This Anthro Life has teamed up with Savage Minds to bring you a special 5-part podcast and blog crossover series. While thinking together as two anthropological productions that exist for multiple kinds of audiences and publics, we became inspired to have a series of conversations about why anthropology matters today. For this series we’re sitting down with some of the folks behind Savage Minds, SAPIENS, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology to bring you conversations on anthropological thinking and its relevance through an innovative blend of audio and text. That means each week for the month of June we’ll bring you two dialogues – one podcast and one blog post – with innovative anthropological thinkers and doers.

You can check out the the second episode of the collaboration titled: Anthropology has Always been Out There, here.

In the second conversation of the TAL + SM crossover series, Ryan and Adam were joined by AAA Executive Director Ed Liebow and Program Manager for Educational Outreach Leslie Walker. They explored the work of the AAA, the changing natures of work and research today, and critically assessed anthropology in terms of scope and impact.

Be sure to check out the first episode of the TAL + SM collaboration: Writing “in my Culture.”

The American Anthropological Association

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an association for professional anthropologists that has been active since 1902. Today, the AAA is the largest anthropology organization in the world, encompasses more than 10,000 members, publishes 23 journals, hosts an annual meeting, and advances broad public education initiatives, some of which have notably focused on race and migration. Recently the AAA began an aggregate podcast network, of which This Anthro Life is a founding collaborator.

Ed Liebow was named Executive Director for the American Anthropological Association in 2013 after a long career with the Battelle Memorial Institute, the world’s largest not-for-profit research and development organization. Ed first joined Battelle in 1986, the year he received his PhD in cultural anthropology from Arizona State University. He has conducted research and public policy analysis on a variety of energy, public health, and social policy issues concerning disadvantaged communities. While at Battelle, he rose from the rank of research scientist to project leader to director of research operations in the Seattle office. He maintains a position as affiliate associate professor of anthropology and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Washington. He has been a visiting professor of Applied Anthropology and Comparative Economics at Università Carlo Cattaneo Castellanza, VA, Italy, a Senior Fellow of the Fulbright Commission, and have served on the faculty of the CDC-sponsored Summer Evaluation Institute. He has also served on the executive boards of the AAA, the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, and the Jack Straw Media Arts Foundation.

Leslie Walker is responsible for managing AAA’s Public Education Initiative (PEI) that includes projects and programming for two important topics, race and migration. Leslie is a cultural anthropologist who previously worked for the National Park Service and taught at Prince George’s Community College. He has conducted research on cultural heritage and environmental justice of Afro-diasporic and Native American communities in the DC Metropolitan area, South Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Anglophone Caribbean. In addition to his work at the AAA, Leslie is an adjunct lecturer at Coppin State University teaching courses on cultural resource management and urban ethnography. Leslie holds degrees in anthropology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and the University of South Florida. He also holds a specialization certificate in project management from the University of California Irvine, School of Continuing Education

Anthropology has Always been Out There

When asked where public engagement fits in with anthropology as a discipline, Ed pointed out that it is important not to view public and anthropology in binary opposition. The AAA’s tagline, “Advancing knowledge, solving human problems”, highlights the vision that anthropology serves to both mint new and refine existing knowledge while also translating knowledge to actionable insight. Recently AAA members were polled to ascertain whether they felt that their research was directly relevant to public issues. An overwhelming number of those polled said yes. Yet, a key takeaway is that while many anthropologists consider their work to be directly related to public issues, extra work is required to make important findings of research translatable to different audiences. In this regard,  Leslie sees anthropology as a discipline focused on identifying and analyzing patterns in human interaction and organization, past and present. Anthropological insights can be used to increase awareness to those within the discipline, the larger scholarly community, and the public. Anthropological methods and theories are used to highlight how some communities are implicated in social discrimination and injustice. However, he contends, there is a privilege in studying anthropology because students are often first introduced to the discipline at college or university.

How to Impact Public Conversation

The AAA recognizes the profound impact that anthropological research offers in naming problems and issues within society. This recognition of anthropology’s impact on public conversation prompted both members and staff of the AAA to begin developing the Public Education Initiative (PEI) in 2002.

The PEI highlights anthropology’s distinctive and encompassing perspective on human variation, human migration, and displacement, as viewed through the lenses of science, history and lived experience. The PEI has been shaping public conversations with hundreds of thousands of museum-goers and visitors to AAA websites. Leslie ensures that PEI offers guides for classroom teachers, community groups, and curriculum materials on race and migration that they can use to complement their lesson plans and workshop guides.

In 2007, the Association presented its first education project Understanding Race: Are We so Different? The project has had enormous success and since then the AAA has launched another project: World on the Move 100 Years of Migration. Additionally Leslie helps coordinate the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which celebrates living cultural heritage. When reflecting on how these projects draw on and change  how we see anthropology, Leslie said “Anthropology has always addressed contemporary issues within society; but making it noticeable that when there’s issues of race or migration, showing that here are these things that have been constructed through culture and here are the offenses and the abuses of it, but here are the ways that we can undo it, and here we are as anthropologists: solving these issues, or addressing them, or raising recommendations. Highlighting that this is what we do as anthropologists”.

Tracking the Trends in Anthropology

Leslie’s discussion of public education propelled us on a quite productive tangent as we began to reflect on anthropology as practiced outside its traditional educational domain. This raised a host of questions about the where, how, to and by whom anthropology is often practiced, and how the PEI may point to other trends that anthropology faces today. Ed identified three main trends he sees in the discipline:

1. Changing Workforce. One of the major changes of 21st century labor is the rise of the project-based, or “gig” economy. Unlike traditional academic professor-university-student relationships, project-based work is more often characterized by a client-patron relationships with different metrics of accountability and funding. The continuing rise of the gig economy provides a diminished latitude for pure intellectual research because it tends to be based on concrete outcomes for clients. Further, much research, design, and impact-based work are undertaken in multidisciplinary teams, both limiting insider anthropological theorizing and providing an important outlet for anthropological thinking, critique, and ethnographic insight.

2. Changing Nature of Research. More anthropologists are moving away from projects designed to, as Ed says, “scratch their own intellectual itch”, but tailor their initiatives to client based interests. For example, this can be seen in the length of some ethnographic research projects. Whereas graduate students are required to conduct long-term fieldwork, generally for a year or more, client-based observational research could range anywhere from one day to a few months. While long-term ethnographic research is an incredibly formative personal and scholarly undertaking, many anthropologists increasingly characterize it as more of a ‘rite of passage’ than the essential point in which one becomes an anthropologist. These concerns raise the question, what forms of fieldwork are valued as anthropological and by whom? It is worth addressing that fieldwork for anthropologists has largely been valued for its duration rather than frequency. Does conducting a year of fieldwork once (American graduate model) rather than an ongoing series of shorter term observational research stints for a few days, weeks or months (practitioner model) make one more of an anthropologist? On par with the changing nature of the workforce, the nature of research itself is changing to be more impact, assessment, or measures-based. Critically, Ed points out that rather than think of client-based research as diluted anthropology, or ethnographically thin, we need to understand that different career paths have different reward structures.

3. Community Collaboration and Communities of Practice. The model of a ‘lone anthropologist’ is showing signs of aging; not to mention anthropologists have never worked alone. For the last few decades, communities have continued to take more active roles with anthropologists, contributing to shared and collaborative work. Indeed, more and more communities insist on actively participating in research and ensuring accountability for anthropological research. As a new hybrid field, for example, Design Anthropology is premised explicitly on research conducted by multidisciplinary teams and the collaborative formation of issues to be solved. Likewise, many archaeologists working in the Americas collaborate with local indigenous communities who have vested interests in heritage and could be directly impacted by the investigative findings – further pushing research away from simply scratching an intellectual itch or the myth that anthropologists somehow work alone.

The Story Digs Deeper…

These trends are particularly important to think through because, as Leslie pointed out above, anthropology occupies a somewhat privileged niche as most become aware of the discipline for the first time in a university setting, if they encounter it at all.

Ryan helped counter this idea by thinking about the idea of audience: “anthropology’s audience is really everybody. It is our objective to bring our narratives and those of the people we work with together, and to showcase why such dialogue is so important. Anyone can do anthropology and diverse voices add needed value to the conversation”.

Taking into account audience and privilege, Leslie and Ed leave us with two crucial and actionable points: Leslie states anthropologists need to be “reaching outside of the discipline, in sort of the public space, but also out of the molds of who an anthropologist is and what they look like. We need to encourage queer anthropologists, anthropologists of color, indigenous anthropologists, and anthropologists with different abilities.” Second, Ed illustrated that the near-sightedness on the part of mainstream anthropology today is that it doesn’t listen to other channels – where anthropology has always also been and continues to make substantial impacts. Anthropologists working in the grant writing world, National Forest Service and governmental sector, and in cultural resource management all have huge impact and are part of the anthropological conversation. Their voices have value, and like so many others, are needed in the conversation.

Check out episode two of the TAL + SM Crossover here. Stay tuned for next week’s episode where we sit down with SAPIENS and dive into the world of popular science writing and bringing the conversation to ever wider circles. See you next week, same TAL time, same TAL channel.

The banality of this particular evil glazes over the continued emaciation of public education. Several authors have addressed this process (see Giroux’s Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education), as well as discussed models for attempting to stem this trend. While CUNY continues to struggle for funding, both for its students and its large number of precariously contracted educators, the learning experience becomes increasingly denigrated – classroom sizes balloon, facilities erode, teachers exhaust. Commoditizing education (prioritizing its exchange-value over its use-value) inevitably impoverishes public institutions, no matter how skilled CUNY’s Chancellor (with his $500k salary) is at branding. A for-profit space reduces its occupants to their potential output, rendering experience marginal or impossible. By this, I mean to convey the mutual exclusivity of the concepts output and experience. Experience is something that only occurs in the present (one can remember a past experience, but the experience occurred in a present). Output, on the other hand, is something that cannot have a present (if I say ‘I have an output’, it denotes either something that is done or something that will be done).

While Marx, Bachelard, Thompson, Lefebvre, Harvey and others have variously mapped out the contours of privatized space and time, I want to zoom in on a relatively new type of space that might amuse such venerable thinkers. The last ten years have seen the rise of commercial spaces specifically designed to facilitate the illumination, ideas, creativity, and productivity of their occupiers known as co-work spaces. Sometimes referred to as shared-work spaces, these are increasingly popular urban alternatives to traditional offices, with their abrasive lighting and tepid aromas. Co-work spaces tend to be marketed to free-lancers – some of the occupations that members boast of holding include social entrepreneur, innovation consultant, content maker, talent buyer, experience designer, and creative (yes, used as a noun).

These spaces are meant to be an antidote to the supposed creativity-stifling office environment, while at the same time foster a level of focus that cannot be achieved at a busy coffee shop. These commercial creativity spaces, much like commercial exercising spaces, are subscription-based, and depending on the amenities provided (some of them have “chill zones” and rooftop gardens) can cost from $800/month to $130/month, with most offering a daily rate of $30. Their websites are dripping with perfunctory marketing language, from the slightly cultish: “Where you work can change the way you work. The way you work can change how you live. Work better, Live better…” to DIY rustication: “We built this place with our hands, using reclaimed lumber and materials and taking the time to do it right. There is a wall made out of windows to make the workspace quiet, while keeping the studio open and airy. There is a wood-fired stove to cozy up to in the winter…There’s an oven for nachos, Delonghi coffeemaker for your rocket fuel… Right now, we’re engineering a solar-powered battery recharge station, just for the hell of it.” And one Brooklyn co-work space proudly asserts that it would like “to change the world for the better.”

Such market-based solutions to cultivating creative ideas may be better at generating output in comparison to publicly-held thinking spaces such as libraries or parks, but can an experience of creativity actually be designed?

While most of the vocations that seem to be attracted to co-work spaces sound like fabricated portable lifestyles, which is perfectly fine, I recently learned that Experience Designer is a quite real and rather handsomely compensated vocation.* An experience designer is charged with ensuring that your experience of a company’s website or app is as optimal and pleasant as possible. Or in their own words, experience design is “focused on creating positive human outcomes.”

While this new vocation might reduce the time we spend on the phone with cable or internet companies, it’s hard to imagine that the DMV or Post Office have ever consulted an experience designer. Such public institutions often generate palpable experiences of misery, precisely because the human experience is not planned. The idea of designing an experience seems, indeed, rather counterintuitive. Are planned experiences genuinely experiences, or just the output of a plan? As the above self-descriptions suggest, co-work spaces are meticulously designed. They are designed to inspire creativity. While there are certainly some spaces that are more conducive to concentration than others, the idea that such spaces can be commoditized inspires more panic than creativity.

To my knowledge, public schools do not regularly employ experience designers. However, the increasing neoliberalization of education and the ideology that DeVos has thus far espoused suggest that this day may not be far off. While it can be more functionally pleasant to interact with FedEx than the USPS, the increasing privatization of space normalizes the idea that every experience should be for-profit, should be designed to grow wealth, and perhaps this is a sentiment we should not entwine with education.

The idea that knowledge production has ever been ‘pure’ and ideology-free is a bit of mythology. The Enlightenment was financed by those seeking more efficient means of growing wealth (see some of Mary Poovey’s work), and its educational traditions bear this mark. Public elementary education developed with the onset of the Industrial Revolution to both instill time-discipline and discourage the idleness of children whose parents spent twelve hours of the day in a factory, and elementary education still bears these marks. But, I would rather have a miserable experience at the DMV than pay for the pleasure of having my creativity designed.

*Disclosure: The building I used to live in was bought by an Experience Designer for Google, after which I no longer generated enough wealth to continue living there. So, it’s conceivable that I’m bitter.

Further Reading:

Aggarwal, Ujju, Edwin Mayorga, and Donna Nevel. 2012. Slow violence and neoliberal education reform: Reflections on a school closure. Peace and Conflict 18 (2): 156-64.

Giroux, Henry A. 2014. Neoliberalism’s war on higher education. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

McClennen, Sophia A. 2009. Neoliberalism and the crisis of intellectual engagement. Works and Days 27 : 459-70.

Poovey, Mary. 2010. Financing enlightenment, part one. In This is enlightenment., eds. Clifford Siskin, William Warner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

What happens to our praxis once we start from a place of acknowledging difference in our persons, our histories, our bodies, and our aesthetics? This text starts from a standpoint of curiosity, consideration, and mindfulness as we explore how, who and what we are, inform structures we create. The moment and place of knowing requires a certain slowness to enter into our thoughts, movements, and research, allowing for nuance and precision, for care and humility, and for an aesthetic of difference to incubate our praxis. Once we allow our work to breathe, to reflect, to sense difference, it transforms structures around it or structures created through it.^[1] The act of research becomes praxis through which critical awareness of one’s own condition and the condition of others comes into high relief. One aspect of this praxis includes bodies co-producing the work. There are intricate processes that situate us between theory and practice as praxis, which must begin to take into account the many ways in which we are identified, the modes of address, our different bodies, and varied epistemologies.

Intersectionality allows us to occupy that praxis and standpoint critically.^[2] It takes into account systems of oppression within the world that hold marginalized people in place (often at an inferior position) in multiple ways. It is not a new idea to acknowledge that our vectors of identity (race, class, ethnicity/gender/body, et cetera) inform how we experience and consider the world, but what is significant in intersectionality is that that place holding happens in different ways at different times and for different reasons. On the flip side, it also means that privilege manifests itself in similarly multifaceted forms. If, due to your body experience, you have never had to question how the world looks at your race/class/ethnicity/gender/body, or if that has never impacted the way the world identifies your research or work, you should know that that is a privileged experience. And that privilege or lack thereof, informs you and your praxis.

Learning Oneself and Others: Intersectional Praxis

The paradox of ‘defining’ something like identity, of course, is that it is not static. Even for someone who is thoughtful and self-reflexive, the ways in which one approaches oneself and others, changes with time and experience. Our ability to understand ourselves in relation to everything else is predicated upon the ability to understand and contextualize the real, tangible, sensory aspect of moving through the world as compared to conceptual, abstract notions of thinking of our bodies in the world. It is important to understand that recognizing systems of power and one’s place in them is a tool that can be utilized. These systems have an impact on our bodies and identities and continue to affect our work. This is the methodology of intersectionality as it relates to praxis. Whereas intersectionality can be defined by levels of access to privilege, a research-based model of intersectionality recognizes that in moving between the lateral and hierarchical modes of being, one must be cognizant and thoughtful about how in each context there may be differences to take into account. And it allows for care to be an intrinsic part of the recognition of difference. All practitioners must first place themselves outside of the system that maintains their work in place. In order to re-conceptualize any practice, the first moments of recognition have to do with recognizing oneself as radically other, not of this system, not of the normalized way of being. That conceptual shift allows one to consider praxis as particular to one’s embodied standpoint, – there is no way for me/you/us to step outside of my/your/our body/bodies to create anything. We may develop tools for all of us to use, methods, codes, programs to help us practice – but what gets coded or institutionalized, what gets marked as knowledge, for what type of normative body, all that should be questioned. If the body that is creating systems of knowledge employs intersectional praxis – the episteme itself knows the diversity of possible bodies it must account for rather than just assuming one norm.

A simple example might be to consider my own childhood: as a person of South Asian heritage, I was often confounded while dealing with crayons that did not have any color to represent my skin tone. I was told by teachers to color in bodies as ‘peach’ because that was the norm in the 1970s, in the United States. But my body was not peach. The disjuncture, cognitive dissonance, and alienation between what I experienced as body and what I represented was unaccounted for: the tools (i.e. crayons) and the representation could not align unless I let go of wanting to see myself represented in that image. I had to make myself into something I was not, and it very quickly became clear to me that I was not the ‘norm’ in the world of crayons. This happens even as I work in archaeology. The normative person in the past is often a body that looks and acts like a contemporary normative body – often not one that looks/feels/could be imagined as mine: normative, and yet othered through time. It is important for us to think through how we might make sense of the many different ways we might imagine past bodies, or othered bodies, or any body that is not a normative privileged body.

Thinking through an intersectional approach to the formation of knowledge then requires some time, some care, and some criticality. Such an approach allows one to look not only at the praxis, but at the pathways and research material to create something: whether that is writing a course syllabus or a book, or reconstructing a history. In effect, such an approach allows for an epistemic critique in the service of decolonization.

[excerpt]

Intersectionality as Decolonizing Research: Integrating Care

Self-recognition, knowledge, and reclamation are at the heart of how one might methodologically approach intersectionality in praxis, and this is really where care is paramount. In our contemporary moment, we have lost the ability to take time out to think, to write, to draw, to wonder, to let our curiosity dictate a research pattern. More and more we are propelled into a system that requires all labor to produce at breakneck speed, suggesting that somehow the survival-of-the-fittest model of labor capitalism is achieved with a lack of all human needs: food, sleep, air, love, et cetera. The late capitalist model has alienated the human body to such a degree that we no longer are allowed to be human to be considered successful.

One of the ways I consider intersectionality to be useful is because it forces the hand of alienation to move. It actually removes the clutches of that form of control over self and control over body and labor. In some measure that is precisely what we want, but it is a privileged position. I have been so disciplined into my subjectivity as an academic, that even when I have slowed down and allowed for care, I have produced an enormous amount of material. Perhaps even because of it: I have produced more work because I am happier working. In some sense, even though I am trying to contest and resist this system, I am actually fulfilling the goal of the late capitalist, neoliberal academic systems agenda.

The reclaiming of a self that is mired in a late capitalist lifestyle is one that requires thoughtfulness, a sense of self-care, and a commitment to time as something to give, not to spend. A radical change in praxis does not always mean a dramatic and drastic change. Sometimes the self-awareness may result in a small material or spatial shift, but it is enough to create a mindful balance: the dramatic quality of the change may be intangible but palpable. In all of my experience, however, the mode of resistance has only ever worked through collaboration, finding allies and solidarity with others. It is through different kinds of practices and alignments that one can contest some of the conditions within which we are working. This can maintain one’s livelihood and sense of self. And so through alliances and creating kin with others (human/nonhuman), we maintain and protect ourselves. And ultimately, that care for and with others is also self-care. Once we recognize ourselves, we begin to recognize our positions, and how our positions may be at the expense of others, be those others human or nonhuman. Once we recognize that we are placed in various systems in ways to keep us moving in place, we stop and then slowly realign our ways of experience, our praxis experiences radical change, one in which we might recognize decolonization as care.

[excerpt]

These are excerpts from a chapter of the same title that is in press for the volume Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice, edited by Carolyn Stauss and Paula Pais. A Slow Research Lab Collaboration with Valiz. Amsterdam, Valiz Publishers.

This excerpt has been published with the approval of the editors of the volume and the Slow Research Lab.

^[1] I am borrowing the concepts of transformation from Paulo Freire’s 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum International Publishing Group.

^[2] Intersectionality, as I am using it, was first introduced in Kimberle Crenshaw’s 1989, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. The University of Chicago Legal Forum. For more on race and architecture see Lesley Naa Norle Lokko’s volume, White Papers Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture. University of Minnesota Press (2000).

Lindsay: Your book takes on how Swedish design is constituted in practice through everyday design work and refracts larger cultural and political ideals about Swedish social democracy. Your observations and engagements with designers not only inspired your book, but also some of your pedagogical strategies like the Ethnocharrette. It is increasingly common to see people working at the intersection of design and anthropology. Do you see this as being a way to make the skills of anthropology marketable outside of the academy or is there something specific that makes this intersection make sense?

Keith: I think the intersection makes sense in a few different ways. In terms of the marketability issue, sure, in a general sense anthropology has a lot to offer all sorts of design fields and is well-positioned to make the work done by designers better according to a number of different metrics. But I tend to think collaborations between anthropologists and most other kinds of professionals are almost always A Good Thing. The question is what makes the match between design and anthropology a fruitful one, and as a follow-up, why is this relationship only recently gaining wider attention, given the fact that anthropologists and other ethnographers have been working with designers outside of academia for several decades.

For me the match makes sense because both anthropology and design (I’m using the term broadly, even though design is a very diverse kind of thing) share a number of basic core concerns, the most obvious of which is a concern with people. Even if the daily work of a furniture designer is focused on sourcing the right sized screws, or an architect spends most of her mornings wrangling with CAD software, that’s all done in the service of creating objects and spaces that help constitute an everyday world of human lived reality. If anthropologists are tasked with making sense of that world, designers are charged with help giving it form, two complementary cuts in a broader human-centered project. Second, both design and anthropology are concerned with, for lack of a better term, stuff. Even though we’re all so focused on people, we also recognize that people never stray too far from their things, and that the forms those things take and the meanings they’re given are critical mediators of cultural and political experience. Third (there’s more, but I’ll keep it at three), design and anthropology both operate by means of research, which is to say, both fields explicitly value exploring and critically understanding the wider contexts in which they’re situated, rather than simply building on preconceived ideas about what they’re looking at.

As for why this relationship is only now taking on a more cohesive form, I think that abstract anthropological theorizing needed to play catch-up with the real world. I see several moments and movements in anthropology as sort of establishing necessary preconditions for the emergence of a more robust design anthropology, including material culture studies and theories of materiality, which bring things and their qualities to the fore in not-necessarily-Marxist ways; reconfiguring the critique of visualism as an attention to multisensory semiotic engagement; and a turn to the ethnographic study of making and its contexts. When taken together, all of these (and more!) begin to dismantle longstanding frameworks that separate production and consumption, material and immaterial, the visual and the textual, form and content, and lots more, and design anthropology is sort of swooping in to help redesign their new configurations.

This isn’t to say that design is perfectly suited for anthropology and vice-versa, and I definitely don’t think the match is always trued. But I do think anthropology and design can definitely learn quite a bit from each other.

Lindsay: Yes, I agree. What I think is interesting is the uptake in visual modalities by those of us whose objects of enquiry are not design or aesthetic/cultural production. For instance, we’ve talked about the debates in the infrastructure literatures that rely heavily on the issue of materiality and what is tangible and seen and what is ‘invisible’. I gained some perspective on this last fall when I participated in a symposium at NYU, Media, Infrastructure, and Aesthetics. There were people from a wide range of disciplines interested in assessing the growing scholarly and artistic interest in the aesthetic dimensions of extraction.  Architecture, design and art were avenues for talking about global resource extraction and its related cultural politics, even for those of us trained outside these specifically visual disciplines. What do you make of this? Do you think this is a select group of people, or do you think there is a broader current in anthropology to take on shared interests and expertise of these other fields?

 Keith: I think that as anthropologists continue to find new sites to examine, and new constellations of humans and their things to puzzle through, we often find ourselves not fully equipped to account for, if we use Eduardo Kohn’s phrasing, the stuff “beyond the human” (and his book is a great example of an anthropologist trying to do just that). This can really be a struggle. Of course anthropology has always cared about the parahuman materials of social life, but as we move toward treating such things less as a context thickly described and more as our central objects of inquiry, our fealty to a textual impulse in both our methods (e.g. field notes) and our representations (e.g. ethnographic monographs) can sometimes stymie us from moving beyond the human in ways that are appropriate to our field sites, and that can push anthropology forward (though I’m personally not interested in straying too far from the human). So some anthropologists start looking elsewhere for inspiration. I think part of the draw toward architecture and design, at least for me, is that, as I said, those are fields whose concerns seem to resonate with anthropology, but whose modalities aren’t ultimately subject to a textual impulse for their legitimacy. They seem to offer ways to engage with the world that are certainly visual, but really they’re multisensory, and they don’t seem to provoke much anxiety around accounting for the semiotic richness of those multisensory forms of engagement — which I think can be alluring to fieldworkers feeling oppressed by the routine obligation to transduce complex experiences into a collection of words on a page. I don’t know whether art, design, and architecture are, ultimately, some perfect parallel panaceas that will help anthropologists really confront the shifting composition of the fieldsites we find ourselves in, but I do think there’s a lot of value in seeing what might come of it.

Since starting to work alongside an artist and a designer, I’ve become more aware of ethnographic practice inflected by art and design. There seems to be a growing number of institutional spaces, degree programs, courses, workshops and books devoted to exploring different combinations of art/design aesthetics and ethnography. While audience and aims vary, one can’t help but wonder what it means for there to be a kind mushrooming of art/design inflected methods and outputs (Design Anthropology, Anthropology Design, Design Ethnography, Sensory Ethnography to name a few and see for instance a last year’s ANTROPOLOGY + DESIGN series on Savage Minds). While visual anthropology has an extended history, and anthropologists have long been interested in the intersections of aesthetic and cultural production, is there something of a “visualisation of anthropology” (Grimshaw & Ravetz 2005) underway? Is an attention to art and design in anthropology ‘new’ or simply new to me? For those of us not designated as ‘visual’ anthropologists, are we being asked/invited/demanded to engage with different modalities for fieldwork and scholarly output?

I decided ask an expert. Keith M. Murphy is an anthropologist of design. His new book Swedish Design: An Ethnography is just that. It is a rich description and analysis of how everyday things (furniture, lighting) are made to mean through processes of design within the context of larger cultural flows. Like some of the iconic objects he describes, Keith’s writing is sharp, uncluttered and politically aware.

In addition to researching and writing about design, Keith experiments with how to harness design modalities to anthropological and ethnographic practice. Through the Center for Ethnography at the University of California, Irvine, Keith and George Marcus host occasional events called ‘Ethnocharettes’. An ethnocharrette is described as a collaborative session of intense activity in which design thinking and methods are used to interrogate and explore ethnographic concerns. Their most recent installment was in March. I was fortunate enough to be there and do what anthropologists do best: hang out, watch, listen, and ask questions.

I reached Keith at his standing desk in his Long Beach home via FaceTime. Our conversation tacked back and forth between the particulars of the ethnocharrette exercise and his speculations on why ‘the visual’ and borrowed modalities from art and design seem to be growing new roots (routes) in anthropology. It was less of an ‘interview’ and more of an ongoing conversation we have been having for the past year or so. I re-assemble our discussion over two posts and invite you to join the conversation.

Before I arrived in California, Keith described the ethnocharrette to me as “this thing”. The ambiguity of his shorthand reflected the changing form of the event since its inception. A charrette is a common activity in design disciplines. Keith described it as more than brainstorming, less than consequential. It is inherently collaborative. Whereas a classic brainstorm involves individuals tossing out ideas and then selecting ones to choose, a charrette is designed collaboratively create by bringing things together.

The impetus for the ethnocharrette experiment came partly from Keith’s own exposure to design thinking in his research, through an earlier pre-doctoral internship at Sapient, and from working briefly as a member of the COLAB team at Syracuse University. Since Writing Culture, George Marcus has increasingly been interested in exploring the appeal of design and the studio as a legitimate form of experimentation in association with fieldwork projects. Keith was upfront that as a pair they have been willfully sidestepping the issue of whether the charrette model is for pedagogy or ethnographic practice. It has always been done in the context of pedagogy (graduate student training), however they have found the boundary between pedagogy and practice blurred by students themselves. Some of the techniques introduced pre-fieldwork end up being independently taken up by students as they move into their analysis and writing.

The most recent iteration involved students bringing ‘ethnographica’ related to their projects. They were instructed to bring ‘things” (texts, images, objects, sound files) that were easily displayed and shared with others. They were in groups of three to five and had each selected a theorist to think through their materials with. Phase one of the charette involved students giving brief introductions of their materials and then laying out ‘pieces’ of their selected theory on post-its. The culling for simplified parts and constraining them to a post-it is an attempt to disturb anthropology’s penchant for the complicated. “If anthropology had a tombstone it would say ‘its complicated’ ”, remarked Murphy. The charette is designed to extract information from materials before deep thinking. This slows down the desire to ‘complicate’ and take better stock of what is.

Once the theory pieces are up, students are invited to ‘read’ each other’s materials. The ethnocharette works against the normative model of anthropological production where singular people are doing work on singular projects. Instead of having students trained to think as individuals first, collaborators later, the charrette model introduces co-thinking earlier in the academic process. Of course there are long lists of successful collaborations from our field, yet individual projects continue to be favoured and rewarded. In the exercise, students relinquish sole ‘ownership’ over their materials and see the variety of ways in which they can be read. Again, post-its keep track of pieces.

Next, students look at the bits of information they have co-produced and think about how they might sensibly cluster. They can re-arrange and combine them in ways they see fit. Keith describes this as ‘structured non-thinking’. The process asks them to physically relate to materials in different ways. Instead of solely cultivating habits like sitting, thinking, attacking, the charette has people standing, moving, touching and seeing things differently. The groups I observed related to the task in different ways. Some had highly tidy rows of like terms, others had stacks of ideas, while one group was determined to extract from us the ‘correct’ way of proceeding.

Phase two of the charrette asks participants to take what has been assembled and re-present it in light of the process. The idea is that if Phase I is a process that compels the participants to let go of their pre-conceived commitments to their field sites and ethnographic materials, and to find otherwise unnoticed connections between their individual field sites, Phase II is  intended to push students to create something — a rough material or conceptual prototype — that could account for these new connections in unforeseen ways. Theory is important here, too. Each group worked with a specific theorist, and tried to incorporate those ideas into their prototypes as glue that held the disparate projects together. Again some groups quickly set about creating, while others waded through possibilities with some uncertainty what could/should be done. Keith sees this hesitation as part of the ‘ideology of creativity’ that design rests on. Design assumes everyone is creative, whereas many anthropologists assume they aren’t creative. In fact, there are explicit discourses against creativity. The charrette is meant to interrupt some of these [stereotypes] to push the boundaries of what anthropology can be, while not oversubscribing to ‘creativity’ as inherently valuable (sellable).

Here I objected. My migration to anthropology from sociology/ applied linguistics was precisely my sense that there was space for creative scholarly practice and that corners of the discipline were staunchly uncommitted to a sharp divide between art and science. If anything, I remarked, I over estimate my creativity. He reframed. The question is perhaps less about if you are creative, but rather what opportunities do you have to manifest creativity? He had me there. While I have been fortunate to be part of Ethnographic Terminalia in the past, most creative projects have been taken on through art-based residencies rather than academic ones.

I still wanted to push the issue of creativity. The analysis seems gendered. Many women anthropologists take on creative modalities (literary ethnography, creative non-fiction) and while they find an audience in the Real World, they can sometimes seem ‘niche’ in mainstream anthropology. Keith acknowledged that there is a difference between certain kinds of aestheticizations and the regimes of value they find themselves circulating in. Broadening what it means to be ‘creative’ as an anthropologist is about understanding stylizations (creative non-fiction, or jargon laden prose) do stand for themselves as inherently valuable. Rather the question must be asked, what are you attempting to do? Who is the audience? What’s the goal? Ethnocharrette is just a part of a longer conversation that students’ work will be in over the course of their training.

Our own conversation moved to the bigger picture. Later that week, he and I would join a larger group of faculty and advanced graduate students for a Productive Encounter led by anthropologist Christine Hegel and set designer Luke Cantarella. We would be making use of design exercises to think through Doug Holmes’ work on central bankers. Perhaps as a result of my own training, I was inclined to ask the question, ‘why this, why now?’ Why are these modes of thinking/ practicing anthropology appearing? Our conversation continues in my next post.

You will notice that some posts, like Carole’s Writer’s Workshop are now grouped together with a special series link that appears at the top. Although we already have category tags that can do this, we hope this will help highlight some of the special series we regularly host on this blog.

You will now see 3 “possibly related posts” linked at the bottom of every post. Having been doing this for a few years now, we have a huge back catalog and we hope posting these will get people to explore the site a little deeper. These are only “possibly” related because the suggestions are made by an algorithm, so don’t blame us if the suggestions are way off!

We’ve also implemented page caching along with image and code optimization. These should hopefully serve up pages faster, with less of a burden on our servers. If you notice anything different other than the fact that pages are loading faster then something is probably wrong. Please let us know.

One thing that is gone is the WordPress “like” button. The way it was implemented was causing some problems. If I can figure out how to bring it back, I will, but for now it is gone. Sorry about that.

I’m not done with all I have planned yet. I’m still working on trying to clean up some layout bugs, especially with the mobile site. Hopefully that will get done in the next few weeks. If anyone out there is a webdesign genius who can help us clean up some of our code to better conform to web standards and further speed up the site, please let me know. We aren’t planning on another redesign anytime soon, just trying to squeeze the most out of what we already have.

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.

Also, we previously posted that people would have to register to leave comments. That is not the case. In fact, we’ve turned off the feature that let people register and deleted most of the new registrations from this week because we were getting hundreds of SPAM users registering for the site. You can use your WordPress.com, Facebook, or Twitter account to leave comments, or simply enter any valid email address. (We will monitor this policy and change it if needed.)

Please let us know if you are having any problems that are making it difficult for you to use the site. Right now we are focused on squashing critical bugs. If you have more general feedback (good or bad) about the design, feel free to leave that as well, but please note that we won’t be making any major revisions to the new design till this summer.

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.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the month, we are getting ready for some big changes around here. To ensure that everything goes smoothly, we will be taking the site offline sometime on Friday evening (Eastern Standard Time). If all goes well, the site should be back up early Saturday morning with the new layout and the restored archives in place. I’ll keep this post active as a place for you to post your reactions (good or bad) to the new site, as well as for catching any bugs in the code.

UPDATE: Welcome to the new/old site! It is new because we have a fresh new look, and it is old because all our archives going back to 2005 have been restored. We are still working on ironing out a few things here and there, so please let us know if anything is broken, not working, or not to your liking. And if you like the new site, please don’t hold back from sharing your praise!

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.