From Anthropologies of Technique to Design Anthropology - Detailseite

Design features amongst the most important set of practices shaping our contemporary worlds: our work, private, and public settings are, in fact, designed through and through. Because of this, design has recently acquired great importance in anthropology. In fact, a newly developed field called Design Anthropology has become an interesting crossroads of different people trying to address design as (1) a topic of scholarly interest, (2) a source of methodological inspiration, and (3) an object of intervention. Since the 1980s, several scholars have in fact analysed different aspects of design ethnographically: for instance, its creative spaces and operations, the imagined and inscribed users of different design objects, together with their more or less creative or disputed uses and appropriations. Also, many ethnographers have tried to analyse artefacts and their mediating role in work, cognitive and everyday life practices; or have sought to understand the particular economic modes of exchange and the markets of design practice. Besides, the methods of design (from user studies to forms of collaborative and participatory design) are scrutinised and sometimes imported into the discipline, searching to have an impact on the particular modes in which ethnography and anthropological research at large are carried out (as a means for social intervention, be it for the creation of public debate or collaborative forms of research). This course approaches these series of works around design seeking to ground them in the wider intellectual concerns (in different anthropological traditions), of the study of technique, artefacts and technology (Marcel Mauss, André Leroi-Gourhan, Jack Goody, Arjun Appadurai, Daniel Miller, Lucy Suchman, Tim Ingold, Bruno Latour, Wendy Gunn, George Marcus). In order to understand the core debates these series of interconnected works bring to the fore, on a weekly basis, students working in groups will have to read and present readings and re-enact some of these debates. In doing this they will develop an insightful analytical gaze to understand manifold dimensions of our lives together with designed artefacts.

Findet im Rahmen des normalen Lehrprogrammes am Institut für Europäische Ethnologie statt, ÜWP Studierende können zusätzlich teilnehmen.

Akrich, M. (1992). The de-scription of technical objects. In W. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society. Studies in Sociotechnical Change (pp. 205–224). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Appadurai, A.  (Ed.) (1988). The social life of things. Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gunn, W., Otto, T., & Smith, R. C. (Eds.). (2013). Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice. London: Bloomsbury.

Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology. In Basic Writings (pp. 287–317). New York: Harper & Row.

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. New York: Routledge.

Latour, B. (1996). Aramis or the Love of Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lemonnier, P. (1992). Elements for an Anthropology of Technology. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Lemonnier, P. (Ed.) (2002). Technological Choices. Transformation in material cultures since the Neolithic. London: Routledge.

Leroi-Gourhan, A., & Bostock Berger, A. (1993). Gesture and Speech. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mauss, M. (2006). Techniques, Technology and Civilisation. London: Berghahn Books

Rabinow, P., Marcus, G. E., Faubion, J. D., & Rees, T. (2008). Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press.

Suchman, L. (2007). Human-Machine Reconfigurations. Plans and Situated Actions 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press..

Die Lehrveranstaltung findet im IfEE, Mohrenstraße 41, Raum 211 statt.