[Literature review] Design anthropology: technological means & humanistic ends
Introduction:
Since at least the 1980’s, ethnography has been applied as a research method for design projects, especially in fields of technology development. This emergent practice of “design anthropology” aims to apply anthropology’s tools of analyzing human value systems to design’s concern with futures-speculation. Anthropology can produce detailed descriptions of a group’s shared values, experiences and symbolic interpretations. In anthropology’s rich analyses, design ventures see untapped markets waiting for products and systems that answer unmet local needs. On one hand, this coupling creates opportunities for anthropologists to apply their theoretical findings and improve tangible systems of human organization. On the other hand, corporatized design anthropology research engagements may fail to meet the institutional rigor of academic anthropology. Namely, design anthropology projects can risk publishing incomplete findings for the sake of meeting operational timelines or prioritizing special interests. Also, leveraging the findings of design anthropology to effect real-world change must be foregrounded as an issue of significant ethical consideration— especially with respect to whose ideals are reinforced through design.
This essay puts into conversation works from the fields of anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and design history to present the current state of the field of design anthropology. Beyond providing explanations of material cultures, this essay presents works from several authors to show how designed technologies can act upon their human users, as well as how those human users reshape their technologies in unexpected ways. Finally, this paper looks to existing design anthropology engagements — and other cases that draw on the ethos and praxis of design anthropology — for shortcomings and achievements. In some cases, design anthropology has inspired global movements of multidisciplinary academic engagement around humanistic goals. In other cases, examples of economized design anthropology illustrate the corporate mishandlings of ethnographic methods to meet timelines and client demands. This essay thus seeks to provide a present-day context for the emergent field of design anthropology, including unresolved issues and areas for continued exploration.
In this time where the crossover between design and anthropology is growing, this research paper seeks to make sense of the boundaries — and areas of communication — between these disciplines. Specifically, I ask: to what extent can design anthropology bring new meaning to the larger field of anthropology? What interventions does the lens of design make to the field of anthropology? What ethical issues does design anthropology need to resolve before it can be reconciled with academic anthropology? As anthropology continues to reflexively consider its position in academia, and in the world at large, this paper suggests that design anthropology needs a unified direction before it can move forward.
Historical Emergence
Originally published in 1954, and translated from French to English in 1964, Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society traces the emergence of “technique” as a global sociological phenomenon. Ellul defines technique as the methods used to effect efficiency and rationality in any given problem. Technique, with its ideal of standardized technical efficiency, “constructs the kind of world the machine needs ... It clarifies, arranges, and rationalizes … It is efficient and brings efficiency to everything,” (Ellul, p.5). Following the logic of this argument, Ellul posits that it is not just capitalism that gave rise to this “technological society,” but the ideal of the machine as the supreme administrator of technique. According to Ellul, "when technique enters into every area of life, including the human, it ceases to be external to man and becomes his very substance ... and it progressively absorbs him" (p.6). Lewis Mumford also cautions against the individual subscription to these quantitative technical systems, saying that once life is surrendered to scientific enumeration “authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified" (Mumford, p.6). In other words, the ideal of mechanical efficiency and constant technological improvement superimposes itself onto the narrative of human progress.
Mumford must have read the English translation of Ellul’s work when it came out in 1964, because that same year Mumford published his essay “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics.” Mumford’s essay attributes the birth of authoritarian technics to the advent of the state sciences of documentation, where “technical invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control” became the principal method of organizing and creating citizenry (p.6). Compare this to Ellul’s claim that the primacy of technique emerged with the convergence of five phenomena which work together to isolate and conquer the individual: “the fruition of a long technical experience; population expansion; the suitability of the economic environment; the plasticity of the social milieu; and the appearance of a clear technical intention" (Ellul, p.47). Upon presenting the historical rise to supremacy of technique — and the ideology of the machine over the human — Ellul balks to offer a clear way out for humans to reclaim ownership over their means of self-determination. Considering this dilemma, Ellul notes, scathingly, that “the required solution, then, must be a technical inquiry into ends, and this alone can bring about a systematization of ends and means … It follows that a complete knowledge of ends is requisite for mastery of means” (p.431). In this sense, Ellul faces a tautology that he perceives as inescapable. Through its deployment, technique — the logic of the machine — reifies itself as both the means and the end to all human action.
Originally published in 1986, Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomadology: The War Machine conceptualizes of two oppositional forms of human organization that the authors define as state-science and nomadism. The state-sciences are quantitative in nature, and aim to control an environment through means of reductionist classification. Building on the cautionary tale of quantitative powers laid out by Ellul and Mumford, Deleuze and Guattari’s 1986 analysis of “royal sciences” and “nomadology” demonstrates how an inherently weak state seizes the original “man of war”. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the “war machine” — a concept which also maps to Mumford’s idea of democratic technics as resourceful, productive, yet disparate human action — as exterior to the state. A statist model of sovereignty seizes the productive capacities of the war machine, “but sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally" (Deleuze and Guattari, p.15). Providing at least a partial resolution to Ellul’s fears, Deleuze and Guattari show that the quantitative powers of “royal sciences” do indeed reproduce themselves, but only within the field that the state’s organizing body can seize through quantification.
Over 30 years after Ellul’s problematization of technique as the driving force of human organization, in 1987 Lucy A. Suchman published Plans and Situated Actions. In this work, Suchman describes two views of human intelligence and directed action — these are plans, and situated actions (Suchman, p.ii). Ellul’s idea of technique as a standardized method for achieving efficient results in any given situation maps onto Suchman’s portrayal of plans, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the royal sciences. These plans resemble the intelligence of scientists and machines through their use of common symbol systems. Suchman describes a plan as the abstraction of an anticipated course of action. Conversely, “situated actions” more so resemble Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine, in that they rely on ad-hoc responses to specific environmental and situational needs as they arise. These two forms of human intelligence run parallel, and opposite one another. The strength of plans is that they preemptively construct a course of action that is communicable through a shared language. Yet, by prioritizing the means to achieve a goal, plans alone are insufficient measures to interpret the significance of human goals as they adapt to situational demands. The strength of situated actions is that they prioritize the ends of an objective, while leaving the means to accomplish this objective necessarily undefined. While perhaps less organized than plans, situated actions can spontaneously respond to problems as they emerge (Suchman, p.4).
By making a distinction between the efficiency of plans in their ability to construct shared goals, and the meaningfulness of situated actions in their ability to interpret ever-fluctuating human needs, Suchman identifies a gulf in communication between humans and machines — and thereby, an area to reify human values in technological systems. It is precisely here that anthropology can lend its analytical methods of understanding and interpreting complex human values to the field of design. Addressing Ellul’s fears that human goals have been subsumed by those of the machine, Suchman notes that cognitive scientists and technologists alike conflate machine intelligence’s representations of action with situated action itself. While machines are robustly equipped to perform complex calculations and construct efficient plans, Suchman posits that machines are currently unsophisticated in assessing the human significance of the problems they work on. It is here that Suchman identifies the need for an academic inquiry that addresses the gulf of mutual intelligibility between systems of human and computer intelligence — which respectively make use of situated actions and plans — warning that “only if that question is addressed directly can we hope to build our theories about human action on solid ground, and bring them usefully to bear on the design of new technology” (p.124).
While concluding on a less pessimistic note than Ellul, Suchman acknowledges the inseparable nature of plans — or technique, in Ellul’s terms — from the modern human experience. In place of Ellul’s uncertainty toward the future, however, Suchman offers a line of academic investigation that can make tangible steps toward a more humanistic technological environment. Though she did not identify this emergent academic field as design anthropology at the time of her publishing, Suchman’s focus on human-machine interactions inspired the works that went on to define the field of design anthropology. Moving into more recent works, we can see that Suchman’s 1985 text established the central terms that design anthropology continues to use today. In Alison Clarke’s 2017 compilation of works on design anthropology, Maria Bezaitis and Rick E. Robinson claim in their essay Valuable to Values that the goal of design anthropology is “to understand the interactions between people and technology, and the reciprocal impact of organizations, practices, and technologies on one another” (Bezaitis, M. & Robinson, R., p.57).
Seemingly heeding Suchman’s call to develop systems of mutual intelligibility for human-machine communication, around the same time as Suchman’s work, the academic field of Science and Technology Studies began to develop new methods to analyze multi-actor systems. “Actor-network theory” — commonly attributed to works by Latour, Callon and Law — bestows agency to nonhuman actors, including computational technologies and organizations. Even more recently, Çalışkan and Callon’s two-part series of papers on “economization” — published in 2009 and 2010, respectively — reconceptualize these actor-networks as sociotechnical agencements. As denoted by the name, sociotechnical agencements broaden the concept of agency to account for a range of human and nonhuman actors. Thus, STAs “renew the analysis of the power struggles at the heart of any market” in their ability to both quantify and qualify the concerns of various actors within the same market-based analysis (Çalışkan, K. & Callon, p.2). Çalışkan and Callon identify three main actors in processes of economization, “(1) the theories of the economy; (2) the institutional and technical arrangements that enhance the capacities of human agents for action and cognition; [and] (3) the things which are being valued whose materiality influences the modes of valuation that are possible and their outcomes” (p.3)
As was Suchman’s goal in her call to action, the conceptualization of actor-networks and sociotechnical agencements enable us to investigate the relationships within multi-actor networks. In doing so, we are better positioned to evaluate the underlying symbol systems that are deployed through technology, and to close the gulf in mutual intelligibility between respective systems of human and machine intelligence. I argue that the works cited in the section above provide the foundation for the emergent field of design anthropology. Design anthropology can be used to reposition the concerns of the human — rather than the machine — at the center of human techniques. We have now looked at some of the pivotal texts which laid the groundwork for the field of design anthropology. In the next section, I review some tangible engagements inspired by design anthropology, and question whether design anthropology is up to the challenge of addressing the problem outlined by Ellul that technique has become the inextricable driving force of all human action.
Practices and problems:
Now that we have reviewed some of the foundational ideas behind design anthropology, we can look to academic studies which exemplify the aims of the emergent field. This section outlines design anthropology’s unique methods of practical analysis, as well as some problems created by design anthropology, as diverse actors seek to appropriate these methods to meet their self-interested goals. This discussion reveals the inherent messiness of design anthropology, whereby actors with opposing values seek to take control of social discourse and promote normativities through the manipulation of their material environments. At the heart of this messiness is the power of design to shape and reproduce intended behaviors, alongside the ability of anthropology to investigate the implicit values that may drive designers to promote some behaviors, and constrain others.
In a collection of essays compiled by W. E. Bijker and J. Law in 1992, Madeleine Akrich’s essay “The De-Scription of Technical Objects,” develops the idea of “scripts” within technologies. Akrich defines scripts as the normative values imbued within, and reproduced by, technologies. Specifying her concept of scripts one level further, inscription is the act of designers who seek to encourage specific behaviors through technology, prescription refers to the collection of behaviors that are encouraged by the specific technology, and de-scription refers to the disparate actions taken by networks of users who re-purpose the technology to better suit their local needs. Beyond developing a theoretical framework to understand how technologies embed themselves in the social fabric of local communities, Akrich develops a research method to track “technology transfer,” tracing the arc of a technology’s deployment from the designer’s initial conception of a technology, and moving into an analysis of the user’s adoption and adaptation of the technology (Akrich, p.207). To trace this arc, Akrich “move[s] constantly between the technical and the social” using two primary methods — first, detailing the constraints imposed onto users by technologies, and next, assessing the user’s ability to reshape these technologies.
These instances of technology transfer comprise the fodder for the field of design anthropology. More often than not, there are discrepancies between the intended behaviors promoted through design, and the ultimate social repercussions of design enacted in the real world. Akrich’s in situ case-study of a photoelectric lighting kit provides an example of of misadapting first-world technologies to "less developed countries," and the resulting creation of a non-user. Akrich details the designed aspects of the photoelectric lighting kit that fail to meet the needs of its users, including its nonadjustable wiring, and rigid yet infrequent maintenance scheduling. By capturing these failures, design anthropologists illustrate how designers can overlook critical needs of people in non-normative technological circumstances by pre-supposing the values and material needs of their intended users. Akrich analyzes the interfaces of communication between human and nonhuman actors to show how technologies "generate and 'naturalize' new forms and orders of causality and, indeed, new forms of knowledge about the world" (p.207). Through this multi-actor approach, Akrich investigates the exclusions that happen in design, and thereby identifies the worldviews that are reinforced through technologies.
In a related body of research, Shannon Mattern presents media archaeology as a field which aims to challenge the willful ahistoricism of technologists in their relentless promotion of technological progress. Mattern notes that “it’s this fetishization of ‘the new’ that media archaeology is intended to counter, in part by encouraging consideration of the epistemologies materialized in different historical media formats” (Mattern, p.153). By situating various forms of media in their larger historical contexts, Mattern shows that “new” technologies are often merely repackaged versions of time-old devices which work to either centralize or distribute human power within technological systems. Similarly, in his book Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation published in 2007, Eyal Weizman draws on his professional training as an architect to critique how the Israeli state reinforces a nationalized claim over space through the provision of infrastructure that serves to physically separate Israelis and Palestinians entirely — even in spaces of shared ownership. Weizman analyzes the fragmented design of Israeli frontier settlements, saying that “each of the spatial technologies and practices ... is both a system of colonial control and a means of separation" (Weizman, p.10). Other examples of design anthropology-inspired critiques of infrastructure can be found in works by Larkin (2008), Redfield (2015), and Fredericks (2018). These works, among countless others, demonstrate the implicit ideological discourse that takes place through the explicit manipulation of the immediate material environment.
Outside the institutional doors of the academy, the ethos of design anthropology can be found in multidisciplinary assemblies of academics who aim to promote positive social change by challenging harmful effects of technology on forms of modern human organization. For instance, on the “about” section of their website, the group Forensic Architecture led by Eyal Weizman, defines their mission to perform “advanced spatial and media investigations into cases of human rights violations, with and on behalf of communities affected by political violence, human rights organisations, international prosecutors, environmental justice groups, and media organisations.” (“Forensic Architecture: Agency”). Another such organization is the Center for Human Technology, whose “Problem” page claims the organization uses “a combination of thought leadership, pressure, and inspiration to create market demand and momentum for products and services based on Humane Technology principles” (“The Problem”). While the focus of these organizations stray beyond the scope of design anthropology with their multidisciplinary research methods, their ethos remains essentially connected to that of design anthropology. Restated, if design anthropology investigates the interactions between people and technologies by analyzing the values that steer these interactions, then these organizations are necessarily dependent on methods originating from design anthropology.
Moving one step further from institutional academia, design anthropology has entered the world of corporate market-building. Corporatized design anthropology aims to identify unaddressed human needs, and develop marketable products which meet those needs. Design firms like IDEO and frog reappropriate anthropological methods to achieve business goals. Perhaps the more notable example, IDEO is often associated with the widespread proliferation of “design thinking” as a multidisciplinary engagement. Design thinking is supposed to help businesses better understand their consumers, think creatively, and thus design products that address their users’ specific needs. IDEO’s website claims that design thinking “brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable” (IDEO Design Thinking). Frog’s website claims that its design research “constantly evolves research methodologies and toolkits to better understand people’s needs and behaviors, and to uncover hidden opportunities” (Product & Service Design and Innovation).
Even in these summary descriptions of the methods behind design thinking, one cannot help but notice that the research outcomes from these design firms are contingent on the economic viability of their research engagements. This explicit dependency on a for-profit model positions the design anthropology engagements of design firms as potentially ethically compromised due to issues of academic rigor, including insufficient time spent in the field, and the moral quandary of producing reports whose findings are tailored to meet the goals of the design firms’ clients. Re-examining the fears of Ellul, the first author cited in this text, this form of corporatized design anthropology a la “design thinking” upholds technique as the supreme value of design anthropology engagements. In other words, especially when deployed to meet market goals, design anthropology risks sacrificing its humanistic ends in favor of an efficient means of conducting “economically viable” research.
Conclusion: moving forward:
In this paper, I have attempted to locate the emergence of design anthropology, and to highlight its wide reach of influence in academia, international policy and corporate affairs alike. I have done so first by presenting some foundational texts which inspired a huge lines of academic inquiry, starting with works from Ellul and Suchman, and using works from Mumford, and Deleuze and Guattari to support the theories outlined. Next, I looked to works which I believe most effectively responded to the charges laid out by the foundational texts. Included in these supporting texts are works from Çalışkan, K. & Callon, Latour, and Law that serve to reconceptualize agency to include the different intelligences of humans and machines, while still placing these diverse actors in a single communication network. After providing this background, I pointed to several texts that were likely inspired in part by the field of design anthropology — if not explicitly, then certainly in spirit. In one way or another, the works cited from Akrich, Larkin, Fredericks, Redfield, and Weizman all serve to analyze the systems of power enacted through material environments around the world. Finally, I concluded the argument of my essay by providing two examples of design firms that — as a result of their contingency on “economic viability” — misappropriate research methods from academic anthropology and design anthropology.
To conclude this discussion, we will identify the most important focus area for the continued development of the field. In this essay, we’ve reviewed how design anthropology provides a powerful analytical framework to investigate technology’s role in shaping systems of human knowledge. Next, methods established by Akrich provide an outline for what design anthropology research looks like: a constant movement between the technical and the social, probing for areas of shared understanding, and also moments of discord between technology designers, technologies themselves, and the users of these technologies. Taking Ellul’s fear of the “technological society” that he foresaw alongside Suchman’s distinction between plans and situated actions, corporatized design anthropology risks reducing human ends to a meaningless quest for the eternal improvement of technological means — all without accounting for ad-hoc situated actions.
As I argued in the essay above, design anthropology can be used to reposition the concerns of the human — rather than the machine — at the center of human techniques. At the same time, design anthropology may be the only lens we have through which to re-frame our current tunnel vision toward technology as the supreme mediator of the modern human experience. It is precisely for this reason that I propose the next line for continued academic inquiry: is there any way to reconcile corporatized design anthropology with its more ethical counterparts in academia and non-governmental organizations? This essay has presented the field of design anthropology as necessarily fractured into two subgroups that might be referred to as humanistic design anthropology, and corporatized design anthropology, respectively. Until we attempt to bring these fractured halves of design anthropology into the same humanistic whole, I share the same fear as Ellul: that we continue to stray down a path leading to the total dominance of technique over the human being.
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