Why Anthropology?

WHY ANTHROPOLOGY?

When I tell people I’m an anthropologist, a well-meaning inquiry generally follows as to the type of crimes I solve—or better yet—the dinosaurs I uncover. It’s no surprise that people are a little confused; anthropology is a unique creature, often falsely represented on television programming. Anthropology deals with all aspects of the human experience, and humans are complex. In fact, one of humanity’s most complex notions is humans studying humans. Academics can trace the earliest instances of humanity’s fascination with itself to mysterious cave paintings or Protagoras’ ponderings of man as the measurement of all things. These early humans were communicating a need to understand their place in the universe. Today this need is still in high demand, coming from companies and government agencies desiring to understand their consumers and constituents or academic researchers attempting to fulfill their next publishing obligation. At its core, anthropology is a science concerned with how and why humans move through the world in the way they do. The ‘why’ questions anthropologists ask requires an immense amount of interpretation. Their questions are not always quantifiable, but the anthropologist is comfortable with the qualitative abstraction of human nature. Anthropologists think of human interactions in terms of the linguistic, biological, sociocultural, and material, using this holistic view to identify patterns. The anthropologist understands that humans are unique creatures that engage in designing their linguistic, biological, sociocultural, and material environments and thereafter react to these designs. An anthropological approach to human strategies asks why these designs exist, why they develop, and how they continue to impact the psychological and embodied human experience.

But What is Design?

When considering design, it’s easy to conjure images of designers sketching blueprints or encircling various prototypes. However, before designs reach this stage, many other events occur. Designs develop from interactions—whether agreeable or laden with friction—and these exchanges result in the enactment of systematic expressions of coping. These assertions move through the world and create new interactions and reactions, influencing and limiting future design expressions. Designs generally operate seamlessly in society, so we fail to recognize their existence. However, once a system malfunctions, as demonstrated during the Texas “Snowpocalypse” of 2021, its existence becomes apparent. The design and the systems that bolster that design are now on full display. The Texas power grid breakdown of 2021 brought to light the numerous strategies that allow our water and electrical systems to function properly—government financial institutions, regulatory agencies, maintenance practices, training programs, and that one guy who knows where the switch is.

Design is not simply the creation of something; design is present in the language, cultural practices, knowledge, and values individuals and communities hold. Design does not occur in a vacuum but emerges from these material and nonmaterial spaces, and the nonmaterial aspects of design are just as crucial in understanding them. Designs bring a particular value or practice to society, and understanding whose values and traditions are prioritized can offer insights into the power dynamics of the users and excluded users and those doing the designing. Ruha Benjamin discusses dynamic power struggles in her book, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, and the impacts historical racist practices have on designed technologies. Benjamin argues that designs interact with racist social systems that operate beneath the surface and further perpetuate these racist practices in design interactions. Additionally, these colonial racist systems hinder the disentanglement of racism and design. Benjamin’s explanation can be applied to any socially constructed method that disenfranchises social identities, communities, and customs.

In essence, designs live among us, simultaneously influencing and hindering humankind in various ways. Yet, humans also influence and hinder designs through their situated and embodied reactions to them. Currently, the constant push and pull of designs are calculated in the user-centered design approach. Companies attempting to create designs with the user in mind are also making judgments about the user, and the non-user, of a product. These same users are simultaneously making judgments about the company and its products. The anthropologist asks—How and why are designs created? Who are they built for, and why? How and why do designs move through the world as they do? And how might a design move differently through the world toward uncertain futures?

How Can Anthropology Inform Design?

Anthropology may seem like an unlikely bedfellow of design, but anthropologists excel at connecting patterns and qualitatively abstracting these patterns into useable data. Design research offers a unique space where designed systems emerge from a collection of interconnected and interacting agents. The anthropologist is well-posed to recognize the patterns associated with these connections because the anthropologist understands designs culminate from the situated and embodied interactions within a geographical, epistemological, historical, cultural, and material context. Anthropological theory and its ethnographic framework search for the contextual story behind individuals' thought processes and behaviors in relation to their cultural communities, cultural communities in relation to their societies, and societies in relation to their global identities. Anthropology seeks to understand the categorical and hierarchal structures that encourage and implement designs, the benefactors and disenfranchised and the possible implications for both.

So how does the anthropologist do it? The anthropologist’s toolbelt contains theories from the humanities, linguistics, sociology, psychology, political science, and the physical sciences. Their vast pool of knowledge, paired with ethnographic observations and qualitative research methods, is a powerful ensemble for making sense of information. Anthropologists’ skills for disseminating information include various forms, such as surveys, interviews, data visualization, multimedia, discourse analysis, collaging, curation, and ethnographic storytelling. The anthropologist approaches a problem from various contextual viewpoints and attempts to articulate findings that are often just as messy, abstract, and contradictory as the design problems themselves.

My Approach to Design

As an anthropologist and technical communicator, I approach design from a situated place of discovery. My personal interaction with design is informed by my understanding of individual imagination, creativity, art, and performance. I never try to assume that I know why a person is motivated to react or interact with a design in a certain way. My background in rhetorical and linguistic theory allows me to make connections between language systems and the implications of the cultural and ideological structures signified and coded in various linguistic realities. With this knowledge, I also acknowledge that research testing and performance are not natural by nature. Some results cannot be taken at face value but must be evaluated for their cultural sensitivity and interpretation. This understanding of language informs my relationship with design and my relationship with design research. I examine my research process for leading or biased language and attempt to clearly and concisely convey my message while remaining flexible if needed for better understanding.

This flexibility drives me, and my observations always leave room for new questions and discoveries in my research designs. As participants interact with my research design, whether a usability test or an interview, I am also reacting and searching for my own bias or preconceived notions in the testing. As an anthropologist, I realize that I am also a product of my own culture, environment, and experience, and my design preferences may reflect this. However, this understanding allows me to be more critical from an anthropological standpoint in my own work and correct for these shortcomings. In my work, I attempt to design for as many users as possible but realize that the systems designs are built upon usually come with some users being excluded. In these situations, I look for ways to minimize exclusions and downline impacts to the best of my ability.

My Research Interests and Career Goals

Like many anthropologists, my research interests are vast. I am especially interested in language and its role in shaping our social identity and cultural interactions as well as our understanding of what’s possible in the future. I believe language creates and reinforces our personal and social outlook and I hope to use anthropology, linguistics, and technical writing to create new possibilities for the future of inclusion and representation in the everyday mundane. The mundane often becomes a permanent fixture in our social fabric and I hope to use my understanding of anthropology, design, technical writing, usability research, and ethnography to create new threads for sowing new stories.

The Think Tank

This blog is created with the intention of sharing my personal understanding and connection with design and design research from an anthropological perspective. Like all designs, this blog is also designed in reaction to my interactions with numerous prepared texts and research conducted by intellectuals before me. These interactions, which have formed the think tank that influenced (and perhaps hindered) my thoughts in this piece can be found at the following link:

References