A question was recently posted to the anthrodesign list about courses in design anthropology/ethnography, and people were quick to point out the growing number of postgraduate programmes including Design Ethnography at University of Dundee, Design Anthropology at University of Aberdeen, Design Anthropology at Swinburne University, and Culture, Materials and Design at University College London. But no one seemed to know of any undergraduate courses.

Since I’ll be teaching my second-year undergraduate course DSDN 283: Design Anthropology for the third time next term, and since it’s finally becoming the course I envisioned, I thought it might be a good time to post about it.

I work in a school with a rather artistic, exploratory and experimental approach to design, and teaching anthropology in this environment requires a different approach than what I was taught as an anthropologist, and from the more business- or industry-oriented approaches to ethnography that I’ve seen elsewhere. At its core, my introductory course uses design to understand social and cultural experience, and takes people’s everyday lives as inspiration for design.

Here are some snippets from the course outline:

Course synopsis

Anthropology can be defined as the study of similarities and differences between peoples of the world, or all the ways we make sense of ourselves, each other and the places in which we live, work and play. As designers work for—and with—a wide range of people around the world, the knowledge and skills of anthropology can be seen as increasingly relevant to a situated and adaptable practice. This course will explore how design shapes, and is shaped by, people’s cultural values and social practices, and help students use anthropological concepts and methods to enhance their design practice and understanding.

Aims of the course

Building on students’ previous studies of discursive, visual and material culture, this course introduces students to major themes from anthropology and their relevance to the understanding and practice of design. The primary aims of this course are to 1) ensure that students can critically and creatively assess the role that design and culture play in everyday life; and 2) enable students to use fieldwork and cross-cultural awareness to improve the quality of their designs.

Course content

This course’s exploration of design and culture will be framed by a number of scales and contexts, including individuals, social groups and cultures from different locations and points in history. Particular emphasis will be placed on what people believe, say, do and make.

Through theoretical concepts, cross-cultural examples, and field-based research methods, students will be introduced to the ways in which symbolic, visual and material culture both shape, and are shaped by, different people in different ways.

The required textbook for this course is Keri Smith‘s How To Be An Explorer of the World.

Course assignments

Project 1: Words

Students are required to complete assigned field-exercises from the course textbook, conduct library research, and submit a 2000-word essay.

Project 2: Images

Students are required to complete assigned field-exercises from the course textbook, and submit an original 10-image photo-essay, along with a 500-word curatorial statement.

Project 3: Objects

Students are required to complete assigned field-exercises from the course textbook, and submit an original design object, along with a 500-word curatorial statement.

Lectures, tutorials and projects are based around discursive, visual and material culture–all things that are familiar to design students but rarely presented in terms of everyday life or lived experience as the social sciences understand them. The choice to use Keri Smith’s workbook reflects my desire to present fieldwork as an integral practice that ethnographers and artists/designers already share–although my primary challenge remains to help students look outwards, to other people, with the same attention and skill they use to look inwards.

Using anthropological concepts to help students make sense of what they experience or find in the field is the distinguishing element of this course–a goal that I placed at the top of my agenda once I realised that my design students were often much better at conducting and documenting fieldwork than my sociology and anthropology students were, but they almost completely lacked the tools to make sense of it and apply it to the tasks they faced.

This approach is only one of many, but I’ve found it very helpful in preparing students for more advanced studies that require a firm knowledge of the cultural contexts of design, and in extending the range of jobs for which they are prepared, and in which they are interested.

It may also just be a personal preference–I did end up in a design school after all–but I often wish I had been exposed to these ways of doing anthropology and ethnography in my undergraduate years. And although I no longer refer to myself as an anthropologist, and highly doubt I will ever consider myself a designer, I certainly feel as though I’ve become a better social and cultural researcher because of my time with artists and designers, and now I get to do cool things like this upcoming workshop on object ethnographies. This course is my space to share with students what these experiences have been like for me.

Wow, I can’t believe it’s less than a month until the CCI Winter School kicks off!

I’m excited to be working with an amazing team and awesome participants on a great 7-day programme (phew, that’s a lot of superlatives!) and Larissa Hjorth and I are especially looking forward to our workshop:

Objects of Ethnography: Creative Approaches to Storytelling
Developed as part of the empirical traditions of anthropology and sociology, ethnography has grown to encompass a variety of methods and forms — digital, media, self and more — but still retains its focus on the performance and representation of people’s everyday activities and experiences. In this workshop we will explore some of the limits of ethnography as a form of contemporary reflexive storytelling, and probe the role that objects and images play in mediating online and offline social interactions. Drawing on Igor Kopytoff’s idea of objects having biographies and Sherry Turkle’s notion of evocative objects, this workshop asks participants to create ethnographies from things. To prepare, participants will read a couple of key texts and bring to the workshop a few images and/or objects related to their research. In the workshop, participants will work in small groups to devise short ethnographic accounts that creatively engage with their broader research interests.

Readings
Beaulieu, Anne. 2010. “From co-location to co-presence: Shifts in the use of ethnography for the study of knowledge,” Social Studies of Science 40(3): 453-470.
Harman, Graham. 2008. “Zeroing in on Evocative Objects: Review of Sherry Turkle (ed.) Evocative Objects, MIT Press,” Human Studies 31: 443–457.

And as if that weren’t enough, immediately following the Winter School is the CCI Symposium: Internationalisation, Quality, Impact – where I’ll be speaking on “Beyond Affirmative Design, or, How Design Interrogates Innovation.”

If you’ll be in Brisbane on 28-29 June, registration is free and I hope to see you there.

Highlights from a 200 tweet (art ?) project, currently half-way through:

Recent pieces that caught my fancy:

Naomi Alderman argues that “zombies are all the things that will not lie down and die, the truth we cannot repress, the thing that will rise up until it overwhelms us all. Whatever you want to forget is stumbling, dead-eyed and open-mouthed towards you.”

Is it enough to describe complex sociotechnical systems, or should there be a new and prescriptive field of study?

The space between memory and invention, writes Mavis Gallant, creates fiction that “resists analysis, all but the most shallow and humdrum, and cannot be tested or measured or, really, classified and contained.”

A story of the extraordinary medical and scientific research that ultimately gave Dallas Weins a new face.

In a country where all prisoners will someday be released, Halden high-security prison is Norway’s new model for rehabilitation instead of punishment.

Samuel Fromartz travels to Paris to learn how baguettes are being made to sing again.

“What can be learned from the Unabomber?” David Skrbina’s correspondence with Ted Kaczynski revives the philosophical question of whether a person’s ideas can be separated from their actions.

First domesticated for cockfighting instead of eating, how chicken became the most “ubiquitous food of our era, crossing multiple cultural boundaries with ease.”

On “thin places,” or those wondrous locales, both sacred and profane, that “offer glimpses not of heaven but of earth as it really is, unencumbered. Unmasked.”

A year ago, Microsoft Research Cambridge and Microsoft Office commissioned the RCA to look at how authorship may change in the future and to help design the Future of Writing, and you can read about all the interesting projects in depth (pdf).

But it’s Koby (Yaacov) Barhad‘s Thoughts You May Have that stuck with me the most because it made me think about writing (and) the self. Barhad’s project began with his “desire…to reintroduce writing as a form of thinking” and explore writing as the “externalisation of thought.” Psychologist Lev Vygotsky claimed that “words die as they bring forth thoughts” and Barhad developed a word processor that immediately deleted each word as it appeared on screen — try it out! — thereby forcing the writer to constantly stay in the “now” and type whatever comes to mind. Meanwhile, “all the data that is being typed is constantly saved and processed so that users can read it as soon as they close the application.” Barhad’s exploration of how these “private” conversations can be made “public” — in a shared Cogitos space — is also interesting in terms of how the tool can be used to promote reflexivity and perhaps even reciprocity, and the project raises questions about access to, and control over, one’s stream of thought.

Unfortunately, I read the project documentation several times and couldn’t clearly identify the research questions or methods of analysis, and I think the final result actually suffers from trying to be too many things at once. While not precisely answering the brief, to focus just on writing in the “now” would have made a valuable contribution to understanding how writing works, especially as a form of self-inquiry and self-construction — and I would have liked to know more about that.

Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’s Way, suggests an activity or tool she calls Morning Pages, which involves starting each day by writing three pages on anything and everything that crosses your mind. This kind of stream-of-consciousness writing has been suggested by many practitioners as a great way to empty out the mind, get unstuck, and otherwise understand things better so that we can get on with other stuff. In fact, Buster Benson created 750 Words as a place online where you can “write 3-pages privately every day, and learn about yourself in the process.”

What makes Barhad’s word processor so interesting, I think, is that it goes beyond writing for ourselves to actually write the self. This difference seems to arise because his tool doesn’t allow the writer to reflect on what is written until after the fact. In other words, the writer is always already in the process of becoming.

It seems like I should have more to say about this but I don’t. All I can say is that this makes me think about writing as a form of inquiry, and about the rise of auto- or self-ethnography in qualitative research. It makes me wonder how different stories — my stories — would be if they were written first on Barhad’s word processor. And I wonder how editing stories would work.

What does it make you think about?

“Sweet Darkness”

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

~ David Whyte

Thanks to Sienna for the pointer.

If you’re an early career research you should read Mel Gregg’s recent post, “In praise of strategic complacency.”

(Seriously, no matter what anyone says–and you’ll hear it even more if you’re a woman–it’s NOT selfish to figure out what you need to do to take care of yourself and your career. I didn’t learn this lesson soon enough, and it’s hard to get back what others got used to you giving up.)

Mel starts by reminding us what’s at stake:

“It’s not enough to have gotten the job. No, landing the job is just the first step in a constant process of planning, assessing and maximizing ‘opportunities’. From now on, there will be little if any time to sit back and acknowledge your achievements, and yet part of what I want to suggest today is that you must fight for this time. And beware of people offering ‘opportunities’! This is because the system is set up to make you feel that you are never doing enough, just as technology has accelerated the amount of things we are expected to be able to do. This results in us all feeling like we are constantly behind, always ‘catching up.’

[...]

[M]ostly it presents as a chronic low level internalized suspicion of incompetence, that there just isn’t enough time to do everything you need to do properly. While it feels highly personal, these are in fact the routine affects of organisational life today. It is worth recognizing the extent to which they are also the principal conditions of your labour that you can control – that is, once you appreciate that there is no temporal or spatial limit to the networked information economy that employs you.

The network, which is to say the office, which is to say work and the prospect of doing it, will always follow you home. So part of what we need to imagine collectively is the degree of compensation we want for that new reality, as well as strategies to cope with it.”

And that means that, first, we need to recognise different forms of academic practice and how to make them work for us:

Expand your imagined audience
“In teaching and research jobs, your audience includes your students (undergrad, postgrad) and your colleagues (department peers, committee colleagues, superiors). You probably engage in written communication daily with all of them – but do you count that writing as output? Do you count it as part of your intellectual project? If not, why not? Here I’m trying to offer ways to think about scale: the audience for your work can have local, national, and international reach. It’s a continuum of interaction and it all matters.”

Publishing: realistic outputs, actual numbers
“How many publications is enough? Homework: check your university’s minimum requirements for research output … Also think realistically about how much time you have free to write without interruption, at which times of the year. i.e. without teaching, without meetings, without someone waiting for you to come home for dinner.”

Grants: motivations for them – different types – which one is right for you?
“Time spent working up a collaboration should be weighed against more time spent on your own writing (track record) … Also against how much the focus will change. Assessors will reward something that’s coherent and distinctively yours.”

Teaching and service: making it work for your research goals
“[R]arely will your teaching directly match your research. But even overview courses can help keep you in touch with the field … Committee work: inevitable, so try to find things relevant to your research.”

Offloading: Claiming time for research
“Make time to plan what you want to do. Keep that time factored in to each week … Write lists. Try to distinguish between things that you must do, should do, or what would be nice to do. Have daily/weekly lists and don’t be hard on yourself if you need more time. Learn to say no, and when you do, say why, or suggest alternatives.”

There is some solid advice here and it never hurts to remind ourselves of these things. But it’s the next part of Mel’s post that I find most intriguing, and promising: Invoke strategic complacency.

“Academics, like other professionals, navigate a range of internally and externally imposed pressures to be productive – and to conclude I want to get you to start getting in the habit of asking: to what end? The model of worker that is rewarded today is that which is endlessly, limitlessly productive. The university will take everything from you if you let it. There are minimum performance levels but you’ll note that there are no maximums.

Replace productivity with strategic complacency. Use the discourse of productivity against itself. Start by using the language you hear routinely around you: ‘I’m just so busy’; ‘I can’t do it that day, today’s impossible‘; ‘This week/month is crazy, I just can’t’. The best line I’ve ever been told to use is the simple: ‘I’m sorry, I’m fully committed’ … Take your own goals seriously, and set boundaries on doing more. Setting up these strategies will help to see clearly the source for the multiple pressures you encounter – where they come from. Are they intrinsic (part of the make up of being an intellectual) or externally imposed? Are you just being polite when you don’t say no? Can you still be polite and excuse yourself from certain things?

Making time to organize and rationalize your time can mean you maximize the ‘good’ parts of your job and make better decisions about minimizing what takes you away from them … Learn whose job it is to take responsibility for things, who has the last say, so you don’t take on more responsibility than you will ever be recognized for.”

Alex Burns replied to Mel’s post by suggesting that emerging researchers need to follow the university’s unwritten rules and learn to “tame, rather than game, the administrative systems” at hand, but her approach is much more compatible with my personal politics. I can see strategic complacency operating as a tactic in De Certeau’s sense, something that must “make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse” (The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 37). It is, as I read it, not entirely unlike “la perruque” or a worker’s ability to get her own work down while appearing to be working for her employer.

Along these lines, Glen Fuller offers further insights into the matter of career “opportunities”. Here, I find his identification of three kinds of opportunity to be particularly helpful: first, opportunities can be offered by those in power; second, an opportunity can present itself; and third, we can create opportunities. This last one interests me the most:

“If a worker creates ‘opportunity’, then it is because he or she has critically appreciated the mechanics of labour relations and relations between worker productivity and the market in its virtuality (an example of what Deleuze called the ‘fourth-person singular’ and the practice of counter-effectuation); that is, the worker does not perceive the situation though the identity and horizon of experience of a ‘worker’ per se. The worker actively differentiates a new set of relations that can only be apprehended through action. This is a tactical relation to opportunity.”

Put a bit differently, even though it may be the most difficult path to take, it’s still in my best interests to create my own opportunities. The challenge is how to actually do this without passively accepting the imperative to perform, or else, and without capitulating to organisational expectations to maintain the status quo–and I think Mel’s suggestions go a long way in that regard. Thanks Mel!

Update 21 Jan 2013: Ben Kraal kindly linked to this post on Twitter, and it’s really good to be reminded of Mel’s work and my reflections on it. (I hadn’t realised how quickly I had effectively forgotten this!) We’re at that point in the southern hemisphere’s academic year when the end of summer is sooner rather than later, and pressure is mounting to finish the research projects we started during the break. Added to that, school meetings are starting to fill the calendar again, next term’s course outlines are being finalised, and Very Important Research Grant proposals are being readied for submission. And yet here I am, perhaps for the first time in my academic career, feeling quite good about all this. So what’s changed? The answer, I think, is simple if a bit dramatic: serious health problems over the last year or so have forced me to rethink how I do my job (and generally live my life, but that’s another story).

Basically, I just can’t heal and work as much as I have in the past; my body simply isn’t strong enough to do what I–and dare I say others–have come to expect me to do. (Don’t get me started on the oppressiveness of expectations or the relationship between overwork and health problems.) Consequently, I’ve become a bit ruthless in deciding what I can, and cannot take on, and I’ve had no choice but to say “no” to a host of interesting opportunities. I often wish I could have said “yes” to people I like and projects that excite me, but I’ve also learned to pay attention to–no, to actually appreciate–the part of me that feels a sense of relief at not having to do Yet Another Thing. (Why did I want to say “yes” in the first place?) This relief has taught me that I really don’t want to primarily consider myself, or be remembered by others, as a “productive” and “efficient” professional. You see, I want to be–no, I already am–much more, and thankfully much less, than that. And I like myself best that way.

It’s good to re-read this post with this new found awareness. I don’t want to compete with my colleagues over who is busier; I don’t want to find pride in being stressed out. I want to do less and get more out of my work. I’ve recognised that my primary focus for this year has to be finishing my Marsden research project. I’ve determined 2-3 journal articles that need to be written and I’ve chosen one major conference at which to present my research and forge new networks. I’ve also identified the best research grant for what I want to do next, and have put all my efforts into one proposal. And last, but certainly not least, I tried out some of Matt Ward’s excellent teaching and learning advice last term and I know that I want–and my students deserve–more of it this year.

As a final thought, I read a few things this year that have stuck with me. I think they’re related to this post and worth sharing.

Tim Kreider’s The ‘Busy’ Trap:

“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. [...] Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice…The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

Oliver Burkeman’s The Positive Power of Negative Thinking:

“What if we’re trying too hard to think positive and might do better to reconsider our relationship to ‘negative’ emotions and situations? [...] From this perspective, the relentless cheer of positive thinking begins to seem less like an expression of joy and more like a stressful effort to stamp out any trace of negativity…A positive thinker can never relax, lest an awareness of sadness or failure creep in. And telling yourself that everything must work out is poor preparation for those times when they don’t.”

And rather than reading yet another list of ways to be more productive, I appreciated many of Kerry Ann Rockquemore’s suggestions in her Inside Higher Ed series on how to accept being less than perfect and still do what you love. After all, what’s the worst thing that can happen?

The Costs of Perfectionism
Breaking the Cycle
Writing and Procrastination
Are You Over-Functioning?
Do You Measure Up?