Week 10: November 2: Anthropology as Speculative and Ontological Design

How do or can anthropologists and designers employ methods beyond ethnography? What are those methods, and how might they help us imagine a broader purview for both fields? What roles might these methods play in clarifying not only how the world is, but also how it could be? What are the ethical and political opportunities and risks inherent in designing for future or better worlds? How might speculative or ontological design methods transform the temporality of anthropology itself? Who gets to decide which futures are “better,” and for whom, and how might we decolonize these processes? 

🚨🚨 We’ll meet virtually this week to accommodate our external guests! 🚨🚨

Guests: Suzanne Kite, Olalekan Jeyifous, and Brandi Summers

• Our Collaborative Notes

TO PREPARE FOR THIS WEEK: 

• Arturo Escobar, “Stirring the Anthropological Imagination: Ontological Design in Spaces of Transition” in Allison J. Clark, ed., Design Anthropology: Object Cultures in Transition (Bloomsbury 2018): 201-16 or Anne-Marie Willis, “Ontological Design – Laying the Ground,” Design Philosophy Papers (2006) [recall that you’ll be prompted to log in to access some of our copyrighted readings].
  • See how readily design methods / movements get stylized and appropriated: Jason Silva, “Ontological Design” < video: 2:25 >. 
• Suzanne has asked us to review:
  • Suzanne’s website
  • Suzanne Kite, in conversation with Corey Stover, Melita Stover Janis, and Scott Benesiinaabandan, “How to Build Anything Ethically” in Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group, eds., Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper (January 2020): 75-84. 
  • Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite, “Making Kin with the Machines,” Journal of Design Studies (2018).  
  • Suzanne Kite, “Pȟehíŋ kiŋ líla akhíšoke. (Her hair was heavy.)” < video: 18:26 >. 
• Brandi and Olalekan have asked us to review:
  • Olalekan Jeyifous’s and Brandi Summers’s websites (especially the Berkeley Black Geographies Project).
  • AbdouMaliq Simone, “The Black City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2017).
  • D. Scot Miller, “Afrosurreal Manifesto: Black Is the New Black – A new 21st-Century Manifesto,” Black Camera 5:1 (Fall 2013): 113-17.
• There is so. much. good. stuff. in the supplemental resources; please take a look! 
• Post a response to our slide deck if you’ve signed up to do so.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: 

• Mathieu Avila, “Ecologizing, Decolonializing: An Artefactual Perspective,” NORDES 2017, 7th Nordic Design Research Conference, Oslo, Norway, June 15-17, 2017. 
• Thomas Binder, Eva Brandt, Pelle Ehn, and Joachim Halse, “Democratic Design Experiments: Between Parliament and Laboratory,” CoDesign 11:3-4 (2015): 162-65. 
• Gustavo Blanco-Wells, “Ecologies of Repair: A Post-Human Approach to Other-Than-Human Natures,” Frontiers in Psychology (April 2021). 
• Deepa Butoliya, “Why Critiquing Critical Design Is Not Enough,” Medium (February 24, 2016). 
• Marisol de la Cadena, “Uncommons,” Fieldsights (Society for Cultural Anthropology: March 29, 2018). 
• Alexandra Crosby, “Design Activism in an Indonesian Village,” Design Issues 35:3 (Summer 2019): 50-63. 
• Clive Dilnot, “The Matter of Design” Design Philosophy Papers 13:2 (2015): 115-23. 
• Carl DiSalvo, Adversarial Design (MIT Press, 2012). 
• *Design Studio for Social Intervention, Ideas Arrangements Effects: Systems Design and Social Justice (Minor Compositions / Autonomedia, 2020). 
• Fernando Dominguez Rubio and Uriel Fogue. “Unfolding the Political Capacities of Design” in What is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment (Ashgate, 2015): 143-60.
• F. Dong, S. Sterling, D. Schaefer, and H. Forbes, “Building the History of the Future: A Tool for Culture-Centred Design for the Speculative Future,” Proceedings of the Design Society (June 2020). 
• Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (MIT Press, 2013). 
• Ana María Durán Calisto, “For the Persistence of the Indigenous Commune in Amazonia,” e-flux architecture (February 2019).
• Arturo Escobar, “Beyond ‘Regional Development’: A Design Model for Civilizational Transition in the Cauca River Valley, Colombia” in Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Duke University Press, 2020): 136-57. 
• Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Duke University Press, 2017).
• Arturo Escobar, Ashish Kothari, Alejandra Jiménez Ramírez, Marta Musić, and Vasna Ramasar, “Weaving Systemic Alternatives From the Global South,” EDGE Webinar (May 11, 2021) < video >. 
• Joshua Falcon, “Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness,” Design and Culture 13:2 (2021). 
• J.P. Hartnett, “Ontological Design Has Become Influential in Design Academia – But What Is It?” AIGA Eye on Design (June 14, 2021).* 
• Alf Hornborg, “Objects Don’t Have Desires: Towards an Anthropology of Technology Beyond Anthropomorphism,” American Anthropologist (July 2021). 
• Jamer Hunt, “Prototyping the Social: Temporality and Speculative Futures… ,” in Alison J. Clarke, ed., Design Anthropology: Object Cultures in Transition (Bloomsbury, 2018): 87-100.
• Tim Ingold, “Design Anthropology Is Not and Cannot Be Ethnography,” Research Network for Design Anthropology, Seminar 2, Interventionist Speculations, Copenhagen, August 13-14, 2014: 7pp.
• Suzanne Kite, Scott Benesiinaabandan, Clementine bordeaux, and Jason Edward Lewis, “Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road) – A Dialogue About Making Art in a Good Way,” Vera List Center (May 20, 2021). 
• Tau Ulv Lenskjold and Li Jönsson, “Speculative Prototypes and Alien Ethnographies: Experimenting with 
• Relations Beyond the Human,” Diseña 11 (2017). 
• Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl, “Figurations of Spatiality and Temporality in Participatory Design and After – Networks, Meshworks, and Patchworking,” CoDesign 11:3-4 (2015). 
• Matt Malpass, “Between Wit and Reason: Defining Associative, Speculative, and Critical Design in Practice,” Design and Culture 5:3 (2013). 
• Stacy Passmore, “Landscape with Beavers,” Places Journal (July 2019). 
• James Pierce, Phoebe Sengers, Tad Hirsch, Tom Jenkins, William Gaver, and Carl DiSalvo, “Expanding and Refining Design and Criticality in HCI,” CHI ‘15 Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Seoul, April 18-23, 2015. 
• Ashanté Reese, “When We Come to Anthropology, Elsewhere Comes With Us,” AnthroNews (February 20, 2019). 
• Tristan Schultz, “Mapping Indigenous Futures: Decolonizing Techno-Colonizing Designs,” Strategic Design Research Journal 11:1 (2018). 
• Anne-Marie Willis, “Ontological Design, Criticality and What Comes After Design?” Critical by Design (May 2018) < video: 57:28 >. 
• Anne-Marie Willis, “Ontological Design – Laying the Ground,” Design Philosophy Papers (2006). 
• Critiquing Speculative Design: Modes of Criticism, Tweet (July 9, 2019); Pedro Oliveira and Luiza Prado, “Cheat Sheet for a Non- (or Less-) Colonialist Speculative Design,” Medium (September 10, 2014); Tobias Revell, “Critical Design / Design Fiction Lecture…” Occasional Blog of Tobias Revell (December 2013); Tobias Revell, “Five Problems with Speculative Design,” Occasional Blog of Tobias Revell (April 2019. “Speculative Design in the ‘Real World’: Public Discussion,” Speculative Now! (2016); “‘Western Melancholy’ / How to Imagine Different Futures in the ‘Real World?’” Interakcije (August 27, 2018). 
• Decolonizing Design: Decolonizing Design; Tristan Schultz, Danah Abdulla, Ahmed Ansari, Ece Canli, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Matthew Kiem, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, and Pedro J.S. Viera de Oliveira, “What Is at Stake with Decolonizing Design? A Roundtable,” Design and Culture 10:1 (2018): 81-101; Ramon Tejada, Decolonizing Design Reader [draft]; Bruce Tharp and Stephanie Tharp, “Discursive Design’s Reflexive Turn?” Core77 (May 29, 2017); Dori Tunstall, “Dori Tunstall on Decolonizing Design,” Berkeley Talks (January 25, 2019); Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, “Decolonizing Design Innovation: Design Anthropology, Critical Anthropology, and Indigenous Knowledge” in Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, and Rachel Charlotte Smith, eds., Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice (Bloomsbury, 2013): 232-50; “The Yin and Yang of Design Anthropology with Dr. Elizabeth Dori Tunstall,” This Anthro Life (October 11, 2017) <podcast: 1:04:49>.  
• Ethnographically-Informed Speculative Design: 
  • Stuart Candy and Kelly Kornet, “Turning Foresight Inside Out: An Introduction to Ethnographic Experiential Futures,” Journal of Future Studies 23:3 (March 2019).
  • Elizabeth Chin and the Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology: @ the Hemispheric Institute; @ Ideas on Fire [podcast: 26:56]; on Tumblr; Elizabeth Chin, “Using Fiction to Explore Social Facts: The Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology” in Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway, and Genevieve Bell, The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography (Routledge, 2017): 478-89. 
  • Anne Galloway: More-Than-Human Lab; “Anthropology + Design: Anne Galloway,” Savage Minds (February 27, 2014); “Designing With, and for, the More-than-human,” Keynote India HCI Conference, Bangalore, December 2018; “More-Than-Human Lab: Creative Ethnography After Human Exceptionalism,” in Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway, and Genevieve Bell, The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography (Routledge, 2017): 470-7; “Speculative Design and Glass Slaughterhouses,” This Is HCD (May 29, 2019) <podcast: 35:15>; with Catherine Caudwell, “Speculative Design as Research Method” in Gretchen Coombs, Andrew McNamara, Gavin Sade, eds., Undesign: Critical Practices at the Intersection of Art and Design (Routledge, 2018): 85-96; “Troubling” in Celia Lury, Rachel Fensham, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Sybille Lammes, Angela Last, Mike Michael, and Emma Uprichard, eds., Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods (Routledge, 2018): 317-28; Anne Galloway, “Towards Fantastic Ethnography and Speculative Design,” Ethnography Matters (September 17, 2013) [Thanks to Anne for sharing much of this material!]. 
  • Nicholas Nova, ed., Beyond Design Ethnography: How Designers Practice Ethnographic Research (Geneva: HEAD, 2015): 83-115; “Nicolas Nova: We we are interested in mundane situations to express futures,” Speculative.edu (May 28, 2019); Near Future Laboratory; Pasta and Vinegar.
  • Superflux – particularly their BuggyAir, Cities Unlocked, and Mantis Systems projects.