Design Anthropology

“Design Anthropology” brings together a unique range of cutting-edge design theorists and social scientists to explore the changing object culture of the 21st century. Decades ago, product designers utilised basic market research to fine-tune their designs for consumer success – today the design process has been radically transformed; the user is now centre-stage in the design process. From design ethnography to cultural probing, innovative designers in the 21st century are relying on anthropological methods to illicit the meaning, rather than the mere form and function of stuff.

The work offers the definitive guide to the issues facing the shapers of our increasingly complex material world. How has user-experience transformed our understanding of design? And how do leading design corporations, from IDEO to INTEL, harness the insight of anthropologists in generating future visions? Why are new disciplines, like digital anthropology, shaping our increasingly de-materialised product cultures?

From the reviews:

“Alison J. Clarke has edited a wonderful set of articles in her work Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century (2011). … I can truly recommend Design Anthropology to all designers and anthropologists—from students to professionals—as basic reading that provides inspiration for current and future projects. … The articles comprise a discussion which entwines both academic and non-academic cases in a fabric that both amuses and inspires the reader, which is exactly what a good book is expected to do.” (Anna Haverinen, Suomen Antropologi, Issue 4, 2012)

"This is a book that successfully explores this burgeoning field and will interest designers, anthropologists´, marketers and sociologists." Artichoke, April 2011

Alison J. Clarke  is professor and chair of Design History and Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna and research director of the Victor J. Papanek Foundation promoting socially aware design. Formerly a senior academic at the Royal College of Art, London, Clarke has a MA with Distinction in Design History (RCA/V&A), and a PhD in Social Anthropology from University College London. She is a former Smithsonian Fellow of History and author of Tupperware: the Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (Smithsonian Press), optioned for the making of an Emmy-nominated USA documentary. She is a regular contributor to media (most recently the ground-breaking The Genius of Design, BBC TV), and has authored numerous articles on the ethnography of everyday design.