Design + Anthropology : Converging Pathways in Anthropology and Design

This volume documents the emergence of design anthropology, the convergence of two disciplines that has informed an emerging transdisciplinary field. Rather than a subfield of either anthropology or design, design anthropology is a unique practice and theoretical approach that explores new modes of knowledge production and enables new forms of participatory engagement. Design anthropologists create the conditions for zones of experimentation and improvisation, bringing those who are being served and/or affected directly into a design process in which existing conditions, places, and things are collectively mapped, visualized, and reimagined to consider possible alternative futures.

This book explores the evolution of two disciplines, design and anthropology, and their convergence within commercial and organizational arenas. Focusing on the transdisciplinary field of design anthropology, the chapters cover the global forces and conditions that facilitated its emergence, the people that have contributed to its development and those who are likely to shape its future. Christine Miller touches on the invention and diffusion of new practices, the recontextualization of ethnographic inquiry within design and innovations in applications of anthropological theory and methodology. She considers how encounters between anthropology and ‘designerly’ practice have impacted the evolution of both disciplines. The book provides students, scholars and practitioners with valuable insight into the movement to formalize the nascent field of design anthropology and how the relationship between the two fields might develop in the future given the dynamic global forces that continue to impact them both.