LAURA FORLANO. writer and design researcher.

WHAT I DO.

I’m an ethnographic time traveler. For much of the last 10 years, I’ve been studying the ways in which the use of communication technology enables emergent socio-cultural practices around working and living in cities. For example, I’m interested in peer-to-peer networking, bottom-up organizing, co-located online collaboration, user-driven social innovation and open source urbanism, to name just a few. I’ve watched teens use mobile phones in Tokyo, observed activists building Wi-Fi networks on rooftops in Berlin, interviewed freelancers in Starbucks cafes in New York, watched doctors use computers in operating rooms, tested iPhone applications for navigating college campuses, visited design studios in Barcelona, and hung out with hackers in Budapest.

I’m also an activist. I’m not satisfied with merely describing the lived experience of socio-technical change through writing. I’m critical of the metaphors that the mainstream media uses to frame discussions about the interplay between technology, culture, and cities. For example, “Smart Cities” are often described as productive, efficient, and innovative, a continuation of neo-liberal discourses around technology and the economy. I’m concerned about the kinds of values that we embed in socio-technical systems, the opportunities that we bring to life, but also the possibilities that we take away by making these choices.

And I’m a maker. Most often, I’m making something that involves people. A workshop, a research salon, a lecture series. I think that part of my learning to work as a design researcher is related to learning how to facilitate face-to-face, hands-on workshops. I’ve run at least seven design workshops in the past year in order to bring together different communities of scholars, practitioners, activists, and makers. For example, in one workshop for a health-focused summer program in Brooklyn, four small groups of teens created stakeholder maps, discussed the values associated with a specific health topic (e.g.,obesity or HIV), and prototyped ideas for new platforms, products, and services. One group wrote the lyrics to a song about future technologies that they might use at the dentist, another wrote the script for a play about HIV, another created a Lego model of community health services and, finally, another created a series of iPad wireframes for a new application.

Luckily, design is a field in which all of these identities–scholar, activist and maker–can coexist. In fact, I believe that all of these are necessary in order to combine a reflective and critical social science perspective with a future-oriented generative process that results in some kind of change in the world. This can sometimes be mistaken for a kind of technological determinism. Yet if you are asking critical questions along the way and have a keen sense of the values trade-offs that you are making, I am hopeful that it is possible to create new ways of knowing things, doing things, and making things that can contribute to the world.

ANTHROPOLOGY + DESIGN.

Anthropology and design have been in dialogue for several decades, but one of the most obvious examples is in the human-centered (or user-centered) design research tradition. This tradition is based on empathy and primary research through field studies and qualitative interviews as a fundamental starting point for a design research project. Design, in this case, is not about the aesthetic qualities of a particular logo, product, service, or system but about its ability to serve user needs and develop solutions.

The shift toward a human-centered approach has been an important one for many companies attempting to innovate through the creation of new products and services. This approach was pioneered by anthropologists and sociologists working in the Bay Area at companies, such as Xerox PARC and IBM, in the 80s and 90s to design computer interfaces. More recently, companies such as Microsoft, Intel, and Yahoo! continue to employ social scientists, designers, as well as people with hybrid skill sets, such as interaction design, in order to conduct user research. Over the past two decades, many design consulting firms that originally focused on industrial design such as IDEO, frog design, and Smart Design have promoted the use of a human-centered approach based on design research. One of the main professional conferences that bring together practitioners and academics working in the field of user research is EPIC, now in its 10th year.

One thing that I think anthropologists might learn from design is the idea of creating a more generative form of critique that makes the project better. In design, a critique is not a peer review, it is a collaboration. I recently got peer review comments back from a design journal and was surprised at the level of engagement with the work in a very deep, helpful, generative and productive manner. Often, in my experience, peer review in the social sciences is more about defining a field by policing insiders and outsiders. A more generative conversation, starting with “Yes, and” rather than “But” could help all of us do better work. Also, in the model of a design critique, it is possible to guide the conversation to focus only on certain aspects of the work such as the style or the content or the process. Adopting and/or developing a design critique model in anthropology might be a productive and interesting direction.

Another thing that I think anthropologists might draw from design is experimentation with more collaborative ways of working in teams, from graduate school though faculty positions and professional practice. In graduate school, I did very few team projects for courses and, at the time, there were not any opportunities to participate in collaborative research projects in my department. In addition, there is a lot of emphasis on doing your own project, collecting your own data and writing it up on your own. Since becoming a faculty member in a design school, I’ve seen the many ways in which student teams collaborate successfully and, sometimes, unsuccessfully. It is always exciting to see students working together to achieve a common goal.

Designers would benefit from a more rigorous incorporation of theories of culture as well as a more in-depth understanding of ethnographic research methods. Finally, while anthropologists are skilled storytellers through text, photography, and film, designers are trained in visual storytelling that includes images, charts, graphs, and artifacts. Greater collaboration across literary and visual traditions would result in better storytelling in both fields.

WHY NOW.

The human-centered design tradition is already built considerably on anthropology through the appropriation of field research and ethnographic methods (to the dismay of many anthropologists!). But a deeper engagement between design and anthropology might allow anthropologists to explore broader implications of their work beyond the academy through exhibits, artifacts, and workshops that engage different communities.

Human “needs” have been the focus of design work for far too long and we are beginning to see the planetary limits of our unevenly distributed needs. It is important to go beyond the human-centered focus and towards a perspective in which it is possible to empathize with and see the world through the lens of other kinds of entities (e.g., objects, artifacts, animals, nature, and the environment). While there are many design frameworks that break up the world into discrete categories for observation, it is time that we consider hybrid categories as new ways of seeing. For example, what of the human-object and the animal-technology? I’ve tried to do this by introducing new terms by which to understand these hybrid categories. For example, in one project, after studying Wi-Fi networks, community activists and mobile workers in a range of settings were struggling with ways to describe socio-technical and spatial phenomenon. I created the term codescapes as a way of referring to technological and spatial things simultaneously.

HOW I SHARE.

I use design to engage with broader and different audiences beyond academic journals. One of the things that I learned from the Breakout! project is how difficult it is to engage the public on the streets of New York in spontaneous collaborative activities. The project was unique in that it was the only project in the The Architecture League of New York’s Towards the Sentient City exhibition that was specifically about people’s behavior and emergent forms of collaboration. The other projects were about the display of specific artifacts in the built or natural environment (e.g., garbage, plants, fish, street furniture).

In the codesign project about urban technology, my collaborator and I, along with the help of several graduate students at the Institute of Design, produced a visual “Designing Policy” toolkit. We introduced participants to the intersection of urban technology, values in design, and co-design methods. The toolkit was a prototype, a visual artifact that contains a theoretical argument and a methodological approach, as my colleague Stan Ruecker and his coauthor Alan Galey have argued here.

Since the social sciences are still primarily focused on the book or the journal article as the primary mode of dissemination, recognition, and publication, I have found that design offers a wide range of more visual modes such as exhibitions, artifacts, and workshops through which to engage communities. Lastly, I have found short articles and blog posts on scholarly blogs like Savage Minds, Culture Digitally, and Ethnography Matters to be an engaging and fast way of disseminating ideas and learning about relevant communities of practice.

METHODOLOGY.

It is difficult to be critical and descriptive as a scholar while at the same time generative and future-oriented as a maker, all along maintaining a strong sense of core values as an activist. Yet this is exactly what is needed in order to develop a methodology that more deeply combines design and anthropology. In many ways, these three different mindsets are at odds with one another: the analytical mind of a social scientist, the exploratory mind of an artist, and the action-oriented mind of an activist.

Our institutions, academic or otherwise, do not allow use to cross these boundaries easily. I think that designers could benefit from a deeper and more rigorous engagement in the context of their projects, but this does not necessarily need to be through conducting fieldwork with ethnographic observations and interviews. What is more important is that designers know how to combine different methodologies in order to answer their research questions. For example, they need to know how to use secondary data, how to understand broader shifts in society, how to derive design principles from a range of sources. That is important.

I draw a lot of inspiration from generative, future-oriented methods such as design fiction, critical design, and speculative design. These methods were pioneered by London-based designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby at the Royal College of Art in the 1990s. (For examples, see their new book Speculative Everything). These methods draw on critical traditions from art and architecture over the last century, such as surrealism and situationism, to use design as a means to ask questions, seek out alternative possible futures, and intervene in society through the creation of material artifacts.

While critical design has been criticized as elitist and apolitical, the purpose of these methods is to pose questions about alternative future possibilities, often in the form of dystopias. When you encounter critical design projects, your first reaction might be to laugh but you quickly encounter a sense of wonder, surprise, horror, or fear about the state of the human condition.

PEDAGOGY.

In my teaching, I encourage students to conduct fieldwork but I also believe that they can draw on their own experiences and still create very interesting work. By conducting ethnographic observations, they can become the creators and owners of their own data rather than believe that experts are the only people that can create knowledge.

But, overall, I’m more interested in fostering discussions of theory that allow my students to develop a more critical view of the world around them in order to inform their process of documenting, analyzing, and making. In order to design in and for a world of emerging technologies, it is necessary to be both skeptical and optimistic. By remaining skeptical, designers can be more aware of the ways in which sociopolitical values are embedded in design.

In my teaching, I encourage students to create artifacts that raise important questions around emerging technologies, such as cultured meat and networked objects. Some examples include a dynamic lighting system such as Philips Hue or a thermostat like Nest that is controlled by an iPhone application, commonly referred to as the ‘internet of things’ type projects. For the cultured meat project, my students created an event called “Meat Up: A Cultured Evening” that included a mini-exhibition of a series of artifacts where they asked participants to document their reactions in a small booklet and hosted a dinner party in order to spur conversation about cultured meat.

ME.

Laura Forlano is a writer, design researcher, and founder of Mobile Atelier. She is an Assistant Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Previously, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2012-2013. Her research is focused on the intersection between emerging technologies, material practices, and the future of cities. She is co-editor with Marcus Foth, Christine Satchell and Martin Gibbs of From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement (MIT Press 2011). Forlano’s research and writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals including First Monday, The Information Society, Journal of Community Informatics, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Design Issues and Science and Public Policy. She has published chapters for books including editor Mark Shepard’s Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space (MIT Press 2011) and The Architecture League of New York’s Situated Technologies pamphlet series and is a regular contributor to their Urban Omnibus blog. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

RESOURCES.

Forlano, Laura. 2013. Digital Fabrication and Hybrid Materialities. Culture Digitally. December.

Forlano, Laura. 2013. Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design? Ethnography Matters. September.

Forlano, Laura. 2013. Making Waves: Wireless Technology and the Coproduction of Place. First Monday, Special Issue on “Media and the City.”

Foth, M. and Laura Forlano, Martin Gibbs and Christine Satchell. 2011. From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Forlano, Laura. 2009. WiFi Geographies: When Code Meets Place. The Information Society 25:1-9.

Forlano, Laura. 2009. Work and the Open Source City. Urban Omnibus, The Architecture League of New York. New York, NY. June.

DANIELA ROSNER. design researcher. ethnographer. science studies scholar.

ANTHROPOLOGY + DESIGN.

I think design and anthropology have the potential to reinforce each other’s aims.  Anthropology could help develop a more socially informed design process, and design could help clarify anthropological investigation. That’s the goal, but not always the end—design can over-simply or misinterpret anthropological insights, and anthropological inquiry can overdetermine or stifle design. What’s helpful in an anthropological interpretation of design is how it helps reveal an instance of design as just one (of many) located and specific moments of change. Lucy Suchman articulates this nicely in her writing on the limits of design, suggesting that “conventional design methods are (necessarily) silent on matters that anthropology would be interested in articulating” (2011:3).

Conversely, design can open up creative possibilities overlooked by other modes of investigation, and help anthropologists communicate in the field. For me, design often involves studio-based explorations. Design can take on many forms for different people, but as someone with an undergraduate degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, I base my own methods on those early days—thinking with materials and building intuition through hands-on explorations.

WHY NOW.

The pace and form of design and technology development has radically changed in recent years, and anthropological methods can offer fresh insight into the cultural stakes of these transformations. For example, anthropology can help explain how and why small-scale, device-level design activities get connected to broader social changes relating to STEM education, green computing, or institutional frameworks and policies. Making anthropology more explicit in the work of design could help designers reach beyond their areas of expertise to ask questions about the cultural, political, and ethical implications of their work.

WHAT I DO.

By interventions I’m referring to the kinds of designed objects, systems, or programs that enable anthropologists to ask questions about a field site. Such interventions might involve deploying cultural probes, as Gaver and others have done (Gaver, et al. 1999). For me, interventions have entailed extended provocations that suggest ways of reimagining commonplace practices such as knitting (see Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s writing on speculative and critical design, 2013). While conducting participant observation in a knitting guild, for example, I introduced a tool that I developed called Spyn that enables people to annotate their hand knit products with digital messages and geographic locations (Rosner & Ryokai 2012). Introducing the technology not only revealed something about the technology itself—that it could be used to turn knit artifacts into puzzles, travel journals, and mix tapes—but it also told me something about the knitting worlds I had entered: that members of this guild saw themselves as outside an engineering culture that threatened their social organization, and even their moral order.

Now by responses I mean something very different. I’m talking about the kinds of designed artifacts that come out of a careful investigation of a field site. For example, activist projects that enact argument and prompt social change in response to ongoing fieldwork. This could involve building a website like Turkopticon in response to asking “crowd workers” to describe a hypothetical Bill of Rights on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, as Lilly Irani and Six Silberman have done. Or it could entail curating an exhibition, as I did last spring at the Oakland Museum of California with female artists working with broken materials, from e-waste to torn clothing. I gathered the artists in response to the shifting gender dynamics I observed while working with hobbyist fixer groups over the past year.

Lastly, by extensions I mean design projects that embody and extend the forms of value, engagement, and practice embedded in the sites we study. This work invites a wide range of material engagements. While looking at relations between the “maker movement” and Stanford’s program in design last year, I worked with a team of students at Stanford University to develop a Playdough and soft materials 3D printer for children called Fingerprint. As a participant and observer on this design team, I found the soft materials printer reflected the particular ways members of these groups conceptualized technology for making, revealing making as shared ideological work (Berger 2003). With my students at the California College of the Arts, we used hands-on explorations with ordinary and extraordinary materials—from piezoresistive fabrics to leather and wood—to trace and extend object histories (Rosner, et al. 2013). Most recently, in my group at the University of Washington, the Tactile and Tactical Design Lab, we have been looking at feminist constructions of hacking in local hackerspaces (community-operated co-working spaces) through a set of “Critical Design” workshops. Sarah Fox and Rachel Ulgado, two PhD students I work with, have been exploring just how feminist perspectives get entangled with members’ conceptions of design to collaboratively build environments that embody members’ hopes and concerns for the future.

In sum, these approaches are not fixed or exclusive approaches, for they often overlap and intertwine. Instead, I’ve found them useful as guides for finding my way across new or unfamiliar interdisciplinary lands.

ME.

Daniela K. Rosner is an Assistant Professor of Engineering at the University of Washington and co-director of the Tactile and Tactical Design Lab (TAT lab). Through fieldwork and design, her research reveals and creates surprising connections between technology and handwork. This work results in new theoretical frameworks and interactive systems for the practices and spaces of design and repair. She has taught interaction design at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and worked in museum exhibition design, most recently at the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum. She holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley’s School of Information, a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago, and a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in Graphic Design. Daniela is a regular columnist for Interactions Magazine, a bimonthly publication of ACM SIGCHI.

RESOURCES.

Berger, Bennett M. 2003. The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life Among Rural Communards. Transaction Publishers.

Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press.

Gaver, Bill, Tony Dunne, and Elena Pacenti.1999. Design: Cultural Probes. Interactions 6(1): 21-29.

Rosner, Daniela K., Miwa Ikemiya, Diana Kim, and Kristin Koch. 2013. Designing with Traces. In Human Factors in Computing Systems. Paper presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference. 1649-1658.

Rosner, Daniela K. 2014. Making Citizens, Reassembling Devices: On Gender and the Development of Contemporary Public Sites of Repair in Northern California. Public Culture 26(1 72): 51-77.

Rosner, Daniela K., and Kimiko Ryokai. 2009. Reflections on Craft: Probing the Creative Process of Everyday Knitters. Creativity and Cognition. Paper presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference. 195-204.

Suchman, Lucy. 2011. Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design. Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 1-18.

KAT JUNGNICKEL. ethnographer. maker.

ANTHROPOLOGY + DESIGN.

I’ve always made a bit of a mess. I’ve splashed around darkrooms, attempted to stitch interdisciplinary collaborations, and knit a research blog. I’ve hosted exhibitions, printed ‘zines and folded origami-inspired data boxes. I regularly collaborate with colleagues to build and perform dubiously welded “Enquiry Machines,” and I’m currently sewing a range of new Victorian women’s cycle wear as a means of thinking about public space, mobility, and gender.

I am by training a social scientist and my key methodological approach is ethnographic; for the last decade this visual, material, and messy approach has been central to my work. I’m increasingly drawn to a hands-on, object-oriented and embodied practice for the potential it holds for unlocking new expressions and transmissions of the social. It is a practice that is sometimes compared with a designer-ly approach, yet for me it comes from a background in Communications, Visual Culture, and Sociology.

I see ethnography and design intersecting on many levels, from topics and contexts of study to the rich material methods we employ to develop thick description of the world around us. I’m particularly interested in how the ubiquity of digital technologies has transformed not only the subject matter for many researchers but greatly expanded the possibilities of communicating and circulating findings. In addition to a palette of new skills and tools, there is an open mindedness to experiment with design practices, a desire to look beyond conventional “knowledge exchange” to alternate forms of transmission and entanglements with bodies, technologies, materials and places.

Ethnography + design become particularly productive for me in relation to making. Making is a fascinating lens for thinking about how things come into being, how they are made, where and from what, and who can and cannot participate. The fact that making remains suspended in a dynamic state of practice means it can always be something more or different. Much of my work involves the study of grassroots or fringe communities who customise and adapt existing technologies, re-inscribing them with new meanings and re-imagining possibilities of use. I also, as noted above, consider making central to my own practice.

I make things to make sense of things.

WHAT I DO.

I’ve worked on ethnographic research projects in industry and academic contexts for over a decade. Topics have been diverse but they generally coalesce around new digital technologies, cultural practices, mobilities and gender relations.

For instance, my study of the digital cultures and practices of the largest community WiFi networking group in Australia describes the collective work of individuals committed to designing and building their own version of the internet, or what they called “Ournet, not the internet”. Recently published, DiY WiFi: Reimagining Connectivity (Palgrave Pivot 2013) tells ethnographic stories about a handmade, deeply local communications network forged around barbeques, located in backyards and on sheds, and made from found, adapted, and off-the-shelf materials, with trees, insects, makers’ skills, and the fierce summer weather all contributing to its distinct shape and character. It’s all about people, materials, contexts and things that work as well as things that don’t always go to plan. While these makers clearly imbue a Do-it-Yourself (DiY) ethos they do not do it alone–they Do-it-Together (DiT).

The relevance of rich descriptions of how people design things from the ground up lies in how they render visible large socio-technological systems and infrastructures, drawing attention to other shapes and possibilities of use. They ask new questions about things we take for granted. Here, WiFi makers shift the register–not by asking what we can do on the internet, but what we can do with it. Their design practice signals ways of connecting with each other that circumvents familiar and dominant telecomunication relationships. Fundamentally, what their messy, make-do methods and tales of resourceful ingenuity permit is another way of seeing how technologies come into being–and how things might be different.

METHODOLOGY.

Methodologically, there is a growing movement in the social sciences to embrace mess (Law 2004), liveness (Back & Puwar 2012), and inventive methods (Lury & Wakeford 2012) as generative of new ways of knowing and understanding social worlds. Inspired by this and the open source ethics of many of my research participants, I’m interested not only in how we as researchers do our research but also how we translate and transmit our processes and findings to different audiences.

How might our methods of making knowledge be different? What happens when we use the same design tools/methods as those we study? How can we resist tidying, fixing or flattening our ideas in order to represent them? What can and cannot be transmitted in certain forms?

These questions invite new ways of imagining how we might re-inhabit our research and the social worlds in which they are situated. It is approach, as Jackie Orr has written, “that insists on its own undoing.”

I’ve written about sticky tape methods, particularly in the context of DiY technology practices and maker communities . Here, sticky tape is an everyday tool and an evocative way of working. It is not irrevocably binding but rather temporarily holds stuff in place, enabling things to be re-stuck in alternate configurations. It is about being responsive to changing conditions, interpretations, and opportunities.

Sticky tape reminds us that design innovations do not have to be new or revolutionary to have novelty and impact. Inventiveness emerges in re-combinations of existing materials and problems. Because it evokes a particular method of binding, sticky tape epitomises an experimental hands-on approach, an openness to ideas and resourceful adaptability. It’s a tactic that fits with what Lury and Wakeford (2012) call “inventive methods,” which are methods that cannot be separated from the research problem at hand. They arise in the process of doing the research,transformed by the subject under study and vice versa. I apply this pedagogy to my teaching. I have organised enquiry machine workshops, 16mm filmmaking training days, and an open source electronics prototyping session to see if, how, and in what ways these practices might interrupt and intervene in students’ modes of ethnographic storytelling.

HOW I SHARE.

In addition to journal articles, book chapters, talks and lectures I make websites, exhibitions, machines, performances, and, most recently, frocks to think about, make, and share my research.

• Performance: Enquiry Machines (EM) are a series of performed artefacts that explore ideas or methods. EM #1, for example, focuses on the interview: a classic social science research method. Made of a constellation of bicycle parts, rubbish, and duct tape, itrequires two operators to co-pedal, collaboratively setting in motion a series of chains, chainrings, and cogs to power a dynamo light. Julien McHardy and I interview each other about interviewing as a method, bringing to light the sensual, social, physical, environmental, and technological skills required to elicit and make sense of data. The point is less about materializing answers or prototyping ideas and more about rendering visible the labour of making knowledge, formulating new critical approaches and literally seeing and touching methods in new ways. EMs are not meant to be finished or polished objects that speak for themselves. In fact, most fail in some way. They remind us that mistakes and tangents are just as important to our insights as the things that “work.” EMs are performed at academic conferences, in public streets, at design salons, and in workshops.

[vimeo 16281282 w=500 h=375]

Enquiry Machine #1 – Hackney from Kat Jungnickel on Vimeo.

• Objects: Bikes & Bloomers. Freedom of Movement: The Bike, Bloomer, and Female Cyclist in Late Nineteenth Century Britain. This project explores public space, new technology (clothes, bikes, new media, etc.), and gendered forms of mobile citizenship through the lens of cycle wear patents lodged by middle- and upper-class women between 1890-1900. The novelty of the research lies in interweaving archival data with the making of new Victorian cycle wear in collaboration with contemporary craftspeople–tailor, weaver, artist, and filmmaker. Sewing and wearing these historical garments literally enables me to get into my research. I’ve also been running DiY Bicycle Bloomer Making Workshops, which involve talking, making, and performing as a way of inviting others to do the same.

• Exhibitions: Bike Portraits.The challenge of spatially configuring sociological arguments in three-dimensional form ensures exhibitions take a regular and dynamic role in my practice. Planning an exhibition involves choreographing not only a select series of objects but also dealing with site specificities and complex relationships between actors. I am drawn to what happens, both planned and unplanned, when I take my research back into social contexts from which they originate. For the Cycling Cultures research, I exhibited a series of Bike Portraits—large, jagged, edged photographic collages made in collaboration with respondents, their bikes, and favourite places. Part of me—a shoe, shadow, or arm—is visible in each portrait as a symbol of the messy collaborative work. Portraits were distributed in five popular bikes shops/cafes across central London with viewers encouraged to cycle between sites to piece together the exhibition.

ME.

Kat Jungnickel is a lecturer in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She uses ethnographic and visual methods to study hands-on DiY and DiT (Do-It-Together) technology cultures and practices, and the creative use (and mis-use) of ordinary, everyday materials. She experiments with knowledge translation and transmission in the way she makes, curates, and circulates her research findings. Past projects have explored WiFi networks, maker communities and mobility cultures. Her recent book, DiY WiFi: Re-imagining Connectivity (Palgrave Pivot 2013) examines ethnographically the innovative socio-technology practices of Australian grassroots wireless networks. She is currently working on an ESRC (Economic Social Research Council) funded project that brings together her three of favourite things—sociology, cycling, and sewing.

www.katjungnickel.com

www.bikesandbloomers.com

www.transmissionsandentanglements.com

RESOURCES.

Back, L and N, Puwar, eds. 2012. Live Methods. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.18-39.

Hine, C. 2007 Multi-sited Ethnography as a Middle Range Methodology for Contemporary STS. Science, Technology & Human Values 32(6):652-671.

Jungnickel, K. 2014. Jumps, Stutters, Blurs and Other Failed Images: Using Time-Lapse Video in Cycling Research In Video Methods, by C. Bates, ed.  Routledge’s Advances in Research Methods Series.

Jungnickel, K and L. Hjorth. 2014. Methodological Entanglements in the Field: Methods, Transitions & Transmissions.Visual Studies, Special issue: Transformations in Art and Ethnography 29(2): 138-147.

Jungnickel, K. 2013. DiY WiFi: Re-imagining Connectivity. Palgrave Macmillian Pivot.

Jungnickel, K. 2013. Getting There… and Back: How Ethnographic Commuting (by Bicycle) Shaped a Study of Australian Backyard Technologists. Qualitative Research. 

Jungnickel, K. 2010. Research as a Form of Making. Making & Opening: Entangling Design & Social Science Conference. Goldsmiths, University of London.

Jungnickel, K. 2010. Exhibiting Ethnographic Knowledge: Making Sociology about Makers of Technology. Street Signs; Centre for Urban and Community Research. Goldsmiths, University of London.

Law, J. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.

Lury, C. and N. Wakeford, eds. 2012. Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social, London: Routledge.

ANNE GALLOWAY. designer. ethnographer. archaeologist.

ANTHROPOLOGY + DESIGN.

My sense of anthropology is very materialist so I think it made a lot of sense for me to gravitate towards design. I originally trained as an archaeologist and did ethnographic fieldwork on Andean textile production, so I’ve always been interested in the things that people make. Of course, as anthropologists we’re taught the importance of context and I think that bringing anthropology and design together really stresses contextual meanings. For me, the most interesting connection between anthropology and design can be found in how each practice enhances the other. Anthropology provides a kind of thick description that contextualises design processes and products, and design offers anthropology creative means of exploring and representing what it means to be human. I also enjoy the explicit combination of thinking, doing, and making—of blurring boundaries between analytical and creative practice, between rational and emotional experience.

Sometimes, in design, we talk about research about, for, and through design—and I think that anthropology is well suited to contribute to each endeavour. As we know, ethnography (including material, visual, and discursive culture) can tell us a lot about the roles of design in everyday life. Ethnography also provides us with valuable information that can be used to design “better” things—or to design nothing at all. And although research through design is perhaps less obviously related to anthropology, I think that every kind of anthropological research could create and employ objects and images with as much nuance as we’ve come to use words.

PEDAGOGY.

My teaching is focussed on issues-based design, which means that my students have proposed everything from community recycling services and conservation activities to publicly curated museums and stray animal sanctuaries. My students also often work in the tradition of critical design, where they create object and image-based interventions or provocations into more culturally fraught issues, like euthanasia and immigration.

WHAT I DO.

My recent research has focussed on seeing how speculative or fictional design can be used as a public engagement strategy. Critical design has sometimes been criticised for a lack of nuanced politics and failure to engage audiences outside of gallery settings. So I began to wonder: what might happen if I applied my background in anthropology and science studies to practice? My “Counting Sheep: NZ Merino in an Internet of Things” research project was conceived as a means to explore possible human-livestock-technology futures, and each fictional design scenario currently exhibited on our Counting Sheep website is based on actual hopes and concerns voiced by research participants.

Inspired by cultural interests and artistic provocations rather than corporate or government forecasting activities, we created a series of speculative “everyday” objects, images, and narratives that we hope will challenge people to critically examine common assumptions and expectations about livestock animals and near-future technologies. (If you’ll forgive me for getting a bit more academic here—) By making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar, we were interested in learning how “what if…? ” scenarios might act in the present, especially in terms of constructing multiple publics and co-producing knowledge. We were also interested in better understanding how these scenarios might support and hinder understanding assemblages of people, places, animals, and technologies as moving processes rather than as static things.

HOW I SHARE.

In addition to grounding our creative work in substantial empirical research, one of the things we wanted to do was systematically assess people’s responses to our designs—to see if and how they resonate. Since the scenarios were designed as prompts for reflection and discussion, we’ve created an anonymous online survey that anyone can take (Please take our survey!) before the end of April 2014. We’re also following up with our earlier research participants to have more in-depth discussions about the different content, our intentions, and their expectations. The project winds up at the end of June 2014, so we’ll be writing up our research results for both academic and popular publications after that. What I can say now is that things are looking pretty interesting—and not least because of disengaged or disinterested publics!

MY TOOLKIT.

It turns out that I’m compelled to get out and witness the goings on of the world, so despite working in design for the past five years, I still consider my primary tool to be fieldwork through participant observation. And, like all fieldworkers, I have a set of things that I use to collect what I see and do.

These days I never do fieldwork without my iPhone, iPad, an extra camera, a notebook and set of pens. I tend to use my phone’s camera as a sort of external memory device, and my other camera for presentation and publication-quality shots. To be honest, I’ve always found that cameras interfere with my ability to be present (and that’s a real problem during participant observation), but photos help me catch things I miss or to see things a bit differently, and that’s very helpful.

I record all my interviews with an app called Highlight, which I like because I can flag interesting points during the conversation and return to them later, without interrupting the flow. I do a lot of note-taking, using a regular paper notebook or an app called iA Writer (because that’s where I do most of my writing these days, including right now). I also try to post regular field reports to my research blog (http://designculturelab.org),/ but that’s not always possible or practical. I have quite limited drawing skills but I always map where I am and make sketches that are too ugly to share with anyone but are useful to me. Design work is much more varied and collaborative, and the tools we use are highly dependent on whether we’re creating objects or images.

METHODOLOGY.

I think I’ve already touched on where I see the most potential for design and anthropology to come together. In terms of more academic methodologies, I’m quite inspired by Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford’s 2012 edited volume, “Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social,” because they point out clear paths already being taken by interested researchers. I also hold out hope that speculative design can be stretched and strengthened by more explicit engagement with empirical research—not least because it may make it easier for us to explore a less anthropocentric anthropology, or tend to the nonhuman in new and exciting ways. I’ve also written about a bit about this recently—”Towards Fantastic Ethnography and Speculative Design“–and there’s more to come!

RESOURCES.

Galloway, Anne. 2013. Towards Fantastic Ethnography and Speculative Design. Ethnography Matters Blog. September 17.

Lury, Celia and Nina Wakeford, eds. 2012. Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social. London: Routledge.

ME.

Anne Galloway (@annegalloway) is Senior Lecturer at the School of Design(Victoria University of Wellington,) and Principal Investigator at Design Culture Lab. Her research brings together social studies of science and technology, cultural studies, and design to explore relations between humans and nonhumans. She is particularly interested in creative research methods for understanding—and supporting public engagement with—issues and controversies related to science, technology and animals. Her current research, supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund, combines ethnography and speculative design to create possible future scenarios for the use of wireless technologies in the production and consumption of NZ merino.

SILVIA LINDTNER. DIY maker, hacker, and ethnographic design researcher.

ANTHROPOLOGY DESIGN.

Many disciplines and fields often work with competing notions of what counts as design, claiming authority over the term, practice, and definition. Think for instance about efforts in critical design (e.g., Dunne & Raby 2007) and the strong oppositions its practitioners often make to product design. Critical design is aimed at engaging people in critical ways with commonly used products. As Jeff and Shaowen Bardzell illuminate, critical design is positioned in opposition to affirmative design—the latter considered as “the common practice, and this practice is amoral and ultimately a dupe for capitalist ideology, while critical designers are described as moral agents who seek to change society for the better” (Bardzell & Bardzell 2013).

It is important to not shy away from the politics of design, or to brash aside such heated debates over definitions, terms, and authentic practices–many of which are legitimizing efforts of new approaches in an overly competitive market (both industry and the academy). The question is how to engage the politics of design in a way that remains open to multiple viewpoints and approaches. At numerous times in my research, I have heard people argue that the process of making and designing itself is apolitical. There is much that refutes such statements–think for instance of questions of labor when we turn towards sites of production that manufacture the technological products we use on a daily basis, or listen to debates of hackerspace members over what counts as hacking versus making versus product design. What is important here is to consider the differences that lie in designing as a mode of inquiry, a leisure practice, or central to one’s profession and livelihood.

Returning to the topic of critical design, then, we might ask: can making and designing for a living also be critical? In which ways? How does critical design in production differ from the kind of critical design we know today? (i.e., shown off to a fairly exclusive audience in a contemporary art museum?) In that sense, for me processes of designing and making have always been more interesting than design with a capital D. There is a tendency in the social sciences to focus on studying the designed artifact—the thing out there and imbued with values and meaning by its creators. In my work, I have been focusing on the processes that goes into making a thing: all the way from tinkering, prototyping, sketching, printing, over writing, talking, pitching, to manufacturing, bargaining, testing, selling,… I consider many of the makers I have encountered in this research critical designers in that sense that they challenge a particular status quo, intervene in existing structures of power, and engage critically with societal and technological questions. Their process of designing is simultaneously affirmative and critical. They are simultaneously driven by (1) making a profit, intervening in the world, and making it a better place, as well as (2) participating in a global market economy of tech innovation and disrupting it (I have written about this in greater detail here: Lindtner 2014).

WHY NOW.

What we might need today is a contemporary version of participatory design (PD). Originating in Scandinavia, the collection of methods known as participatory design aim to engage workers in co-determining the computational systems that might be introduced into their workplaces (Kensing & Blomberg 1998). This approach to engage the user into the design process has found broader uptake in corporate design methods, such as human-centered design, that are often based on methods borrowed from fields such as anthropology. The original political agenda to empower workers has turned into what Tom Boellstorff (2008) calls “creationist capitalism”—a form of “user participation” that gets people to adopt and spend money on a technology by being involved in creating content, writing code, and sharing information. The most notorious example of this is social media platforms, such as Facebook and Second Life.

So taken together, the fields of anthropology and design have already “met.” Ethnographic methods are used to better target product designs towards user needs (and increased sales), and design methods are used in anthropological research and training (e.g., The Ethnography Center at UC Irvine “Ethnocharrette” project). Not all of this has gone so smoothly as Boellstorff reminds us with his notion of creationist capitalism. In neither field of anthropology nor design do we find much of an in-depth engagement with the more critical and reflective approaches that the other discipline offers. Simply put: design draws upon participant observation, but not the writings after anthropology’s critical turn. And anthropology is interested in what design fields have to offer in terms of creativity, rapid ideation, and material engagement, but not in terms of critical reflection on the politics of design.

I propose a turn towards reflexive and critical approaches in both anthropology and design. It might be worthwhile to bring into conversation and develop a shared methodological frame based on efforts such as critical technical practice (Agre 1997), critical making (Ratto 2011), reflective design (Sengers et al. 2005), and ongoing reflections on authority and collaboration in anthropology (Marcus 2000, Kelty 2009).

WHAT I DO.

Both design and anthropology are an art of inquiry. They set up a relationship with the world, rather than a distanced view from an academic position. Working with makers, hackers, and tinkerers provides me with the opportunity to explore, on an even deeper level, productive processes (i.e., what goes into making or manufacturing a thing) as forms of inquiry and knowledge production.

I research cultures of technology production, with a particular focus on contemporary DIY (do it yourself) maker and hacker cultures. Over the last four years, I have explored, for instance, the proliferation of the maker movement and its intersections with manufacturing and industry development in China. I have conducted multi-sited ethnographic research as well as DIY maker workshops, maker conferences, and media productions, mostly in different cities in China, but also (although with less intensity) in the United States. I pay particular attention to the ways in which local maker cultures are tied into a global reorientation towards digital fabrication, hardware production, and physical materials. DIY makers in China, for instance, situate their work in relation to a history of open manufacturing (shanzhai 山寨) common to the Southern regions of China as well as in relation to a global maker movement and start-up culture (e.g. Lindtner 2014).

With a background in digital media and interaction design, an essential aspect of my ethnographic research has always been a deep engagement with people’s technology practices. This means that as part of my fieldwork, I also participate in the making of things, which has included the production of a short film about an open innovation and co-working model XinDanWei in China, the co-organization of conferences and research projects as well as co-authorship with makers and artists (e.g. Lindtner & Li 2012; Hertz & Lindtner 2014).

METHODOLOGY
Both anthropology and design provide me with toolkits to “study with,” in Anthropologist Tom Ingold’s sense of the term (2013). By “study with,” Ingold emphasizes the difference that lies in “study about” versus “study with,” the former being primarily transformational and the latter largely documentary. The kind of anthropology I feel aligned with and the kind of ethnographic research I conduct have always entailed a process of “making with:” studying with, working with, writing with, and learning with, rather than studying or writing about.

Let me elaborate on what I mean by “making with” here. In early 2013, I had a several months long ethnographic engagement with a growing start-up scene in and around Shenzhen, a city in the Southern regions of China. The last years have seen a rise in hardware accelerator and incubator programs that invest in hardware start-ups and bring them to China in order to turn DIY maker ideas into end-consumer products (see more on this here: Lindtner et al. 2014). The vision that many of the start-ups share, from both China and abroad, is a commitment to empower others who are less familiar with the inner workings of technology and hacking (i.e., their own appropriation and modification of the products they own). They share this vision with the makers and hackers of earlier generations working on human-computer interaction, invisible computing, and tangible interfaces, who began by building prototypes of wearable computers, embedded systems, and Internet of Things. The visions of seamless computing by Mark Weiser (1999) or Ishii and Ullmers’ early work in tangible computing (1997) come to mind here. Many of the hardware start-ups that spin out of hackerspaces, universities, and maker initiatives today are implementing these earlier visions and prototypes of invisible computing, turning them into actual products by partnering with small- to large-scale manufacturers.

By “making with,” I wish to highlight the collaborative process central to design, something that I have found to be rarely taken up in anthropology Despite anthropology’s interest in design methods and cultures of design, the focus often remains on things like engagement with materials, brainstorming, fast data generation, etcetera. Designing is fundamentally a collaborative practice that frequently involves a multitude of stakeholders. For instance, the start-ups I worked with as part of my fieldwork in Shenzhen did not simply hire a factory that made products for them. Rather, designing a product entailed visits to the factory on a weekly basis where the start-ups and the factory workers together explored different materials, the affordances of different machines, and electronic circuitry for a given product. These collaborations on the factory floor slightly altered the original design, often improving it. When people talk about design, they rarely talk about these interactions fundamental to production, a process often considered as post-design. By “making with,” I wish to highlight first, that production and industrial fabrication is an essential aspect of design, and second, that it is accomplished through partnerships and collaborations.

ON COLLABORATION.
An essential aspect for me in this approach of “making with” is also the collaboration on writing and media productions. Much of my writing (academic and otherwise) is collaborative, a practice common to many technology research and design fields. Two of my recent projects are:

1. A handmade zine that Garnet Hertz and I produced in collaboration with the members of the New York City-based hackerspace NYCResistor:

2.    An article David Li from the hackerspace in Shanghai and I wrote together in 2012 that got published in the ACM Interactions magazine on China’s maker movement:

Both publications involved processes of crafting, theorizing, and researching. The production of each was a way of understanding cultures of technology production on a deeper level (i.e., active participation in production). For instance, the making of the NYC Resistor Zine gave us the rare opportunity to learn about the hackerspace by working with the resistors. The article allowed David and myself to express more clearly themes that I had identified in the field before, but that had remained somewhat vague—such as the relationship between copy and open-source, or between hacking and making. The making of both publications also opened up conversations and interactions with others who are less likely to read traditional academic pieces. For instance, because the ACM article was translated into Chinese, it became accessible to a new readership amongst a group of elderly inventors in China.

HOW I SHARE.
When I began my fieldwork with makers in China in 2010, I was struck by the amount of writing that makers produced–on blogs, public talks, in books, and in articles. Many think of geeks, hackers, and makers as concerned foremost with things like circuit diagrams or the kinks of a piece of software code. And while such things are of course essential to makers, they are not divorced from reflecting and thinking about the very process of hacking, coding, and making. I was driven to understand this material-semiotic mode of co-production better and began to work with David Li, the co-founder of China’s first hackerspace, and others in China’s growing maker scene on a series of workshops and events based on making and critical reflection.

In 2011, we put together a workshop in Budapest that brought together scholars, makers, designers, and hackers from China, Iran, Eastern Europe, and North America. We worked with the local FabLab (Fabrication Laboratory, small-scale workshops offering digital fabrications, tools, and machines for digital-physical production), who provided us with the space and tools to make things. Over the course of the workshop, practitioners and scholars worked together on writing software code, cutting wood, formatting hardware boards, etcetera, while also critically debating and reflecting on the designs and process as a whole. One of the things we made was a functioning prototype, a little box that can record messages and then play that message on a radio receiver. Imagine recording your own slogan and transmitting it in a public space to be heard by others. The motivation was to disrupt state media coverage that doesn’t allow for a multitude of voices–hence the prototype’s name, “Silenced Voices.” The making of the device brought up heated discussions about censorship and Internet freedom and control, especially with an eye towards participants’ experiences in their respective regions of work in the US, China, Iran, and Europe.

In 2013, based on the success of these informal events, David Li (XinCheJian), Anna Greenspan (NYU Shanghai), and I kicked off a Shanghai-based research hub, called Hacked Matter. What began as a series of workshops and conversations has now turned into a long-term collaboration between makers and researchers in China using an interdisciplinary set of methods ranging from designing over making to writing and ethnographic fieldwork, with the goal to understand deeply contemporary transformations in industrial production, hacking, and innovation.

Our most recent event in Shanghai brought together makers and hackers, journalists, industry partners, and scholars through conversations and hands-on making sessions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKQXXlV9Mds

RESOURCES.

Agre, P. 1997. Towards a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI. In Bowker, Gasser, Star, and Turner, eds, Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems and Collaborative Work. Laurence Erlbaum.

Bardzell, J. and Bardzell, S. 2013. What is “Critical” about Critical Design? Proc. of ACM Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI’13 (Paris, France), 3297-3306.

Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2007). Critical Design FAQ. Last retrieved February 21, 2014.

Ingold, T. 2013. Making. Anthropology, archeology, art and architecture. Routlege, New York.

Ishii, H. and Ullmer, B. Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between people, bits, and atoms. . In Proc. of ACM Conf. CHI’97, 234-241.

Kay, A., C. 1972. A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages. Proc. of ACM ’72, Vol. 1, No. 1.

Kensing, F. and Blomberg, J. 1998. Participatory Design: Issues and Concerns. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 7, 3-4 (Jan. 1998), 167-185.

Kelty, C. et al. 2009 Collaboration, Coordination, and Composition: Fieldwork after the Internet. In Fieldwork is not what it used to be, eds. Faubion, J.D. and Marcus, G. E., NY: Cornell University Press.

Lindtner, S. and Li, D. 2012. Created in China. The Makings of China’s Hackerspace Community. ACM Interactions, XIX. 6 November December.

Lindtner, S., Hertz, G., and Dourish, P. 2014. Emerging Sites of HCI Innovation: Hackerspaces, Hardware Start-ups & Incubators. Proc. of ACM Conference CHI’14, Toronto, Canada.

Lindtner, S. 2014. Making Subjectivities. How China’s DIY Makers remake industrial production, innovation & the self. In: Special issue on Polititical Contestation in Chinese Digital Spaces” (ed. Guobin Yang) of the Journal of China Information.

Marcus, G. 2000. Para-sites. A Casebook against Cynical Reason. Late Editions: Cultural Studies for the End of the Century. University of Chicago Press.

Ratto, M. 2011. Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life, The Information Society: An International Journal, 27:4.

Sengers, P., Boehner, K., David, S., and Kaye, J. 2005. Reflective design. In Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing: between Sense and Sensibility (Aarhus, Denmark), 49-58.
Weiser, M. 1999. The Computer of the 21st century. ACM SIGMOBILE, Mobile Computing and Communications Review, Vol. 3, Issue 3, 3-11.

ME.

Silvia Lindtner is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the ISTC-Social (the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing) at UC Irvine and at Fudan University, Shanghai. She is also an incoming faculty member at the University of Michigan in the School of Information. She researches, writes, and teaches about DIY (do-it-yourself) maker culture, with a particular focus on its intersections with manufacturing and industry development in China. Drawing on her background in interaction design and media studies, she merges ethnographic methods with approaches in design and making. This approach allows her to provide deep insights into emerging cultures of technology production and use from a sociological and technological perspective. Her work is published across the fields of human-computer interaction, media and communication studies, science and technology studies, cultural anthropology, and China studies. Silvia is the recipient of a NSF grant, a Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, a Chinese Government Scholarship 2012, and two Intel Research Grants. Together with Anna Greenspan (NYU Shanghai) and David Li (XinCheJian), she is also the co-founder of Hacked Matter, a Shanghai-based Research Initiative.

NICOLAS NOVA. design researcher. ethnographer.

ANTHROPOLOGY + DESIGN.

The word “design” is problematic as it’s often related to furniture and glossy magazines at the local newsstand. And because this term is used in different fields, from engineering to management, you have different professions in which practitioners see themselves as “designers:” architects, engineers, people developing user interfaces for websites or video games, etc. A good way to approach design is to understand what “designers” do: they define the shape and the behavior of artifacts based on their understanding of potential users and the context in which they live or work. Said differently, they materialize “prospective futures.”

In order to speculate about near future possibilities, designers usually need to make their work relevant, useful, or believable by people. This is where the social sciences fit in. Knowledge and methods coming from anthropology–such as ethnography–are used and often repurposed by designers to help make different decisions over the course of a project. Observing people’s routines in a kitchen can inform the design of electric appliances, for instance. Interviewing users with a non-standard way of using their bike can also be curious and lead to new bicycle designs.

As a researcher, I’m intrigued by the ways design can also be informative to ethnography and anthropology: can design work help generate new concepts and theories? Can design skills be relevant to ethnographical analysis? The way designers work (often based on a series of intermediary objects such as diagrams, mock-ups, and prototypes) and how they see the world around them seem very helpful in reconsidering anthropological matter. In my work, I try to use such design skills to surface new insights. In the “Curious Rituals”  project for instance, we used design prototypes of potential near future devices and then filmed people using them. Of course, it’s speculative and we cannot guarantee that people are going to be using devices in this way in the future, but this ethnographic approach is a way for us to represent what we discovered in our field research.

WHY NOW.

First and foremost, it’s curiosity. Curiosity can be a driving force behind this kind of interdisciplinary collaboration. A second reason that I find important is the necessity to find new “research formats” beyond standard monographs and papers. Text is good, of course, but I think design can broaden the possibilities by looking at alternative representations, such as films or diagrams. What I’ve learned over time from working with designers is that they force me to think up an original output for my research. Not original for the sake of it, but with the intention to find a proper type of output based on the nature of the research that has been done. For instance, for the project on gestures that I mentioned above, we did a booklet with drawings of gestures and short texts describing their social and cultural implications. The next design move was to use this material to speculate on the near future of such gestures, which led to a short movie that describes the postures and habits one might adopt with technologies such as brain-computer interfaces, head-mounted displays, or gestural interfaces. [see pictures sent with my email] This was a way to embed our ethnographical findings into something new and different. Perhaps it’s not exactly scientific, but it leads to interesting discussions in conferences and exhibits about the motivations behind these gestures.

WHAT I DO.

My focus is less on anthropology than on ethnography and more specifically, field research. My interest is geared towards understanding how field research can help designers support, frame or inspire design work. There are two directions that I find interesting here:

•  The observation of people’s practices: For example, I worked on a project called “Curious Rituals” that focuses on gestures, postures and habits that typically emerged with the use of digital technologies, such as computers, mobile phones, sensors, and robots. These gestures were such as recalibrating your smartphone with an horizontal, figure-eight hand motion, and the swiping of a wallet with a radio-frequency identification card on public transports. We documented a series of our observations and interviews into a book on the social and design implications of current digital gestures.

• The investigation of everyday objects: The project consisted of building an evolutionary diagram in order to properly describe how these peripherals changed over time. An example would be the history of game controllers. We collected controllers and explored the literature of games and console design to do so. Using approaches commonly employed in archaeology, such as the clustering of similar items, we created a series of visualizations showing the evolution of the peripherals.

Both kinds of explorations are important for design projects as they enable an empirical basis to speculate on the near future—in these cases, game controllers or gestures made with digital artifacts.

HOW I SHARE.

Because of the large diversity of formats I employ with my colleagues, there are different ways to share the results:

• Physical artifacts: books, print-on-demand booklets, card games, newspaper-like publications, posters, postcards, exhibits.
• Digital objects such blog posts, short films, or papers.

METHODOLOGY.

I don’t think there’s one singular methodology. I always try to different approaches to show students how various sorts of sampling and interviewing techniques can be informative. That said, there’s a similar structure that I use in my classes: how to conduct field research (interview, observations using photography and films), how to analyze this material (with different theoretical assumptions), and how to use this information in a design context. I’m currently writing a book about this with my colleagues at the design school in Geneva. The most difficult bit in this design/field research articulation is that it’s tremendously difficult to teach with room for improvement. From a pedagogical angle, I tend to be pretty minimal in terms of lectures and do a lot of exercises and activities (field trips, days spent analyzing pictures) to show how this kind of work can be done.

ME.

Nicolas Nova is a design researcher, ethnographer and co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. His work is about identifying weak signals as well as exploring people’s needs, motivations and contexts to map new design opportunities and chart potential futures. Nicolas has given talks and exhibited his work on the intersections of design, technology and the near-future possibilities for new social-technical interaction rituals in venues such SXSW, AAAS, O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and the design week in Milano, the Institute for the Future, the the MIT Medialab. He holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne and has been a visiting researcher at the Art Center School of Design (Pasadena). He is also Professor at the Geneva University of Arts and Design (HEAD–Genève) and curator for Lift Conference, a series of international events about digital culture and innovation.

RESOURCES.

Nova, N. 2014. 8-bit Reggae: Collision and Creolization. Editions Volumiques.

Nova, N. & Bolli, L. 2013. Joypads! Le design des Manettes. Les Moutons électriques.

Nova, N., Miyake, K., Kwon, N. & Chiu, W. 2012. Curious Rituals: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday. Near Future Laboratory Press.

Bleecker, J & Nova, N. 2009. A Synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing. New York: Situated Technologies.

Chances are you know nothing about design.

Me neither.

So when I was introduced to designer Laura Forlano at the Society for Social Studies of Science meeting in Sunny San Diego last fall, my interest in what design could do for anthropology–and vice-versa–was piqued.

For the next two weeks, I will be running a short series that features interviews with design researchers, ethnographic hackers, and field work makers with their take on anthropology and design. For the first interview, we will be talking with design researcher and ethnographer Nicolas Nova (that’s his toolkit in the photo above).

Rachel Carmen Ceasar (@rceasara) is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Medical Anthropology Program at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco (California, USA). She writes about the subjective and scientific stakes in exhuming mass graves from the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship in Spain today.