Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century

253 Pages·2010·10.751 MB·English

by  Alison J. Clarke

~ SpringerWienNewYork
For My Loving Parents
ALISON J. CLARKE (ED.)
DESIGN ANTHROPOLOGY
OBJECT CULTURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Edition Angewandte
Book Series of the University of Applied Arts Vienna
Edited by Gerald Bast, Rector
This book is the outcome of a lengthy and exciting journey into the various
objects, disciplines, and debates that form the bridges between contemporary
design and anthropology. Many of the contributors are colleagues from academia,
industry, and design with whom I have shared discussions, or simply listened to
intently, at conferences, workshops, and events over the years. Design Anthro-
pology is a testament to the generosity of the contributing authors, whose articles
arose from a genuine collective interest in disseminating knowledge beyond the
tight parameters of their disciplines to specifically address the phenomenon of
design anthropology.
The original proposal for this anthology was thrashed out with my PhD
student, and then student assistant, Kathrina Dankl, whose enthusiasm was
invaluable. I would also like to thank enormously Gerald Bast, Anja Seipenbusch,
Elfe Fritz, Angela Fössl, Bryleigh Morsink, Katharina Wohlrab, Erwin Bauer,
Diana Young, Daniel Miller, Fiona Raby, Harlanne Roberts and Harvey Molotch
who in various ways, practical and otherwise, helped the project to its completion.
And I thank my inspiring family Constance, Solomon, and Paul for their
unerring love and support.
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INTRODUCTION 09
ALISON J. CLARKE
DESIGNERS GO NATIVE PEOPLE, OBJECTS
AND ENTANGLEMENTS
Chapter 1 16 Chapter 5 74
JANE FULTON SURI ALISON J. CLARKE
Poetic Observation : The Anthropological Object in Design:
What Designers Make of What They See From Victor Papanek to Superstudio
Chapter 2 33 Chapter 6 88
JAMER HUNT DANIEL MILLER
Prototyping the Social: Designing Ourselves
Temporality and Speculative Futures at the
Intersection of Design and Culture Chapter 7 100
HARVEY MOLOTCH
Chapter 3 45 Objects in Sociology
JO-ANNE BICHARD & RAMA GHEERAWO
The Designer as Ethnographer: Chapter 8 117
Practical Projects from Industry DIANA YOUNG
Coloring Cars: Customizing Motor Vehicles
Chapter 4 56 in the East of the Australian Western Desert
LORRAINE GAMMAN & ADAM THORPE
Criminality and Creativity:
What’s at Stake in Designing Against Crime?
MUTATING FORMS, FUTURE TRAJECTORIES:
SHIFTING MATERIALITIES FUTURE USERS
Chapter 9 130 Chapter 13 184
SUSANNE KÜCHLER MARIA BEZAITIS & RICK ROBINSON
Materials and Design Valuable to Values:
How ‘User Research’ Ought to Change
Chapter 10 142
PAULINE GARVEY Chapter 14 202
Consuming Ikea: LANE DENICOLA
Inspiration as Material Form The Digital as Para-World:
Design, Anthropology, and Information Technologies
Chapter 11 154
NICOLETTE MAKOVICKY Chapter 15 212
‘Erotic Needlework’: KATHRINA DANKL
Vernacular Designs on the 21st Century Market 31m2 and Style
Chapter 12 169 Chapter 16 229
VLADIMIR ARKHIPOV SIMON ROBERTS
Functioning Forms / Anti-Design Technology for the Future, Design for the P resent?
Authors‘ Biographies 244
Index 250
ALISON J. CLARKE
Design Anthropology brings together key thinkers and practitioners involved in
making and theorizing our contemporary material and immaterial world: its rituals,
its aesthetics, and its interactions. No longer bound to the outdated fiction of the
Fordist product, a logical object borne of rational technological means and eagerly
adopted by the novelty-hungry consumer, theorization around ‘stuff’ has seen
an exponential increase. But the ‘turn to the material’, as some academics have
dubbed this preoccupation with things, is indicative of a more prosaic crisis.
Thingness is simply not what it used to be.
Post-Fordism brought us iconic designs, such as Daniel Weil’s 1982
‘radio-in-a-plastic-bag’, that knowingly challenged our assumptions regarding
the bogus relation between form, function, and materiality. More than a quarter
of a century later, Weil’s design (featuring wires protruding uncomfortably from
a transparent vacuum pack) seems quaintly indicative of the nostalgia for a simpler,
pre-digitalized age when subverting form was a whole lot simpler. Contemporary
design, as this collection of essays reveals, is as much about the spaces, interac-
tions, and meanings between things and people as it is about things themselves.
This book describes a seismic shift in the way experts and users
conceptualize, envisage, and engage in object culture. As the output of
contemporary design becomes evermore diverse, the term design itself is
increa singly redundant in its capacity to capture the sheer heterogeneity of the
processes, practices, and materialities involved in the making of stuff. Designers
are now as likely to engage in social research as they are in the making of form:
Once an intuitive process, gauging cultural relevance has become part of
a burgeoning area – design anthropology.
Observational techniques, human focus and emphasis on the machina-
tions of the everyday, are essential in interpreting the complex implications of
consumer culture, technological interaction, and media. As the values of expan ding
new markets challenge homogenous, globalized understandings of product
worlds and users, the desire for indigenous, grassroots, and nuanced insights has
never been more acute. And it is the products, as much as designers and users,
that have propelled social understanding to the forefront of the design agenda.
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Design anthropology is made evident in tales of Australian Aboriginal cars,
whose colors, rather than brands, single them out as sought after objects of design
that engender a social relation to ancestral landscape (see Young, this volume); or
the process of ‘designing ourselves’ whereby objects are used to display and rein-
force kin relations through the practice of home curatorship (see Miller, this
volume). Design anthropology belies the cultural embeddedness that all brands,
objects, and designed interactions operate within, and it is emerging as a meth-
odology as much as a discourse.
Over the last two decades, myths and legends have abounded regarding
the rise of the corporate design anthropologist. In 1991, the New York Times
featured an article titled ‘Coping with Cultural Polygots’. Business Week, later
that year, reported on ‘Studying Natives on the Shop Floor’. A wealth of similar
stories about the intervention of anthropologists into the corporate workplace,
with titles such as ‘Anthropologists Go Native in the Corporate Village’ and ‘Into
the Wild Unknown of the Workplace Culture’ (Suchman 2007), sketch out a
kind of parody of ‘authentic’ anthropologists whose attentions have turned from
ancient Papuan New Guinea gift cultures to the banality of Western corporate
and consumer culture.
Anthropologist Lucy Suchman’s involvement with Xerox PARC, as part
of a research and development strategy in the late 1980s, was hailed in the business
media as a fine example of how design, transformed by anthropology, can
enhance a product’s success. The legend had it that Suchman’s ethnographic
study of Xerox users led to the development of the ‘break-through’ design of the
big, green photocopier button. According to the hero of the tale herself, this
myth of corporate anthropology’s ‘magical’ power, is in fact an entire fiction that
undermines the intent of deep research and its findings. Far from being an advo-
cate of the ‘simple’ green button, Suchman’s user-research challenged its very
existence. As she puts it herself, ‘the green button actually masked the labor that
was needed to become familiar with the machine and incorporate it effectively
into use’ (2007:3). The branding of corporate anthropology in this reductionist
way, she suggests, arose with the need to understand the worker and consumer
beyond the economic paradigm; anthropology had a role both as a brand (offer-
ing human interest and public relations caché to corporate employers via the
media) and as social science promising new and appropriable insights into worker
and customer ‘culture and experience’.
Technology-based corporations like Intel (see Bezaitis and Robinson, this
volume) embraced anthropologists during this period to expand their under-
standing of global markets. Design models like the ubiquitous ‘smart home’ offer
a homogenizing vision of technological innovation (see Roberts, this volume).
But an anthropological approach, that promotes cross-cultural and non-secular
understandings of everyday life (from Hindu to Buddhist culture), takes into
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account ‘soft’ factors such as notions of pollution, sacredness, humility, and
modesty otherwise overlooked in Western discourse around the appropriation
of technologies (Bell 2006). Similarly, design companies, such as IDEO, encourage
designers themselves, not just adjunct anthropologists, to use their observational
skills and intuition in thinking beyond functional problem solving and into the
social realm of things (see Fulton Suri, this volume).
The shift towards cultural sensitivity through ethnography, while under-
pinned by a market-driven agenda, could optimistically be construed as a move
towards socially responsive design. But some critics point to the inherently
reactionary nature of using consumers themselves to generate ‘bottom-up’ inno-
vation, much as politicians have moved in the last twenty years towards focus
groups as a means of trading complicity for ‘real’ social innovation. To quote one
such critic from the Marxist-leaning online journal spiked : ‘As an example of a
relatively new form of immersive research, the discipline of ethnography
emerged out of social anthropology: that is, white men studying black natives in
the jungle, in an attempt to understand and control them. Today, we are the
natives, caricatured in the interests of research’ (Perks 2003:1). Certainly, the
move towards ‘incorporated’ anthropology requires serious critical scrutiny, but as
the examples of ethnographic research into aging (see Dankl; Bichard and Gheerawo,
this volume) and urban criminality (see Gamman and Thorpe, this volume) reveal,
anthropological methods have the capacity to generate effective social innovation.
Types of design anthropology follow a tradition of Anti-Design that has
striven to question or undermine the corporate, market-driven relations of object
culture. Contemporary critical designers, combining anthropological-style obser-
vation and speculation on emergent social practices, engage in a practice Hunt
(this volume) describes as ‘prototyping the social’. This new breed of designers,
whose scenario-based projects adopt ethnographic tropes in exploring immaterial
and material futures, utilize design as intervention to present us with ‘a distorting
mirror through which to see our present’. Critical design, such as this, arguably
belongs to a broader tradition of radical or Anti-Design that emerged as a dialogue
with a burgeoning consumer culture and the late 1960s condemnation of Western
bourgeois cultural hegemony. By the 1970s, designers and critics, from Italian
design group Superstudio to design theorist Victor Papanek, used the anthropo-
logical object itself, from the peasant’s wood-working tool to the Kula canoe, as a
statement of critique; a counterpoise to inauthentic capitalist product culture
(see Clarke, this volume). The material culture of the Other has been a consistent
foil to the design of the contemporary.
Self-made and found objects are an extension of this counterpoised
anthropological object. In Vladimir Arkhipov’s case (this volume), the notion of
Anti-Design is based on an ongoing collection of ‘found’ and ‘retrieved’ vernacular
designs that disassemble the hegemony of consumer product culture. These
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