Design anthropology in participatory design from ethnography to anthropological critique?

Abstract

In this workshop we explore the opportunities of ethnography and design anthropology in Participatory Design (PD) as an approach to design in an increasingly global and digital world. Traditionally, ethnography has been used in PD to research reallife contexts and challenges, and as ways to involve people in defining userneeds and design opportunities. As the boundaries between physical, digital and hybrid spaces and experiences become increasingly blurred, so do conventional distinctions between research and design. This halfday workshop invites participants to discuss and explore opportunities of using design anthropology as a holistic and critical approach to societal challenges, and a way for anthropologists and designers to engage in design that extends beyond the empirical.

Design games as fieldwork: Re-visiting design games from a design anthropological perspective

“…Blending techniques of description and intervention to enable new forms of experience, dialogue, and awareness (Halse and Boffi 2016), we challenge the idea of fieldwork in design as being primarily about describing 'users' in 'the wild' (Ball & Christensen 2018) before and separate from the design process (Button 2000, Dourish 2006, Wasson 2000, Blomberg et al 2003. Building on and extending ideas from previous work within the field of design anthropology (Kjaergaard 2011, Kjaersgaard & Otto 2012, Smith, R. C., & Kjaersgaard, M. G. 2014, Halse 2012, Halse & Boffi 2016, we suggest that design games might be understood as a form design anthropological fieldwork, that does not primarily provide user data and descriptions (Kjaersgaard 2011, Kjaersgaard & Otto 2012, as in the tradition of ethnographically informed design. Nor do they mainly offer methods and techniques for enrolling users and their knowledge and agendas directly within the design process as foregrounded in participatory design.…”

On Visual Granularity

“…Design ethnography has debated on the usefulness of detailed descriptions from long-term field work, usually remaining on shorter durations and more robust video analysis [67]. However, design ethnography is still based on a too narrow conception [55]. In our case, we experienced both longer field work time and detailed CA as beneficial in understanding sales reps work and drawing design implications from data.…”

The Co-Drive Service: Probing into Preliminary Social Outcomes through Early-Stage Prototyping

“…We acknowledge that the outcomes we presented are drawn from the participation of a limited number of respondents, which cannot be representative of the population, however we do not claim them to be either universal or definitive truth. We invite to read our preliminary social outcomes from a design anthropology prospective [45], as initial results of socio-material interventions which have critically informed our perspective on the issue of social isolation among the elderly and intergenerational relationships. Such results created other points of discourse by challenging and reframing dominant conversations on XR technologies and disclosed new departing sites to continue engaging with the project and scaling up the experimentation.…”