Think Tank

Design anthropology

Designers primarily concern themselves with how to create a "successful" communication, product, or experience. But with the past 10 years of globalization, digitalization, and ever increasing design complexity, designers have come to realize that to answer the question of design "success" requires that they answer that question of how the processes and artifacts of design help define what it means to be human. This "humanness" can range from how humans control the environment through tools (homo faber); how high-heeled shoes affect natural ways of walking; to moral issues of how participation in the design process empowers marginalized communities. In this space, the practice and theory of design anthropology has emerged.

Design anthropology: What is it?

Design anthropology is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand the role of design artifacts and processes in defining what it means to be human (e.g., human nature). It is more than lists of user requirements in a design brief, which makes it different from contextual inquiry, some forms of design research, and qualitative focus groups. Design anthropology offers challenges to existing ideas about human experiences and values.

For example, I conducted a project for a large retail company in which I was expected to deliver an information architecture for the website. The method used was a standard card sorting exercise, but I also did research into how humans classify information. In addition to the information architecture, I delivered statements about the continued meaning of gender classifications. In the course of conducting the card sort, I learned that men and women continued to classify domestic products based on stereotypical gendered spaces of male equals outside/garage, and female equals inside. This was in spite of their lived gendered roles where the women where the heavy power-tool users and the men used blenders to make smoothies for the kids. My colleagues pointed out that my anthropological perspective produced insights beyond what the card-sort could deliver. The fact that the classification of consumer products lagged behind contemporary gender roles had strategic implication for how the client should and should not arrange the website site or retail spaces.

Figure 1: Gendered classification of consumer products.

At the University of Illinois at Chicago where I teach, I train designers on anthropological theories and research methodologies. Contemporary anthropology is no longer primarily concerned with exotic peoples and dinosaurs. Anthropology is engaged with issues of the global flows of people and goods, human rights and social justice, global feminism, technology adoption, the social effects of the environmental degradation, and local sustainability practices—all issues that have become important to designers. I also work with anthropologists to learn and understand the theories and processes of designing. For their part, anthropologists are interested in learning how to better communicate their insights to wider society, a task in which design excels. While currently the practices are split, design anthropology's intentions are to create hybrid practices and practitioners. You can be a design anthropologist or an anthro-designer, but you are adept at both.

The focus of design anthropology is on connecting the process of design to the meanings and functions designed artifacts have for people. These meanings and functions often go beyond obvious attributes. For instance, I've one of my projects studied the tangible experience of male grooming as it relates to shampoo. Men were asked to video and photographically document their daily grooming process over seven days. The team and I watched hours of video tape of men brushing teeth, combing hair, cleaning ears, shaving, and showering (rated PG only). We learned which products the men preferred and why, doing good marketing analysis. But we also discovered that grooming and clean hair tied back to values of professionalism in ways that seemed reminiscent of Pop culture "Ken" dolls and 1950s movies.

Figure 2: A Ken doll from 1960s that seems to embody male notions of professionalism.

Design anthropology does not place separate emphasis on values, or design, or experience, which are the domains of philosophy, academic design research, and psychology, respectively. Rather, design anthropology focuses on the interconnecting threads among all three, requiring hybrid practices. The outcomes of design anthropology include statements providing some deeper understanding of human nature as well as designed communications, products, and experiences.

What is it good for? Design anthropology's theoretical and practical concerns

So if design anthropology is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand the role of design artifacts and processes in defining what it means to be human, what specific issues does it address that relate to design? H. Russell Bernard, the leading authority on anthropological research methods, describes four problem areas of anthropology:

1. The nature-nurture problem (ex. Is it biology or environment that causes humans to respond to something in a particular way?)
2. The evolution problem (ex. How do things expand and change over time?)
3. The internal-external problem (ex. What are the ways in which behaviors are influenced by values or environmental conditions?)
4. The social facts or emergent properties problem (ex. How are people influenced by social forces that emerge from the interaction of humans, but which transcend individuals?)

These four problem areas have profound ramifications for design, especially in the high-tech design and innovation sectors.

Nature versus nurture

An example of the nature-nurture problem in design could be determining whether physical or cultural differences might account for different responses of Chinese children and Chinese adults to a technology. The methodological approach to this problem requires both ethnographic and ergonomic research. On the nurture side, a team of design anthropologists would need to carry out ethnographic interviews, observations, ask people self-document their experiences, and perhaps participate in Chinese household activities. On the nature side, they would have to take physical measurements of Chinese adults and children in a lab or in the field, create databases and tables.

Intel may have followed this approach in its 2005 design of the China Home Learning PC. Design anthropologist Dr. Genevieve Bell and her team observed and interviewed Chinese families with school-aged children. The team provided Intel with ethnographic insights about the educational aspirations of Chinese families. One of their main insights was that Chinese parents viewed the computer as a distraction from their children learning Mandarin for school, which was an answer to the nurture question. But also, as part of their design process, Intel would have tested how adults and children interact with the hard and software features of the PC. The result was a physical lock-and-key mechanism that, from across the room, could alert Chinese parents to when the PC was being used in an "open mode," which allowed for surfing the web of playing games, versus in an "education mode," which restricted their child to schoolwork.

The evolution problem

How do designed communications, artifacts, and experiences spread, change, or grow over time? The evolution problem requires longitudinal approaches that explore the relationships among artifacts, time, and place. Methodologically, these can take the form of multi-year studies within a region and/or the creation of image databases that can be re-mined over time.

Cheskin, a consumer insights and innovation consultancy, has over 20 years of longitudinal research on the Hispanic market in the U.S. This legacy of data allows them to conduct multi-year studies in order to track the changing dynamics of Hispanic purchases through generational shifts and migration patterns. Consultancies such as the former E-lab, NOP World, and the Institute of Design at IIT have create image databases that allow researchers to re-mine categorized visual data of designed artifacts. Often on projects, you might use only 10% of the data collected to address a client's problem. Being able to re-mine data, you can use the other 90% to make new connections between different projects, track trends based on differences in previous and new data, and share data with distributed teams across the globe or save it for future projects. NOP World's database exemplifies how design anthropology is not always ethnographic, but sometimes is closer to archaeology, where the focus is completely on the material remains of the consumer products without asking about their meanings to owners.

The internal-external problem

"How is it that the things inside our collective heads or outside in the world drive us to behave in a particular way?" This is the central question of the internal-external problem in design anthropology. Many of the great social dilemmas are internal-external problems: environmentalism, social justice, economic parity, and human rights. The theories and methods of design anthropology are especially good for guiding mainstream design's recent emphasis on social and environmental responsibility. My design anthropology projects with AIGA's Design for Democracy weighed to what extent voter disenfranchisement could be accounted for by the erosion of democratic values versus design-related regulations for election materials.

As a human-centered design project, Design for Democracy produced successful ballot prototypes that adhered to the highest standards of design and were vetted by citizens, advocacy group, and Federal government administrators. What makes this also a design anthropology project is that the early discovery and later design phases were structured to contribute general statements about how design translates values of democracy, transparency, accountability, and efficiency into tangible experiences. Something as simple as providing graphical illustrations to explain the voting method on a ballot can make someone with low literacy feel like the government is being more transparent about the process, which increases his or her voting confidence.

The social facts or emergent properties problem in design anthropology

The emergent properties problem frames the majority of design anthropology projects, because it tends to lead product and service innovations. In fact, design anthropology came to the fore at places like Xerox Parc, Cheskin, Nokia, Steelcase, Sapient, Microsoft, Pitney Bowes, BBDO, Philips, IDEO, Intel and others specifically to help companies better understand how the social forces of digitalization and globalization influenced people's behaviors. Methodologically, ethnographic and experimental approaches work best for these problems because of the necessity to design for problems and opportunities that have not yet emerged. So the approach of "living with people" and observing, interviewing, participating in activities, and giving them prototypes to play with might provide some insight into new ways in which people are relating to artifacts and to each other.

The work of Jan Chipchase for Nokia, recently profiled in the New York Times, exemplifies some of the best work addressing the emergent properties problem in design anthropology. The journalist, Sara Corbett, describes how "…Chipchase…act[s] as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner's wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they're likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design."

Understanding design's role in defining humanness

Design anthropology seeks to answer the question how do the processes and artifacts of design help come define what it means to human. It explores a wide range of interests related to design practice: how interfaces can be developed based on values of shared learning versus individual study; how the adoption of technologies can lead to greater social equality and inequalities over time; and how not just the words but the meanings behind words change as you design for one culture versus another. These are all issues of the human context that has grown more complex. Design anthropology is the field to help you feel confident in your design decisions by showing you the global ramifications of past, current, and potential communications, artifacts, and experiences as they affect the human context.

Design anthropology does not place separate emphasis on values, or design, or experience, which are the domains of philosophy, academic design research, and psychology, respectively. Rather, design anthropology focuses on the interconnecting threads among all three, requiring hybrid practices. The outcomes of design anthropology include statements providing some deeper understanding of human nature as well as designed communications, products, and experiences.

Where to go from here

For more information, check out these resources:

• Dori's Moblog: Explorations in Design, Decision-Making, Anthropology, and Govermentality
• Anthrodesign Yahoogroup listserv
• American Anthropological Association
• Christina Wasson's User Experience Readings page
• Bruce Tharp's Design Research Resources

About the author