Abstract
Design is never creating out of nothing—it always has specific cultural points of reference. Design alters and adapts, whereby the discipline always takes what exists as a reference point, which also makes it heretical. Design requires and generates knowledge, because designers always need to engage with specific lifeworlds. Through methods such as ethnography, this knowledge can be made explicit, which makes the discipline of design capable of connecting with other academic disciplines. Ethnography in the context of design differs from ethnography in the social sciences: it is quicker and embedded in the iterative processes that designing involves.
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The use of the term “Design” is today downright inflated. A Google search for it immediately returns 25,270,000,000 entries.Footnote 1 It is associated, among other things, with beautiful furnishings, flashy fingernails, cars, sneakers, and sex toys. It can also refer to systems, events, interfaces, and processes. The term can be traced back to the Latin designare, which led to the Italian disegnare, which initially meant to describe and later came to mean to draft. From an anthropological perspective, design is an expression of appreciation for the new: It is neither manual skill nor handicraft, in which artifacts are produced through the replication of traditional manufacturing techniques. Tradition may well be an important point of reference, since design never creates from nothing (Latour 2008, p. 5), but design does alter traditions, however. It is a heretical discipline—a discipline of transformation, to which Bruno Latour even ascribes revolutionary powers (2008, p. 2).
Design requires and at the same time generates knowledge. Designers create things or systems that are later used by people about whose lifeworlds or native point view they know very little (Blomberg et al. 1993, p. 141 ff.). Accordingly, they assimilate project-specific knowledge. Claudia Mareis describes design as a “knowledge culture” (2011). Designers incorporate stores of implicit knowledge through their practice, which they often do not reflect upon (Mareis 2010, p. 126 ff.; Schön 1983, p. 51 ff.). The consequence is an intuitive approach to design that is guided by internalized experiential knowledge. This knowledge remains bound to the individual, or at best, to the social environment with which they interact (Mareis 2010, p. 125). If design is to become an accessible knowledge culture capable of connectivity then it must free itself of its dependency on the individual.
Design is situated within a diverse field of disciplines that influence it (Götz 2010, p. 55 f.): Engineering, natural sciences, sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics—to name just a few. At the same time, design is not an academic discipline, even if there have been efforts to establish it as such (which incidentally has given rise to some heated debate). The thesis of this book is that the frequently implicit knowledge of design must be made explicit. This will allow design to make connections to other disciplines (Milev 2011, p. 46; Schultheis 2005, p. 68). Articulating and reflecting upon design knowledge strengthens the position of design. Since design is still a practice, however, it cannot become a scientific discipline in a true sense. At issue, rather, is the fact that design is a discipline of exploration and inquiry. Design should understand its own generation of knowledge as “reflection in action” (Schön 1983, p. 76 ff.). This requires methods: a term that goes back to the ancient Greek word for “pursuit.” Methods such as ethnography are procedures that should not simply be applied dogmatically, but rather are meant to lead to reflection about one’s own actions. It is only when these procedures are explicitly articulated that it becomes possible to consciouly adapt and transform them.
The term ethnography also goes back to ancient Greek and means someting like “description of a foreign people.” It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that ethnography became a method of cultural sociology and social anthropology. Ethnography presupposes foreignness—lack of familiarity between the ethnographer and the people and lifeworlds they investigate. This suggests that ethnography is actually a common practice in design research: As soon as designers leave the libraries and the on-line databases to enter the field—and they must!—they are ethnographically active. Every observation of an everyday situation, no matter how trivial, that is made in the course of a design project is already a simple form of ethnography. This occurs often without any awareness that a research method is already being used.
It should be noted, however, that ethnography is not an academic discipline, but a method situated in various (partly academic and partly applied) disciplines—cultural sociology; social and cultural anthropology; organizational science; business administration; development aid; pedagogy; art; gender, cultural, and queer studies; and of course design. Ethnography has been adapted in each of these disciplines. Design ethnography is accordingly also grounded in cultural-sociological and socio-anthropological approaches (Gunn et al. 2013; Milev 2013), though these are adapted in rather design-specific ways. While in cultural sociology and social anthropology, ethnography happens through long-term immersion in foreign lifeworlds, design ethnographies are often of far shorter duration—as in other applied disciplines—due to time constraints. Such approaches are known as “quick and dirty ethnography” (Hughes et al. 1994, p. 433 ff.; Knoblauch 2001, p. 128; Plowman 2003, p. 34), “short-term ethnography” (Pink and Morgan 2013), “rapid ethnography” (Norman 1999), and of course, “design ethnography” (Crabtree et al. 2012; Nova 2014; Müller 2018; Salvador et al. 1999). Corresponding approaches have emerged in the Anglo-Saxon world in the context of workplace studies (Knoblauch 2000; Knoblauch and Heath 1999; Suchman 1987), in which anthropological methods have been combined with engineering and technical sciences to investigate workplace situtations that have been transformed by technological innovations.
Ethnography is a more complex, unstructured, and chaotic process than scientific research. It is an experiential, explorative research method in which the physical presence and sensory experience of the researcher play a part as they move corporeally (apart from on-line ethnographies) through other realities (Goffman 1989, p. 125). For the “empirical world must forever be the central point of concern” (Blumer 1986, p. 22).
This book is an attempt to shed light on design ethnography at the epistemological and methodological level. In this endeavor, design ethnography is not understood as a self-contained method, but rather as a starting point for opening up new perspectives and thinking about new methods that lead in iterative steps to the creation of form. Such processes can certainly also lead to discontinuities that are inherent to research. For those who know from the start what they are looking for observe their field of investigation through tunnel vision. If a research project is guided from the beginning by hypotheses that do not change during the process, then this prevents true exploration from taking place (Malinowski 1932, p. 16 f.). That is why research is genuinely risky (Latour 1998, p. 208): One leaves one’s comfort zone, which can occasionally shake one’s own worldview. The “art” consists of reflecting on and mapping these processes and constructing from them a “mosaic” (Prus 1997, p. 27 ff.) of the reality under investigation.
The world cannot be observed neutrally from a box seat, especially since the observer is always themselves situated in it (Maturana and Varela 2003, p. 5 ff.; Denzin 2014, p. 70 f.; Haraway 1988). Realization does not occur passively and objectively, in the way the natural sciences suggest. It is the natural sciences in particular that exhibit a highly constructed character (Dellwing and Prus 2012, p. 206): The laboratory, the measuring instruments, etc., are constructed and man-made. A certain style of thinking manifests itself in them (Fleck 1986, p. 147 ff.). They are not neutral. Rather, they are cultural constructions—just like the idea of objectivity, which originated in Western philosophy of science and is not an anthropological constant. For man is “an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (Geertz 1973, p. 5). The sciences are part of this man-made culture.
While scientific research obscures its own constructed character behind an ethos of objectivity, design ethnography can and should expose it. It does not need to strive for objectivity. Its methods are not applied dogmatically but playfully. They can be adapted, varied, and transcended on a case-by-case basis and situationally. This does not, however, mean it is completely arbitrary: The methods must be reflected upon and made explicit, at least if design research is to become compatible with other disciplines. The aim, then, is not to imitate the natural sciences proper, but rather to arrive at interesting and surprising findings through playful ethnographic methods.
While in social science research, ethnography is usually concerned with investigating “natural” situations—that is, situations that have not been prompted by the researcher (Dellwing and Prus 2012, p. 54 ff.)—design is interested in disturbing such “natural” situations: It intervenes, it gives form, it is “research through design” (Findeli 2004, p. 44). Giving form thus takes on an epistemic quality (Ammon and Froschauer 2013, p. 16), which makes visible design-specific modes of knowledge. Such modes consist in quick, iterative processes in which a sharp line cannot always be drawn between investigation and form-giving. This is confirmed in a statement by the Chilean epistemologists Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco L. Varela, who wrote that every action is a realization and every realization an action (2003, p. 13).
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Accessed 26 May 2019.
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Müller, F. (2021). Introduction: Design as a Discipline of Alternation. In: Design Ethnography. SpringerBriefs in Anthropology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60396-0_1
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