Anthropology 318: Anthropology of Design

Video poker machines, water pumps in developing countries, everyday office furniture, the ubiquitous smartphone: our worlds are shaped by intentional objects and their power to inform our habits, actions, and sensations. Anthropologists have studied how the things humans make – from a stone tool to cooking pot to a bicycle – are more than their function and utility This course is an introduction to the anthropology of design – a recent, loosely articulated field of study that bridges academic and commercial ventures in a pursuit to understand how people make, circulate, and use made objects and products. Fusing standard approaches and concerns of cultural anthropology with the eclectic field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this class will explore diverse historical and cultural forms of how things humans make come to embody complex social trajectories. In other words, we’ll look at how technologies, broadly defined, come to take on “a life of their own.” We’ll begin class by considering how technology shapes and is shaped by political and cultural contexts. Next, we’ll move to philosophical investigations into the relationship between materials, form, and craft and finally proceed to read ethnographic case studies of design as both an expertise and an ordinary practice. All along, we will assess ways “design thinking,” as an open-ended and often unpredictable process of creativity, shares affinities with anthropology’s core method of ethnography. This class is a seminar with discussion (including student-directed discussion) as the primary activity. Assignments will include a short analytical essay, a mini research project on a designed object, and a semester-long group project developing a design intervention.