Design Anthropology as Ontological Exploration and Inter-Species Engagement (original) (raw)

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss the potential for a design anthropology that, while firmly grounded in a material-experimental practice, is also informed by, and explorative of, those ideas in contemporary anthropology that are related to what is commonly referred to as the ontological turn. To detail this argument, we stage a discussion around an experimental design project carried out by one of the authors in which speculative prototypes were deployed at a care home in the Danish city of Elsinore. The purpose of this deployment was to experiment with, and possibly enable, new kinds of inter-species relations, in this case between the senior citizens of the care home and the wild birds in the surrounding area. The objective – to build and explore inter-species relations – along with the character and style of the experiment described here may seem foreign to the primarily human-centred field of design anthropology. However, a central concern in design anthropology is simultaneously to understand and reconfigure the very collectives that humans are continually both being formed by and giving form to. In this chapter we will show that material-speculative approaches that address non-humans are capable of generating questions-not-yet-posed that have relevance for contemporary design anthropology – questions that may expand the scope of this transdisciplinary field to such an extent that we may focus not only on the human capacity for change, but also on the capacity of others, including non-humans, to perform and configure both humans and the collectives of which humans form a part in ways that we are perhaps not yet capable of imagining. We begin by briefly mapping some of the current positions in design anthropology in order to situate our approach in relation to them. This is followed by a condensed account of how we understand and are interested in the so-called ontological turn in anthropology. That will lead us to a presentation and analysis of the experimental project, which will fuel a discussion of the differences involved in attending ethnographically or experimentally to a series of other-than-human encounters.

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