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Design Anthropology

As a transdisciplinary area of research and practice, Design Anthropology is not located in any one field or area of expertise, but is representative of a whole spectrum of diverse relationships that have historically formed between the fields of design and anthropology, as well as other intersecting fields. This group was formed to follow these broader fields, subfields, and their relationships as a transdisciplinary epistemological construct of design anthropology along a spectrum within four specific quadrants: anthropology relevant to design, anthropology of design, design of anthropology, and anthropological design. Situating these many meanings of design anthropology as holistically constitutive of it in the gestaltic sense.

As a transdisciplinary, collaborative, and still contested field, the objective of this group is to raise public awareness of the diversity of research and practice and their related themes that consistently cluster as a design anthropological discourse. It is one of the only spaces on the internet where this diversity of research and practice is actively organized collectively as design anthropology. Making resources more accessible to those across the spectrum in order to:

1. Establish and explore how Design Anthropology fits into or supplements the varied practices and objectives of design (including and across commercial design, speculative design, critical design, design fiction, transition design, ecological design, social design, decolonized design, sustainable design, participatory design, co-design, etc.), anthropology, futures studies, STS, and society writ large.

2. Contribute to the development and evolution of a more inclusive and holistic pedagogy of design anthropology.

3. Open up a dialogue between designers, anthropologists, researchers, engineers and potential clients leading to greater participation, adoption, and even new collaborative partnerships.

Website: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8353522/
Members: 16
Latest Activity: Oct 18

Video Presentations On Design Anthropology

Design Anthropology: A new style of research and action by Ton Otto:

Interactive Exhibitions at The Design Anthopological Futures Conference: 
https://kadk.dk/sites/default/files/downloads/article/interactive_exhibitions_documentation_002.pdf

Video Stream of Design Anthropological Futures Conference: 
https://kadk.dk/en/research-network-design-anthropology/conference-design-anthropological-futures

Research Network for Design Anthropology (2014-2015):
https://kadk.dk/en/research-network-design-anthropology

Discussion Forum

Anthropology + Design Graduate Seminar @ The New School | Fall 2019 | Shannon Mattern

"Designers commonly use ethnographic methods, and social scientists often adopt design practices, economies, cultures, and artifacts as their subjects of study, focusing in particular on how design…Continue

Started by Brandon Meyer Aug 24.

Speculative Futures Slack Group

The Speculative Futures Slack Group is quickly becoming a great virtual meeting place for those interested in the…Continue

Started by Brandon Meyer Jul 20.

Personal Introduction

I have worked as a web and graphic designer and was originally a multimedia design major before deciding to transfer to anthropology with the goal of advancing to design anthropology. Since my time…Continue

Started by Brandon Meyer Feb 25, 2014.

Comment Wall

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Comment by Brandon Meyer on October 18, 2019 at 9:04pm

Letters South of (Nordic) Design: an epistolary article on the 2017 Nordes Conference Theme, Design + Power

"...Such is my hypothesis: there is design (or its equivalent) in every social group. It would suffice to think of the amount of artefacts made by designers in comparison to those made by 'non-designers.' This reinforces the notion of 'majority world,' proposed by Bangladeshi photographer and activist Shahidul Alam (2008) as a replacement for concepts as 'third world' countries and 'developing world,' noting that that which is considered secondary is usually much larger than that considered as reference... Let me remind you that in Chinese, Arabic, Hindi and many indigenous languages of the world, there's not an etymological trace of the word 'design' (with its European roots); however, there are terms referring to 'forms of prefiguring artefacts' that could be considered equivalent to practices of what in the west is considered design; I call those practices 'designs with other names'."

https://www.academia.edu/33503810/Letters_South_of_Nordic_Design?au...

Comment by Brandon Meyer on October 3, 2019 at 12:40am

Design & Culture Special Issue: Design and Neoliberalism

"Neoliberalism, as a term, has the particular distinction of being both esoteric and overused. Until quite recently, it was rarely heard outside of academic contexts, while within them it became virtually a shorthand for contemporary capitalism and its myriad social manifestations... This special issue (SI) of Design & Culture examines some of the ways that such developments have both expanded and constricted the purview of design, as well as ways that design has shaped and continues to shape processes of neoliberalization. A key premise of this SI is that contemporary design is not merely an outcome of or response to neoliberalism but also an important contributing factor in its articulation and implementation... Thus, while neoliberalism has been used as an analytic within fields in which the design object’s relation to capital is obvious, many design scholars have not adequately considered the ways the expansion and dematerialization of design (e.g. Design Thinking, mechanism design, user experience design (UX), etc.) represents a cutting edge of neoliberalism... Each of the following four papers not only describes different articulations of these dynamics but also offers distinct disciplinary positions, objects of study, and critical strategies to explore them."

Comment by Brandon Meyer on October 3, 2019 at 12:39am

Swiss Design Network Summit: Beyond Change, "Questioning the role of design in times of global transformations" Keynotes

Current discourse in design research, art, cultural studies, media studies, philosophy, and the social sciences is dominated by the much-debated concept of the “Anthropocene,” which claims that we are entering a new geological age determined primarily by the effects of human activity on the planet. It has been used to increase awareness of the negative influence of our actions on climate and the environment, and thus on the terms and conditions of our long-term survival. Against the backdrop of ongoing catastrophe and normalised crisis, the image of designers as problem-solvers and shapers of material-visual culture is constantly evoked. Designers are expected to come to the rescue and to draft speculative scenarios, construct artificial worlds, and develop smart solutions. In short: design is wielded as a catalyst for global change.

But isn’t this image of the designer as an omnipotent problem-solver itself problematic? What if design is not the solution, but very much complicit in the problems it wants to solve? At this point, we feel compelled to ask: How can design truly contribute to a more just society and sustainable forms of living without compromising bottom-up initiatives and marginalising the voices of those who are most directly affected?

Our conviction is: Design cannot change anything before it changes itself. The conference “Beyond Change: Questioning the role of design in times of global transformation” is a critical response to the tendency of seeing global crisis first and foremost as a worldwide design competition. How can we reimagine design as an unbounded, queer, and unfinished practice that approaches the world from within instead of claiming an elevated position? How, for once, can we see design as a situated practice instead of turning it into the Global North’s escape and problem-solving strategy? How can we think about one world without falling into planetary-scale thinking and the idea that resilience is our only hope?

Comment by Brandon Meyer on October 3, 2019 at 12:32am

FREE eBOOK: Speculate This!

Speculate This! is a concise, provocative manifesto advocating practices of "affirmative speculation" over and against "firmative speculation." "Firmative speculation is 'a firming [...] or solidifying of the possibilities of the future. It is a speculative mode that seeks to pin down, delimit, constrain, and enclose - to make things definitive, firm' (12). The manifesto is interested in how firmative speculation is a central orientation of contemporary capitalism, which 'operates as if everything in the future were representable, knowable, and calculable in principle' (10)... Understood in this way (firmative speculation) 'produces potentialities and then exploits and thus forecloses them' (27). In contrast to firmative speculation, 'affirmative speculation'; a mode of speculation concerned 'to hold on to the spectrum of possibilities while remaining open to multiple futures whose context of actualization can never be fully anticipated' (13). - Rebecca Coleman

Comment by Brandon Meyer on October 3, 2019 at 12:30am

Strategic Design Research Journal Special Issue: Designing, Sensing...

We want to contribute to the emerging debate on design’s role in the creation of the very worlds within which we live, the conditions for plural possibilities of being, and in critically self reflecting on the conditions, infrastructures, networks and scaffolds that world-making in our troubled times require. It should not come as a surprise that calls for a reorientation of the design disciplines, away from the functionalist, rationalist, and industrial traditions dominant for most of their history are surfacing today... These moves have led to ever-encompassing claims that design expertise and processes are able to achieve innovation that can lead to forms of social change, while contributing to productivity and competitiveness... This type of contribution seems to be quite a challenge for design, even within the above-mentioned trends... as editors, designers and design scholars, we were wondering about the relation between autonomía, design practices and the political activation of relational and communal logics and ways of being, and how they could manifest –or not– in current design research and practice.

Comment by Brandon Meyer on October 3, 2019 at 12:28am

Statement for the Viktor Papanek Symposium by Ahmed Ansari and Presented by his Colleagues in the Decolonising Design Platform

"My initial intention for this symposium was to talk about the possibility of employing indigenous histories and knowledge systems, and radical ‘Other’ cosmologies and their conceptions of reality, to rethink our own modern relations to nature, ourselves, and the world we have created, and to speculate on how we could recreate them otherwise. I had identified this project: a project of radically reconceiving both speculative and transitional design practice on the basis of fostering cosmo-ontological reflexivity, a rendering of the social and artificial systems and infrastructures that constitute the foundations of our modern existences dissonant and strange, in order to rethink them, as a cosmotechnically driven approach to designs towards the pluriverse, to take a term recently coined by the Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui..."

Comment by Brandon Meyer on July 29, 2019 at 8:25pm

"We have learned that heterogeneous design practices have always been active under other names, continually constituted by various blends of cultures, relationships, materials, histories, philosophies, and world views to become relevant to certain localities and situations. The theme of this Special Issue of Design and Culture, "embracing plurality," is one way to continue exploring our concern... that the international design research community must be careful when design from industrial and modernist roots in Europe becomes dominant in the field of Design for Social Innovation (e.g. Brown and Wyatt 2010, Manzini 2015, Murray, Caulier-Grice, and Mulgan 2010). We also argue that this field is “in need of effort and commitment to sharpen thinking to embrace difference and accommodate heterogeneity as its central condition” (Akama and Yee 2016).

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17547075.2019.1571303?...

Comment by Brandon Meyer on July 23, 2019 at 9:15pm

USEFUL FICTIONS Symposium, Sept. 9-13 2019, Paris

Humans collect and interpret measurements to understand the world and exercise control over chaos... However as traces, proxies, and indices, measurements are fragile and prone to manipulation and misinterpretation... the promised indexical pars pro toto correlation between measurements and their interpretations has been increasingly exploited in pursuit of human agendas. In the context of a complex problem, such as climate change in the Anthropocene, this relationship has become increasingly political. Useful Fictions is a week-long symposium and a public participatory art project in Paris... Useful Fictions proposes to see the calculation of a catastrophic future not as an inevitability but as an invitation to innovate and effect change. Bridging the divide between urgency and agency, the project gathers a coalition of artists, designers, humanists, and graduate students to work with globally acclaimed climate scientists in their laboratories to build future machines and write absurd fictions.

Comment by Brandon Meyer on July 23, 2019 at 9:13pm

Design Research for Change Symposium, December 11-12 2019, London

In recent years, design research has witnessed a “social turn” where researchers have looked to make change in social contexts as opposed to wholly commercial ends. This “social turn” has encompassed a range of activities and interventions that constitute a more “socially-driven” form of design, which suggests that researchers and practitioners from non-design disciplines are central to realising change in social situations. The Design Research for Change (DR4C) symposium will examine this “social turn” in design in detail and explore how design is increasingly involved in social, cultural, economic, environmental and political change. The DR4C Symposium will highlight the significant roles that design researchers play in some of the most challenging issues we face, both in the UK and globally.

Comment by Brandon Meyer on July 23, 2019 at 9:12pm

New Experimental Research in Design (NERD) Conference, November 1st and 2nd, 2019 Basel, Switzerland

"With its particular consideration of the fact that all aspects of everyday life are designed, design research reveals an astounding ability to discuss current economic, social, environmental and media-related processes. This kind of design research, when intelligently implemented, also provides a fundamental critique of design as well as a variety of possible perspectives to better understand the present and prospects for the future."

 
 
 

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