied skills of human users, through attention to the dynamics of performance and the coupling of action and perception (as opposed to the more traditional focus on mental computational operations). This is a radically new area of research that cuts across a wide range of fields from industrial design, through human movement studies and ecological psychology, to sociocultural anthropology. From an anthropological perspective, it resonates with three areas of interest that are generating some of the most exciting new work in the discipline: the understanding of skilled practice, the anthropology of the senses, and the aesthetics of everyday life. Research interests include: visual perception and material culture, learning and knowledge traditions, information theory and systems development.
Rachel Harkness is an anthropologist with interests in art and architecture, politics and the environment. She has recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of Aberdeen with a thesis entitled ‘Thinking Building Dwelling: Examining Earthships in Taos and Fife.’ This thesis is based on fieldwork she carried out with the builder-dwellers of off-grid eco-homes in Scotland and the US called Earthships. In it Rachel discusses architecture as a peopled process and considers the ways in which the dwellers are able to make manifest their dreams and designs for living. Rachel is currently working on a number of projects to do with ecology, craftwork and materials and their re-use, as well as a series of workshops about anthropology and its engagement outside academia.
Nina Holm Vohnsen is a Social Anthropologist from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. She is currently doing PhD research in a position shared by the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University, the Danish Ministry of Employment, and MindLab - a cross ministerial innovation unit promoting qualitative field research as a tool to make better and more focused policies in the public sector. She is currently doing ethnographic research focusing on the implementation of specific experiments and action plans aiming at regulating the Danish labour marked. Here she is mainly interested in the ways in which knowing and shaping are concurrent processes. Her previous research include: Migration and gender relation in urban Guatemala (2005). Functional Somatic Syndromes in a Danish context (2006-2007). Her recurring interest is the creativity and emotional work exercised by citizens caught between ideals, dreams, structure and practicality.
Penny McCall Howard is completing a PhD in anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, provisionally titled Work and Tension: The Human Habitation of the Sea in Scotland. Field research was undertaken on fishing trawlers and with people working in the offshore oil and gas industry, fish farms, and the cargo shipping. She is particularly interested in the relationship between people and the machines they work with, and in understanding when skilled and fulfilling relationships break down to cause frustration, injury and death. Another focus is on the relationship between techniques of navigation and orientation, and the rapidly changing digital navigational instruments used in the fishing industry. In the future, she is interested in developing anthropological approaches to workplace safety and well-being. She also holds a 100 ton captain’s license in the United States Merchant Marine and worked for several years as a captain of passenger carrying ships in the United States. Her first degree was in marine biology and contemporary studies.
Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology and Head of the School of Social Science (2008-11) at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written extensively on comparative questions of environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, as well as on evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history, on the role of animals in human society, and on issues in human ecology. His recent research interests are in the anthropology of technology and in aspects of environmental perception. He has edited the Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (1994) and was editor of Man (the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) from 1990 to 1992. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His major publications include Evolution and Social Life (1986), The Appropriation of Nature (1986), Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution (co-edited with Kathleen Gibson, 1993), Key Debates in Anthropology (1996), The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines: A Brief History (2007), Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (co-edited with Elizabeth Hallam, 2007) and Ways of Walking (co-edited with Jo Lee Vergunst, 2008). He is currently writing and teaching on the comparative anthropology of the line, and on issues on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. He has supervised thirty-two doctoral students to completion, and is currently supervising a further ten, on subjects ranging from thinking like a river in northern Finland to traditional craft in Japan.
James Leach is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Head of Department at the University of Aberdeen. He has undertaken long term field research in Papua New Guinea, and also in the UK. James’s research interests include intellectual property and notions of creativity, knowledge production and exchange in cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary contexts, the development of new technologies and their implications for social form, and the relation of law (specifically intellectual property law) to artistic practice. He is currently working on a book addressing contemporary constructions of ‘the owner’ and ‘the creator’ in different contexts. These interests all draw upon and extend collaborative anthropological research with Reite villagers from the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea.
James was trained as a Social Anthropologist in Manchester (B.Soc.Sci 1992, PhD 1997). His first publications focused on kinship, creativity, place/landscape, and art in Reite. Since then, he has written on Intellectual and Cultural Property, and on interdisciplinary collaboration. He has recently been engaged in comparative research on creativity and ownership in the UK (artists’ placements in Research and Industrial contexts), in directing research on gender in Free/ Open Source Software Development, and on artists' relations to laws of Privacy and Defamation.
George E. Marcus is Chancellor's Professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. In 2005, he established> the Center for Ethnography there, dedicated to charting and reimagining the conventions of ethnographic research challenged by new forms and norms of collaboration and by the fashion for design thinking. Previously, he was chair of the anthropology department at Rice University where he participated in the production of the volumes Writing Culture and Anthropology as Cultural Critique, and the Late Editions series of annuals through the 1990s. His most recent volumes are Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (with Paul Rabinow and others), and Fieldwork Is Not What It Used To Be (co-edited with James Faubion).
Dawn Nafus is an anthropologist with the People and Practices Research Group (PaPR) at Intel Labs in Portland, Oregon. Nafus holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University, and she previously worked as a research fellow at the Institute for Social and Technical Research at the University of Essex. She has worked on issues of communication technologies its relation to time, mobility, and gender. Her current work explores the social creation of technology consumers.
Julian Priest is an independent artist and researcher currently focused on themes at the edges between technology and the environment. He was co-founder of early wireless freenetwork community consume.net in London, became an activist and advocate for the freenetworking movement and was an advocate for an open spectrum in the public interest with openspectrum.org.uk. He has been peer advisor at the Banff New Media Institute, publishes articles through informal.org.uk and develops projects at greenbench.org. Since 2005 he has developed an artistic practice around collaborative forms and shows internationally.
Matt Ratto is currently director of the Critical Making lab at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 2003, writing his dissertation on the social organization of the Linux development community. He has worked and done research with Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information (NIWI), Humanities and Social Sciences in Amsterdam (VKS-KNAW) and the University of Umea, Sweden. His previous research has included the use of computer simulation and modeling technologies in Archaeology, the interplay between social organization and software code, the ramifications of particular software design sensibilities on our ability to function as citizens and as members of expert collectives, and the role of digital commons-based peer production in scientific communities.
His current research focuses on how hands-on productive work – making – can supplement and extend critical reflection on the relations between digital technologies and society. This work builds upon the new possibilities offered by open source software and hardware, as well as the developing technologies of 3D printing and rapid prototyping. These technologies and the social collectives that create, use, and share them provide the context for exploring the relationship between ‘critical making’ and ‘critical thinking.’
Thea Skaanes is chief curator and leader of UNESCO Educational Collections at Moesgaard Museum in Denmark. As an anthropologist she has done fieldwork in Cuba studying neighbourhood tactics in claiming spheres of self-governance from the state. Later she was responsible for ethnographic merits and community engagement in a pre-project for the world culture house in Denmark. In relation to the pre-project she facilitated processes as a trained facilitator and has taught modules at the facilitator education to a broad group of process consultants. As leader of UNESCO Educational Collections she works within the nexus of experience economy, education, research, the art of business and process design.
Rachel Charlotte Smith
Jo Vergunst is an RCUK Academic Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. His PhD (2004) was on the perception of landscape and social change in Orkney, Scotland, and he has since carried out research on European rural social change and on walking in rural and urban environments. Recent publications include two co-edited books, Ways of Walking (Ashgate, 2008) and Comparing Rural Development (Ashgate, 2009).
Laura Watts is an ethnographer at Centre for Science Studies, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University UK. Her interests are in the effect of landscape and location on high-tech design and on how futures are imagined and made. Her research has been located in the islands of Orkney, the mobile telecoms industry, and the public transport industry. Prior to her academic career she was a designer and business strategist in the telecoms industry. Much of her work is published on her website at www.sand14.com
Thomas Yarrow is a lecturer in social anthropology and human geography in the School of the Environment & Natural Resources, University of Wales, Bangor. Previously he completed his PhD in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge before holding a Leverhulme early career fellowship at the University of Manchester. Through this he has developed a regional interests in West Africa and theoretical interests in development, space and place, globalisation, civil society, knowledge and elites.
