Short Abstract

This workshop explores how the generative potential of the movement between design and anthropology—attentive to the power of aesthetics, the affordances of diverse materials, the politics of the future—responds to the need to understand and intervene in the changes convulsing European societies.

Long Abstract

Although the encounter between design and anthropology goes back to at least the 1970s, one can mark a boom beginning in the mid-2000s as anthropologists and designers engaged in more targeted efforts to think through and explore possible relations and combinations, resulting in a nascent canon of English-language texts published in the 2010s.

One could also argue that this encounter between design and anthropology anticipated and facilitated recent trends that have injected fresh energy into sociocultural anthropology, and that touch upon affect, materialities, and politics. These include a revived interest in aesthetics and affect reflected in the rise of sensory and multimodal anthropology; the emergence of new materialism and its theorization of the lively nature of object worlds; a renewed enthusiasm to explore and play with collaborative research formats; and the rise of experimental, future-oriented, and interventionist approaches reflected in everything from the proliferation of labs and studios to the desire for a more public or politically-engaged anthropology.

Of course, the design/anthropology encounter is not without its frictions. Perhaps this is why, despite the generative potential of the movement between design and anthropology, it remains marginal within German academia. This workshop pushes against this marginality and foregrounds the potential - and its frictions. We invite proposals that speak to how the productive frictions of design/anthropology—attentive to the potency of aesthetics, the affordances of diverse materials, the politics of shaping the future—respond to the urgent debates currently convulsing German and European publics or the perpetual crisis facing anthropology in academia.