Design Anthropology Meets Marketing
Gray Graffam · 2010
Design Anthropology in ContextOver the past several decades, there has been a growing interest in what has become known as - the use of anthropological method and theory in the field of design research and the making of things (Blomberg et al. 1993; Blomberg et al. 2002; Button 2000; Buur and Sitorus 2007; Cohen 2005; Grudin and Grinter 1994; Jordan 2003; Kingery2001; Louridas 1999; Pfaffenberger 1992; Plowman 2003, 2005; Schiffer 2001; lunstall 2008; Wasson 2000). Anthropological research provides a superb foundation for investigating the role of technology in society, and as such, it constitutes a valuable component of design research.Design anthropology itself emerged over the past few decades as an innovative subfield of applied anthropology, referring to what W. David Kingery (2001) once described as anthropology's role in visualizing technological change as part of the design process, and to what Christina Wasson (2000) described as the role of ethnography in the field of design. It is a primary subject area of business anthropology with deep roots in design innovation (Jordan 2003; Wasson 2000), and it ties to themes in the design literature that had appeared since the early 1990s (Blomberg et al. 1993; Blomberg et al. 2002; Collins 2003; Julier 2000; Katz 1997, 2006; Louridas 1999; Pfaffenberger 1992; Schuler and Namioka 1993). According to these authors, design anthropology plays a valuable role in the innovation of things precisely because it probes the social and cultural context of how they work, for whom, when and why. It helps designers understand the underlying motivations that govern how people use technology and the shape of technological innovation (Tunstall 2008).In recent years, design anthropologists have been employed in the design and making of things, most commonly in projects dealing with what designers call divergence and convergence-the understanding of new problem space and the prototyping of improved design solutions respectively. Job postings for design anthropologists, many of which call for expertise in human-computer interaction, industrial and product design, usability studies, instructional design and software design, are themselves quite revealing. Whle these terms are less descriptive of the design process per se, they indicate that a prime area of current employment lies in the development and refinement of new technologies, for example, crafting web utilities and digital interfaces from everything from music players to electronic newspapers (Callahan 2006; Ito 1996; Marcus 2005; Tunstall 2008). Not surprisingly, Microsoft, ATT Sunderland and Denny 2007). For those who have been calling for an anthropology of technology, this has been a welcome and promising trend (Pfaffenberger 1992; Schiffer 2001).Design anthropologists have also been pushing the envelope recently on design theory itself. Notably, they have challenged the view that design anthropology is merely an avenue toward accessing user opinions and ethnographic insight and have positioned the field as an essential component of design strategy, design thinking and what may generally be referred to as design theory. University faculties that have played (and continue to play) an important role in building the theoretical foundation of design anthropology include, inter alia, the Mads Clausen Institute, part of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Southern Denmark, the Institute for Information Technology and Culture at Wayne State University, the Center for Ethnography at the University of California, Irvine and the Anthropology Department at the University of Northern Texas. …