Paper long abstract:

Design Anthropology has emerged mainly outside the academy, or at least outside anthropology as a University based practice. What then can anthropology based in a research University setting offer for design processes? While ‘ethnographic method’ has come to mean little more than listening to focus groups, or observing ‘users’, academic anthropology offers an imaginative, comparative, reflexive and robust approach to understanding the processes by which things, meanings and persons are constituted. This paper explores the specific contributions that an anthropology straddling the useful divisions between academic and other contexts, through attention to collaboration and ethnographic engagement, can offer. Focussing on the contribution that elements of an anthropological approach generates, the paper will examine contemporary anthropological thinking, and examine how anthropology provides resources for these creative engagements. Examples are taken as pointers to the wider potential of a broadly conceived Design Anthropology.