Design Anthropology: A Distinct Style of Knowing

Otto, Ton; Smith, Rachel Charlotte

doi:10.4324/9781003085195-1

Cited by 40 publications

(50 citation statements)

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Section: Designing For the Problem Situation And Peoples' Needs Withimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Understanding human context through anthropology and ethnography allows to identify current needs and problem situations (Patnaik andBecker, 2010, Otto andSmith, 2013). This has been practiced in organizational context since the 1930s and is a fast-growing academic field (Otto and Smith, 2013). Ethnography allows to understand social context through inquiry of immediate situational surroundings and the human beings involved, while design adds the practices to actively engage and collaborate in the formulation of interventions to establish preferred situations (Otto and Smith, 2013).…”

Section: Designing For the Problem Situation And Peoples' Needs Withimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This has been practiced in organizational context since the 1930s and is a fast-growing academic field (Otto and Smith, 2013). Ethnography allows to understand social context through inquiry of immediate situational surroundings and the human beings involved, while design adds the practices to actively engage and collaborate in the formulation of interventions to establish preferred situations (Otto and Smith, 2013). Utilizing this practice allows to understand reoccurring patterns of activities, behavior and worldviews as well as the context in which these patterns emerge within the organization.…”

Section: Designing For the Problem Situation And Peoples' Needs Withimentioning

confidence: 99%

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Is Organizational Design a Human-Centered Design Practice?

Auernhammer¹,

Leifer²

2019

Proc. Int. Conf. Eng. Des.

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In recent years design has had a renaissance in business and management research and practice. Several authors have discussed if management is a design practice and how far design ought to go to design behaviors. This article discusses, evaluates and explores organizational design as a human-centered design practice. Relevant theoretical concepts of organizational theory, design approaches and practices are discussed to evaluate gaps in management practices and potential opportunities for design practice. The study collected and analyzed data from two organizations. The researched revealed several propositions, which provide insights of the usefulness, appropriateness and value of a human-centered design practice to organizational design.

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Section: Designing For the Problem Situation And Peoples' Needs Withimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Designing For the Problem Situation And Peoples' Needs Withimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Designing For the Problem Situation And Peoples' Needs Withimentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Is Organizational Design a Human-Centered Design Practice?

Auernhammer¹,

Leifer²

2019

Proc. Int. Conf. Eng. Des.

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“…The potential of design anthropology is not in presenting a solution, as not all problems have simple answers. Its greater impact is in collaborative future making: shaping the way that a phenomenon is understood in the design process, with those involved in the design process (Otto and Smith 2013). In this paper, design anthropology serves as a lens to examine the 'breaking points' of when our practices of professional design and design research met, collided and framed a design research program.…”

Section: Researching How To Design For Focal Things and Practices (Ftandp)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Generating value across academic and professional design practice in the Internet of Things

Robbins

Giaccardi

2019

CoDesign

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This article accounts for how value in design research can be derived from knowledge exchange that occurs through the collaborative discourse of doing design. To demonstrate this point, the article details the arc and impact of a design research collaboration that extended over several years with design practitioners in the field of internet-connected devices. As a result of this ongoing collaborative work, a programmatic set of design ideals and intentions concerning how to construct a more transparent and ethical relationship with technology was shaped. We examine this sustained and transformative collaboration as a series of knowledge exchanges. Within each particular collaborative project, worldviews and knowledge are exchanged among design researchers and practitioners, enabling them to traverse 'through practices' of academic and professional design. To unpack these exchanges and how they built and fed into each other, the article examines how collaboration unfolded and produced value on two levels: first on the scale of the academics and practitioners directly involved in a project; and secondly on the scale of the larger international community of design practitioners concerned with Internet-connected devices, with whom we had shared our work.

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“…An often-mentioned difference between design and anthropology is their respective temporal orientations (Hunt 2011;Otto and Smith 2013). Whereas design, as the effort to create new things and solutions, is by definition concerned with the future, anthropology has traditionally been concerned with the analysis of past and present realities.…”

Section: Ethnographies Of the Possiblementioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Design Anthropological Futures

Design Anthropological Futures

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The future is here. Or so it has often been proclaimed by futurologists, scientists and engineers, as the fruits of science labs and cutting-edge technological gadgets are showcased, promising to make our lives more productive and more enjoyable. The public facade of design shows grand visions of future possibilities, yet every imperfect Now is also the concrete instantiation of what was once a vision of a bright future. Envisioned futures, as Bell and Dourish (2007) remind us, tend to differ radically from how they eventually unfold in the situatedness of people's lives. The future is not an empty space awaiting projected visions from an incomplete present; neither is it a predefined destination that we can simply foresee and arrive at in due time (Yelavich and Adams 2014; Mazé, this volume). Rather than seeing the future as a separate space or time, design anthropologists in this book engage with the future as a multiplicity of ideas, critiques and potentialities that are embedded in the narratives, objects and practices of our daily lives. In this sense, multiple, often conflicting, futures are always already here as part of a continuously unfolding present and past. Design Anthropological Futures explores futures and future-making from a design anthropological perspective. Here futures are not understood as striking visions created and implemented by scientists or designers, but rather as collaborative explorations of situated possibilities, formations and actions at the intersection of design and everyday life. The term futures relates both to the theoretical and practical engagement of design anthropology with futures and future-making as a subject-futures in design anthropology-and to the exploration of possible future directions for the discipline itself through such engagements-futures of design anthropology. Through various design anthropological investigations at specific sites-from care homes to corporate organizations, eco-homes to museums, Rio de Janeiro to Italy-this book critically addresses a number of dominant perspectives on, and approaches to, futures, including implied assumptions of singularity, linearity, locality and novelty. In the following we briefly elaborate on these themes and propose alternative perspectives for a design anthropological approach to futures. First, 'The future' is often referred to in the singular, using the definite article to 9781474280624_txt_print.indd 1 20/05/2016 16:16 Seeing linearity as a particular, historical and cultural approach to time, futures and future-making (Grosz 1999; Jameson 2005; Mazé, this volume), the approaches presented in this book take other points of departure. Some focus on emergence and the mutual constitution of past, present and future, through practices of design and everyday life. Others engage with futures as imaginary 'others' outside the ordinary and the contemporary-what Rabinow refers to as 'the untimely' (Faubion, Marcus and Rabinow 2008)-from where we might question the taken-for-granted, and speculate about alternatives (Maz...

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Design Anthropology: A Distinct Style of Knowing

Cited by 40 publications

References 1 publication

Is Organizational Design a Human-Centered Design Practice?

Is Organizational Design a Human-Centered Design Practice?

Generating value across academic and professional design practice in the Internet of Things

Introduction: Design Anthropological Futures

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