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Paper short abstract:

How can design democratise technology, addressing the gap between Global North and Global South? This paper portrays the efforts to reshape (co)design practices by global south design students, to narrow ecological and educational gaps, celebrating the diversity of many worlds within one.

Paper long abstract:

Design and technology share a longstanding symbiotic relationship, historically serving to showcase technological advancements. Design plays a crucial role in modifying people's interactions with objects, often portraying the latest technological innovations. Additionally, design responds not only to the interests of designers but also to stakeholders and corporations.

However, global design perspectives have created disparities, exacerbating the divide between technology and minority groups. In the global north, design is viewed as a problem-solving process intricately linked to cutting-edge technology. Conversely, in the global south, design is seen as a colonising imposition, resulting in products often perceived as luxury items, overshadowing design contributions of indigenous communities. This dynamic also tends to overlook the environmental repercussions of production practices in the global south.

This paper delves into the potential of design for democratising technology. Drawing examples from the School of Design at the Anáhuac University in Cancún, México, it examines the challenges in educating design students from the global south. The focus is on utilising technology for the benefit of indigenous communities in southern Mexico, as well as addressing issues within the country's educational health systems.

The aim of this paper is to highlight efforts to reshape practices in design schools across the global south. The goal is to move away from replicating design processes dictated by technology from the global north and instead democratise (co)design. By doing so, the objective is to narrow ecological and educational gaps within these environments, ultimately contributing to create resilient futures that celebrate many worlds within one.

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Paper short abstract:

The ‘Design for Change’ degree attempts to help students meet contemporary challenges with imagination and criticality. Considering education as a space of urgent action to help transition and regenerate environments and societies, the context and challenges of the programme are analysed.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers a UK interdisciplinary postgraduate degree programme, ‘Design for Change’, which largely caters to those trained in the design disciplines (from textiles to industrial design, architecture to graphic design). It examines the attempts of the programme to meet social, environmental and technical contemporary challenges with imagination, methodological experimentation and critical engagement, and reflects on that which is (design) anthropological in them: from, say, a focus on the relational or the habitual, to the influence of writers such as Ursula Le Guin or Anna L. Tsing. In sync with the panel’s emphasis on exploring the role of design anthropology as a transdisciplinary future-oriented research field, the paper looks to how the education of design graduates can be understood as a space of research-informed pedagogy that is in itself helping to shape environments and societies (from spaces, relations and behaviours, to social systems, material cultures and technologies). Furthermore, it offers insight into the ways in which one group of educators and their students attempt to tackle wicked problems – intractable and not easily ‘solved’ – at a time of increasingly urgent emergencies (of climate, biodiversity, inequality) and what facilitating the design of alternative (environmental and just) futures can entail at this juncture. The paper considers how the work of students, teachers and community collaborators tries to grapple with the scale, temporality and impact of their actions and inactions, and finally turns to discuss the challenges and contradications of attempting to work this way within the neoliberal University.

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Paper short abstract:

In the face of present crises, some people cannot imagine any future or imagine a different one. This paper draws on a design anthropology project to reflect critically on the resources that are needed for future imagination and suggest for the past to be used as new material for design.

Paper long abstract:

Imagining a new and better future, is the pre-condition for people to take action and get involved in making the future they want. But in the face of ever new crises, some people cannot imagine any future, or struggle to imagine a radically different one. This article draws on a design anthropology project in community mental health with Gipsy, Roma and Travellers communities to reflect on the value of the interplay between past, present and future for motivating action among those groups that might feel stuck in a difficult present.

While most scholarship in design anthropology tends to focus on the role of the discipline for activating future possibilities, this paper starts from a failure to do that and to imagine ones’ future, and provides suggestions for how to 'un-stuck' futurity.

In my fieldwork doing and making futures did not mean the undoing of the past but actually the need to deal with it as a (so far) unused material for design. The forwarding of the role of the past should not be misunderstood as conservative. Like within the ethnographic accounts of improvisation in the Javanese dance (Hughes-Freeland, 2007), repetition is neither backwards nor romantic but a practice of creative resistance, where creativity plays a role in ensuring stability and continuation. This paper puts forward the idea that a dialogical temporal understanding of agency is needed for design anthropology to better engage with so called ‘marginalised groups’, when these feel they have no resources to imagine their future otherwise.

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This paper discusses our experience of teaching design anthropology for design students. We discuss the possibility of moving beyond the introduction of anthropology from a theoretical perspective to knowing anthropology through and from within design.

Paper long abstract:

This communication discusses the experience of teaching the mandatory subject of Design Anthropology in the design degree of the Open University of Catalonia, offering insights into how this can support both designers and anthropologists to navigate contemporary societal change. This virtual course seeks an alternative approach to the challenge of introducing anthropology to design students, shifting from pure theory to incorporating anthropology directly into design practices.

Our approach places ethnography at the forefront to teach design anthropology. We encourage students to go through a process of opening design to the community, not just to introduce them to ethnographic description but to facilitate their interaction with local communities. Here, ethnography is positioned as a perspective and a process, "decentering" designers towards the discovery of alternative ways of living and doing things. This process challenges students to transcend individual creativity and consider unforeseen perspectives in the design process.

Positioned as a foundational step preceding participation methods, co-creation, or co-design processes, this exercise tasks students with designing "for" the community. We push designers to reframe problems based on what they learn, embracing multiple perspectives, emotions and relationships, while fostering openness to cultural and functional diversity. In doing so, we also promote deep understanding of people and problems through situated experiences, approaching design as a research process and as a reflexive practice that can also contribute to anthropological knowledge. Ultimately, we explore the engagements of design and anthropology in a double direction, in which both can contribute to one and another symmetrically.

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Paper short abstract:

In Istanbul's urban context, this research employs a design anthropological open living lab approach to explore decolonial feminist values via co-speculation. We discuss imaginaries and ontological values around underrepresented feminist practices to gather insights for the future of "sharing."

Paper long abstract:

Decolonial feminism brings to light the struggles, reservoir of knowledge, practices, and anti-racist, anti-sexist theories intertwined with anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist ideologies (Verges, 2019, p.19). Decolonial feminism aligns with design anthropology, which follows Anti-Design traditions and questions corporate, market-driven object culture (Clarke, 2017, p.11). Embracing decolonial feminism, we reexamine underrepresented knowledge systems, fostering a discussion on redesigning sharing systems with a plural perspective through co-speculation.

Verges (2019) emphasised the significance of examining the contributions of women from the global south, highlighting their crucial role in challenging racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy. Under the patriarchal domestic structure in Türkiye, there are community-based autonomous care-oriented practices and rituals historically attributed to or adopted by women. Examining how women adopt them unveils alternative values and dynamics. Digital technologies and dominant mainstream influences are entwined in our daily lives. There is a growing need to understand how underrepresented knowledge systems inspire alternative imaginaries.

On several design anthropological open-living-lab sessions, we unpacked underrepresented feminist practices with people using a co-speculation method to inform on the emergent decolonial feminist values around sharing systems. In the session, we will show and discuss our design material and sample results, namely the imaginaries. The introduced imaginaries consist of and are not limited to care-oriented post-earthquake events and volunteer applications. Reflecting on the panel's call, we will speculate about the relationship between "what insights can designers gain from adopting a design anthropological perspective" and our insights gained from the co-speculation sessions.

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Paper short abstract:

This work shares and discusses a global design anthropology project that delves into the decolonised understanding of the emerging phenomenon of energy exchange between households. The project includes anthropology-through-design field research in two villages in rural India and the Netherlands.

Paper long abstract:

Addressing global challenges, such as achieving an inclusive energy transition, involves navigating through prevalent ideologies and interconnected infrastructures that advocate specific ways of engaging with the world. However, these dominant ideologies and infrastructures can impose significant constraints on alternative ways of being—essentially hindering the design of sustainable futures with global applicability. Designers must recognize and emancipate themselves from these forms of colonization.

In this context, we introduce a global design anthropology program dedicated to embracing a decolonized understanding of the emerging phenomenon of 'energy exchange between households.' The prevalent comprehension of this phenomenon has predominantly been influenced by neoliberal market thinking, primarily centered around the concept of energy 'trading.' The program started with anthropology-through-design field research in two rural villages in India, employing an open-design energy infrastructure to investigate and conceptualize diverse and alternative ways of energy exchange. Insights gathered and concepts identified were subsequently expanded upon through additional field research conducted in the Netherlands.

The outcomes underscore how a global and open exploration of a phenomenon through design anthropology can decolonize knowledge and unveil alternative ways of being that are scalable. Our work seeks to motivate design anthropologists to challenge established perspectives and phenomena knowledge by actively engaging in global anthropology-through-design programs. This involves fostering awareness, transcending dominant and colonized frameworks, and exploring through open-design infrastructures in diverse global field settings.

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Paper short abstract:

How can anthropologists engage with new wave and tidal power machines to actively support designs for environmental justice? This paper analyses the global development of marine renewables. I then discuss co-designing social learning infrastructures between coastal communities in Asia and America.

Paper long abstract:

Marine Renewable Energy (MRE) technologies are being heavily promoted along many coasts. But the experience with solar and wind parks shows green technology design and roll-out is often beset with social and environmental justice concerns. We need to study the production of new wave and tidal power machines in a way that actively supports resilient, socially-acceptable design. This paper asks first: what kind of research and design models are powering this particular ‘blue-green’ transition, and what are the effects? For example, in western Canada, First Nations groups are actively initiating and the development of new MRE, while in the East, top-down planning and subsequent resistance from fisherfolk led to the failure of several tidal power companies. Second, how can research attuned to different Asian and American contexts help foster environmentally just versions of MRE? My research data stems from the early stages of establishing Social Ocean Energy (SOCEAN): a transdisciplinary endeavour that connects Asian and American coasts. Grounded in a collaborative ethnographic approach, the goal is to unfold design for social learning between coastal inhabitants, tech developers and policy-makers. I document the exploration of how to foster a coast-to-coast network and digital learning infrastructure. This intervention in new ocean power infrastructures asks what environmental justice means, to whom. It aims to generate both practical lessons and theoretical innovations in technology design, as well as insights into cross-continental alliance-building.

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Paper short abstract:

Societal visions of automation urgently need human approaches for shaping sustainable, inclusive and responsible ways of life. This paper presents a design anthropological methodology to future urban mobility and its potentials for scaling such approaches across diverse contexts and domains.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary visions for automation of future society and everyday transportation in cities and society are based on accelerated innovations in emerging technology (Legacy et al. 2019). Whereas such anticipated social transformations are based on abstract and idealised imaginaries, they lack engagement with the everyday life, communities and environments into which they are to be implemented. In this paper, we argue that situated human approaches to the future of urban mobility in everyday contexts are urgently needed, through transdisciplinary and long-term engagement with a broad range of stakeholders and communities, in order to negotiate and align opportunities, values, and desires for sustainable social change (Fors et al. 2022, Smith 2022, Pink et al. 2022).

The paper demonstrates a design anthropological methodology for future urban mobility based on two consecutive projects involving sustained engagement with industry, municipalities, and local communities in Sweden (Smith et al. 2024; Brodersen et al. 2023, Ebbeson et al. 2024,). Grounded in two suburban areas in Sweden and involving long-term, iterative multi-stakeholder collaborations and co-design, we discuss how a transferable methodology for human futures in urban mobility can be used in diverse contexts, organisations and environments. We also present design anthropological tools for multi-stakeholder co-design developed through the project. We argue that such approaches can support the shift towards socially sustainable transformation at wider scales - hereby reimagining futures based on participatory human approaches that place the values, everyday practices, and environments of people at the centre of design.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will describe the efforts of design anthropology to develop Digital Twins of a global fleet of data centers for a large technology corporation by restating the agenda of sustainability efforts as outcomes that impact stakeholders distributed across fragmented ecosystems.

Paper long abstract:

A Digital Twin is an indexical, virtual representation of a physical product, system, or process that behaves and acts like it's counterpart in the physical world. In the domain of data centers, the utility of a Digital Twin is based on two interrelated factors: the availability of an accurate 3D model that integrates various critical systems (i.e., mechanical, electrical, networking, etc.) into a fully federated representation; and, the incorporation of real-time data that represent the current state of each system as spatialized layers.

This paper will describe the efforts of design anthropology to develop Digital Twins of a global fleet of data centers for a large technology corporation. It offers a conceptualization of the Digital Twin as a "boundary object," defined by Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer (1989) as any object that is part of multiple social worlds and facilitates communication between them. With this definition in mind, this paper will illustrate how the cultural, historical and ecological emphasis of design anthropology broadens the definition of sustainability to connect more traditional measures of resource consumption and carbon emissions with questions of labor for the sustained operation and maintenance of these infrastructures.

It argues that design anthropology has the capacity to resolve the trap of empiricism as an end unto itself, by restating the agenda of sustainability efforts as outcomes that impact stakeholders distributed across fragmented ecosystems.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents an ongoing research project on digital everyday lives and energy futures in South Africa. We used design anthropological interventions and decolonial design approaches to engage tech entrepreneurs in dialogues involving elements driving their enterprises: technology and energy.

Paper long abstract:

The energy crisis in South Africa is experienced by many when it is load shedding. Due to the ageing coal-fired power stations, which cannot generate sufficient electricity to meet demand, the national power utility Eskom resorts to turning off the power in selected areas for a few hours to avoid national power failure, a process locally known as load shedding. Our project focuses on how tech startups based in the historically racially segregated township on the Cape Flats in Cape Town are affected by the energy crisis and their position in imagining energy futures in South Africa.

We carried out ethnographic research and design interventions to discuss the tech entrepreneur's everyday energy experiences and their relations to colonial pasts and apartheid laws that shaped the Cape Flats and how such experiences influence- and can be used in imagining futures. We draw on decolonial design methods that consider situated pasts as resources for imagining pluriversal futures (Escobar, 2018; Kambunga et al., 2023) - considering how the everyday is always in a state of emergence and that interventions support the process of imagining futures (Smith & Otto, 2016), and in the relations between technologies and energy (Pink, 2022, Waltorp, Lanzeni, Pink & Smith 2023). The tech entrepreneurs, especially those in the Cape Flats, are stakeholders in the energy futures precisely because they are shaping the future of digital technologies with limited energy access and can potentially contribute to imagining futures otherwise.

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Paper short abstract:

Cultural heritage and participatory memory-making have been central to design anthropological engagement and experimentation. This paper presents a heuristic framework for scaling up these approaches and their transformative, participatory potentials across contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Inclusive engagement in collective memory making is a crucial challenge in contemporary societies. This paper introduces a relational approach to shaping and scaling socially inclusive memory practices as forms of global assemblages (Ong and Collier 2005).

Cultural heritage and participatory memory making have formed a central site for design anthropological engagement and experimentation, as part of the strong focus on participation, digitalisation and decolonisation between heritage institutions and everyday life (Smith 2022). Researchers engage professionals and communities in dialogic processes of curation to explore and co-design novel cultural (material, historical and digital) representations (Smith & Otto 2016; Koch 2021; Otto, Deger & Marcus 2022). They bring to the fore the potential of design anthropology as a transformative and decolonial practice towards: including both pasts-presents-futures, inclusive and multi-modal approaches to decolonial futures (Stuedahl et al. 2021; Kambunga et al. 2023; Chahine 2022). 

Scaling up these approaches across scapes, flows, and spaces requires a heuristic framework to explore the transformative and participatory potentials of memory practices. As a basis for our argument, we propose a relational approach to Participatory Memory Making rooted in theories of social anthropology and critical heritage studies and developed as part of the interdisciplinary European research project POEM (www.poem-horizon.eu). It has the ability to examine the relational agency of groups, institutions, and memory modalities, i.e. socio-material arrangements, resonating with the multiplicity and diversity of social, political, and economic settings of memory practices, opening them up to design anthropological approaches that support the development of policies of inclusive futures.

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Paper short abstract:

How can we include non-human perspectives in design anthropological practices to address contemporary global challenges? We construct theory instruments to help instigate perspectival shifts across scales and provide a tangible vocabulary for engaging in co-design practices beyond the human

Paper long abstract:

Design anthropology combines methods and perspectives from design and anthropology to explore possible futures at the intersection between design and everyday life. However, a design anthropological focus on the situated everyday life of humans, often neglects how this is entangled with the everyday life of non-humans both locally and globally.

Following the increasingly bleak environmental and climatic forecasts and the advent of the Anthropocene, a 'more-than-human turn' has swept through anthropology and design research in recent years. It entails a dual and intertwined concern for rethinking relations between local and global scales - e.g. situated practices and sensorially ungraspable 'hyper objects' - and engagements with biological and technological entities beyond the human.

In this paper, we explore how to tune design anthropological methods and perspectives to better address and design for contemporary global challenges that extend beyond the human and the local. We are inspired by Freal Atlas (Tsing et al, 2020), a transdisciplinary and interactive platform exploring ‘feral ecologies’ resulting from human infrastructure projects. Analyzing this project and its theoretical frames, we explore their relevance for addressing a design anthropology beyond the human along three axes: The entanglement of human-non-human practices, the bridging of scales, and s vocabulary for scaffolding a design anthropology practice beyond the human.

The aim is to conceptualize and construct theory instruments (Sorensen & Kjærsgaard 2022) that make tangible new possibilities for reframing perspectival shifts across scales and enabling a new design anthropological vocabulary for engaging in co-design practices for alternative futures.

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Paper short abstract:

The success of carbon offsets has led others to replicate its design motif (reify->measure->certify->sell). However despite early success, carbon offsets have received scrutiny. Here I examine the ways multispecies ethnography, AI and permaculture design could improve offset market design.

Paper long abstract:

In an attempt to mitigate the socio-environmental challenges of the 21st century, investors and policymakers have invested in the issuance of various credits to offset activities that damage the environment or reward those that protect, remediate or regenerate. The relative success (USD 87.9 billion in 2022) and visibility of carbon offsets has led other entities to replicate its design motif (reify->measure->certify->sell) across such diverse environmental aspects as biodiversity, water quality and methane. Despite its early success, however, carbon offsets have recently received scrutiny for dubious accreditation practices, fraud, price dumping, questionable efficacy and unacceptable human/environment tradeoffs, all of which suggest the design pattern has yet to be adequately refined. This paper examines the ways in which a synthesis of multispecies ethnography, artificial intelligence and permaculture design could improve offsets markets, a seemingly important step toward green transition. If successful, it would be possible to shape a system to equitably connect the local and the global, the tenuous present and livable futures. My analysis begins by taking an economic anthropological lens to the idea of reifying environments, then proceeds to a critique of the current market and concludes by proposing research activities, technological platforms and permaculture design approaches to fill gaps in the current paradigm.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper explores possibilities in the anthropology of technics and technodiversity to expand design anthropology toward less anthropocentric futures. It examines what design anthropology could learn from fermentation processes to contribute to the growth of alternative worlds.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores possibilities in the anthropology of technics and technodiversity, expanding design anthropology towards less anthropocentric futures. It examines what design anthropology could learn from fermentation processes to contribute to the growth of alternative worlds. Drawing on perspectives from technodiversity (CATT, 2022; Hui, 2019), cosmotechnics (Hui, 2016) and Pluriversal Design (Escobar, 2018) the paper explores how the anthropology of technics could stretch design anthropology towards a less anthropocentric practice, thereby contributing to more plural and sustainable worlds. Based on the ethnographic experience of 'growing materials' in Chile—using fermentation processes to create biomaterials—I investigate how the co-activity between microorganisms, humans, and the territory enriches critical views on design anthropology from the vernacular perspectives of care, contributing to the growth of other possible future worlds. The paper focuses on methodological reflections using the Chaîne opératoire in more-than-human practices, theoretical considerations entangling views on technodiversity, pluriverse, cosmotechnics, and design anthropology, and analytical perspectives from ethnographic work. It addresses how in fermentation processes and material growth, technical activities are also activities of care, proposing that design anthropology could embrace more-than-human care as a technical structure in its methods and perspective to contribute towards less anthropocentric and more sustainable futures.

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This paper examines a 2023 design installation where ‘extreme’ experiences, sensorialities and imaginations were stimulated by ground-breaking new digital fabrics. It analyses emergent futures in a space of codesign which veered between aspirations for frictionlessness and for intense feelings.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary fashion design not only engages with the forms, styles and materials of clothing, but is simultaneously a significant vehicle for rethinking global human futures. Digital fabrics are renderings of cottons, linens, wools and other textiles, with programmed properties of movement, light, colour, and sound, which are then used to produce various digital garments. Exploring the designing and manufacturing of these digital fashion materials offers anthropology routes to examine how more sustainable global human futures are being envisaged and negotiated at a human scale, on human bodies.

This research is based on design anthropology work as a part of the four-year Business of Fashion and Textile Technology (BFTT) research cluster. It examines how digital fabrics were experienced in the 2023 public installation ‘Made in Code’ at the Victoria & Albert Museum, an installation where participants worked to push these technologies to extremes and discover their limits. The paper shows how these fabrics carry a huge sociopolitical, environmental, and personal aspiration and potential, envisioning possibilities to directly address the environmental and emotional problems associated with fast fashion. They destabilise the contemporary centricity of ‘image’ to selfhood, and are imagined as bridging global gaps between people who design, manufacture and consume clothing. Focussing on the emerging sensorialities of digital fabrics, how they ‘feel’, the paper argues that this work opens a conceptual space between two extreme kinds of future imagination, one frictionless and the other intensely sensorial, and offers a model for how fashion design is mediating vernacular and professional design communities.