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Critical Design 2016: Reading Outlines

Week 1: Imagination

Lucy Suchman 2011 Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design. Annual Review of Anthropology 40(1): 1–18.

Location, placemaking and future making

  • anthropology of places as “centers of innovation” (2)
  • design and innovation as anthropological objects, objects of contemporary
  • how does transformative change happen (away from narratives of progress); design as method PARC located in silicon valley in 1970 as a literal frontier and figurative frontier of future making
  • making human subjects and natural objects through frontiers “To do that requires bringing into view the politics of design, including the systematic placement of politics beyond the limits of the designer’s frame.” (4) Is design political? Should it be? What would that entail? technological society: change = tech innovation; in need of design to stay up to date: “a world in need of design” (5)
  • designing the world, global, global scale
  • unintended consequences of design
  • “how the situations that frame design practice are themselves constructed” (Margolin p. 241)
    • the situations that frame design and condition professional practice
  • automating work with an algorithm (6)
    • procedures, in practice, often an accounting after the fact, an effect of the orderly work
  • AI: representation of knowledge
    • designing intelligent machines as embodied social practice
  • prototyping: user needs as latent, needing to be drawn out, articulated, expressed vs. invented/recovered contextually
    • compatibility between actors, assemblages, e.g. software not always aligned
    • artifacts significance given through unfolding activity of design-in-use
  • 1990s management shift: process management
    • imagining and managing future projects and directions, in tension with shorter term ones
    • participation required despite little effect, to have a place in the future
    • regaining a lost past through the future (12); current projects as obstacles to get rid of
  • reflexivity built into possibility of organization, into operation (13); reproducing existing arrangements as much as challenging them
  • Ingold: creativity as ontological openness, process, ongoing formation, as opposed to static finished objects/fixed forms (which can be sold, licensed, copyrighted, patented, etc.)
    • things vs objects: alive vs….?
  • Lave: research as learning = critical ethnographic practice (14)
    • knowledge-making always entangled in the scholarship making it (Haraway 1988, Strathern 1999, Barad 2007, Verran 2001)
  • innovation as enactment, performances to disrupt particular arrangements of interest (15)
    • “newness” depends on breaks and discontinuities, obscuring the “in-between,” negotiation and engagements between oppositions which define each other: “an articulation that calls out differences from whatever is referenced as the thing that came before"
    • valuing transformation over incremental change
  • inventiveness instead as opening up possibilities (Barry 2001): not the novelty of artifacts but of arrangements with other activities and entities in which artifacts are situated: new configurations, reconfigurations, arrangements, etc. always provisional, precarious, etc. (15)
  • Friction — incommensurabilities, uncomfortable alliances, disparate knowledge systems

George Marcus 1995 Ethnography in/of the World System: the Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 24(1): 95–117.

  • studying topics beyond a single site: “a strategy or design of research"
  • tracing a cultural formation
  • in AND of the world-system
  • postmodern approach, but also response to changes in the world, “transformed locations of cultural production" What is a world-system?
  • integrated piecemeal into discontinuous multi-sited objects of study
  • “strategies of quite literally following connections, associations, and putative relationships are thus at the very heart of designing multi-sited ethnographic research"
  • Wallerstein’s world system theory; Wolf 1982
    • "ethnography as single-site probing of local situations and peoples"
  • 1980s successors: post-Fordism, time-space compression, flexibilization of capital, etc. (Harvey 1989); globalization, transnationalism
  • “groping your way” when there’s no single systemic overview of the world?
  • system vs lifeworld as earlier mode for situating and designing ethnographic research
    • alternative: “constructing subjects by constructing the discontinuous contexts in which they act and are acted upon"
    • “new paths of connection and association by which traditional ethnographic concerns with agency, symbols, and everyday practices can continue to be expressed on a differently configured spatial canvas" vs: “disengaged positioning characteristic of value-free social science"
  • reflexive anthropology

Ethnography: everyday, intimate knowledge, face-to-face communities and groups multisited: not holistic, totalizing project to map entire world system

  • all ethnography in the world system is also of it
  • “For ethnography, then, there is no global in the local-global contrast now so frequently evoked” (99)
  • “The global is an emergent dimension of arguing about the connection among sites in a multi-sited ethnography"
    • world system does not equal context of ethnographic work constituted by path in design of sites Power of ethnographic fieldwork
  • fieldwork on a discourse/policy vs on “the situated communities such policy affects”: bringing both into same frame
  • function of translation across idioms enhanced, multiplied
  • "connections through translations and tracings among distinctive discourses from site to site"
    • requires multilingualism
  • shift away from only subaltern subjects: “reconfigured space of multiple sites of cultural production” “about the shape of systemic processes themselves and complicities with these processes among various positioned subjects"
    • not just studying up/experts: new object of study
    • comparative but not parallel studies of homologous objects/sites: “fractured, discontinuous plane of movement"
    • object of study is mobile and multiply constituted

Postmodern ethnography: theoretical inspiration from Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard, etc. (bricolage, pastiche, collage) - new approaches to increasingly fragmented, multiple, mobile world Media studies: production/reception; indigenous media STS/science studies: Latour, Haraway’s cyborg, juxtaposed field sites/objects of study Public culture project (Appadurai and Breckenridge; Public Culture journal etc.): Transnational Cultural Studies; trans- and cross-cultural production: “multi-sited vision for research in this transnational domain that defies older practices of “locating” culture(s) in place(s)” (104)

  • rethinking space and place in ethnographic research: “This work, concerned theoretically with the construction of identities in global-local frames, merges with the methods and spaces constructed by media studies” (105)

  • practical issues of multisited research design

  • Russian avant-garde constructivism

approaches: Follow the people Follow the thing: circulations of objects in and processes of world system

  • cf. commodity chains
  • life of things, sugar, etc.: “sense of system to emerge ethnographically and speculatively by following paths of circulation” (107); research on consumption and commodities Follow the metaphor: symbols, language and print media: e.g. Martin on trope of flexibility; metaphorical associations “creating empirically argued new envisioning of social landscapes” (109) Follow the Plot, Story, or Allegory: looking for narratives in the field, situating in social landscapes Follow the Life or Biography: novel associations and contexts Follow the Conflict, e.g. in law, media

Strategically single sited: “The sense of the system beyond the particular site of research remains continent and not assumed"

  • local forms of knowledge beyond “resistance and accommodation” frame
    • awareness of subjects of broader world, associations, etc.; local knowledges “Sorting out the relationships of the local to the global is a salient and pervasive form of local knowledge that remains to be recognized and discovered in the embedded idioms and dioceses of any contemporary site that can be defined by its relationship to the world system” (112)
    • located, situated position of researcher as goal of critical reflexivity; overlapping discourses and domains of knowledge between subjects and ethnographer; issues of authority and representation
  • doing research with rather than studying

activism: political as professional; research as inherently politicized, dealing with stakes of power; political commitments of ethnographer; shifting positioning while moving through sites: circumstantial activism (114)