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Introduction: Design Anthropological Futures: September 2016
Introduction: Design Anthropological Futures: September 2016
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Introduction 3
Introduction 5
Interventionist Speculations
Design practice is centred on intervention, and has a historically established focus
on creating change. But anthropology, too, essentially and increasingly, intervenes
in the worlds and lives of the people being studied (Hastrup 2003; Smith 2013). In
both design anthropology and constructive design research, intervention is increas-
ingly employed as an action research method, allowing new forms of experience,
awareness and dialogue to emerge (Ericson and Mazé 2011; Koskinen et al.
2011). In this book, the term ‘interventionist speculations’ is used to draw together
and spotlight inventive methodologies that embrace open-ended speculation and
concrete proposals for change as modes of inquiry. When we speculate about
something, we engage in a form of reasoning that is based on inconclusive evidence.
This section of the book is marked by contemplation of issues that are unsettled and
thus issues that it is not possible, or even desirable, to know fully. Can the particular
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Engaging Things
In the coming together of design and anthropology, a major point of convergence
is the embodied and material engagement with ‘things’ in social and collaborative
encounters. Within anthropology, the recent ‘material turn’ has placed particular
emphasis on the agency of objects, the affordances of materials, and the interplay
between humans and non-humans. As a result, we have seen an increased interest
in ‘things’ and the making of things as objects of, and for, anthropological research
(Ingold 2013; Henare et al. 2007; Miller 2005). Within design and design research,
the growing sensitivity to processes of collaborative making has raised questions
about what is accomplished in design practices, and about the status of the material
artefacts that these practices produce. Binder et al. (2011) have proposed that
design collaborations should be treated as socio-material assemblies of humans
and artefacts. They suggest the notion of ‘design things’ to capture what is accom-
plished in design as these assemblies form and evolve as a gathering around matters
of concern. What constitutes a thing, and how things participate and become
concretely engaged in practices of design anthropology, is unfolded in this section
of the book. The theme, ‘Engaging Things’ refers to both the practical engagement
of things as tools for collaboration, exploration and experimentation in design and
research practices and to the engagement in and the fascination with things as
objects of design anthropological inquiries.
How speculative objects may be engaged in productive friction in real-world
settings to challenge and influence future-making practices – practically, politi-
cally, and epistemologically – is explored by Mette Kjærsgaard and Laurens Boer
(Chapter 14, this volume). Here, the authors outline potentials for the development
of a more critical form of design anthropology in parallel with a more engaged and
situated approach to speculative design. Based on empirical examples of critical-
design engagements with practices of urban development in Denmark, the authors
suggest an approach based on situated and critical material engagement (Boer,
Donovan and Buur 2013; Kjærsgaard 2011) that brings together speculative and
mundane practices of future-making, in the field as well as in the design studio.
Such an approach extends design anthropology (beyond ethnography) towards
a more critical material engagement with the possible, while moving speculative
design beyond the critical object itself (Koskinen et al. 2011). This (also) allows
things and objects to take on new forms and agency in exploratory research
activities.
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What stands out in the four sections and themes described above is a renewed
curiosity about our ways of living as being contingent, constructed, and transformable.
Together they show how material, theoretical, and methodological experiments can
open new spaces for insight and social change. Most of all, they demonstrate how
future-making is part of everyday, emergent, collaborative, and political practices of
shaping and defining possibilities.
Through specific encounters, we sense the methodological and epistemological
challenges and potentials of contemporary design anthropology, and glimpse
the contours of possible futures for this transdisciplinary approach to knowledge
production and change.
Futures are now. Let us engage.
References
Appadurai, A. (2013), The Future as Cultural Fact, London: Verso.
Becker, H. S. (1982), Art Worlds, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Bell, G. and Dourish, P. (2007), ‘Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Notes on Ubiquitous Computing’s
Dominant Vision’, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11 (2): 133–43.
Binder, T., De Michelis, G., Ehn, P., Jacucci, G., Linde, P. and Wagner, I. (2011), Design
Things, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bleecker, J. (2009), Design Fiction, San Francisco: Near Future Laboratory.
Blomberg, J., Burrell, M. and Guest, G. (2003), ‘An Ethnographic Approach to Design’,
in J. A. Jacko and A. Sears (eds.), The Human–Computer Interaction Handbook:
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