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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
design anthropology's intentions are to create hybrid practices and practitioners.
focus of design anthropology is on connecting the process of design to the meanings and functions designed artifacts have for people.
often go beyond obvious attributes.
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.
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?)
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.
How do designed communications, artifacts, and experiences spread, change, or grow over time?
requires longitudinal approaches that explore the relationships among artifacts, time, and place.
create image databases that allow researchers to re-mine categorized visual data of designed artifacts.
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.
"How is it that the things inside our collective heads or outside in the world drive us to behave in a particular way?"
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.
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.

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