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Design Anthropology: Experiments in Cold War Industrial Design and Social Science
Saturday 7 September, 10.45 – 12.00
Design anthropology, as a relatively recently coined discipline, has mostly been understood as a progressive practice successfully dissolving the borders between social science and design and fostering nuanced user-focused solutions and outcomes. Increasingly, however, critics have drawn attention to the ethical aspects of the breaking-down of these disciplinary boundaries whereby design anthropology (accused of quick-fix, acritical qualitative research approaches) casts its subjects as little more than disempowered fodder aggregated for use in underpinning multiple facets of corporatised global life; from health care provision, through to governance strategies and data harvesting. Placing critical historical analysis centre-stage, this talk argues that the origins of the design anthropology phenomenon lie closer to early US development policies than contemporary Silicon Valley innovation and grassroots community co-design initiatives. Exploring instances of early ‘design anthropological’ initiatives, it traces the ways in which industrial design and anthropology emerged as crucial partners in negotiating Cold War geo-political interventions and, in so doing, generated an enduring borderless disciplinary alliance.
Bio
Professor of Design History and Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna
As a design historian and social anthropologist, Alison J. Clarke’s research deals with the intersection of these disciplines, specifically in terms of their shared focus on the politics of material culture and social relations. Her most recent monograph Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (MIT Press, 2021) explores the controversial origins of social design, casting a critical perspective on the origins of a movement that has claimed to promote social justice through people-centred approaches. Her present book and research project Design Anthropology: Decolonizing and Recolonizing the Material World (MIT Press) explores the blurred historical boundaries between design practice and anthropology, and the social consequences of the uptake of this melding in the contemporary corporate sector. Clarke’s research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Austrian Science Fund and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, among others.