See below for final project submission instructions!
Today, in our final session, you’ll be sharing your final projects – as they currently stand! – in a format that some call a “world cafe” or “group speed dating.” In small groups of 4 to 5, you’ll informally share your amazing work, get some final feedback, and have some low-stakes discussions (with suggested discussion questions). Each student gets a maximum of 2 minutes to introduce their work, elevator pitch style, and then you can discuss! After 20 minutes or so we’ll reorganize the groups, then repeat, for a total of three small-group sessions. We’ll then regroup for a full-class discussion and offer some final reflections before we say goodbye!
TO PREPARE FOR TODAY
- You could prepare by doing absolutely nothing 🙂 We’re keeping things informal. Our primary purpose is to celebrate our individual and collective accomplishments!
- That said, please feel free to bring material artifacts, images, and other media to share as part of your discussions.
POSSIBLE DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
ANTHROPOLOGY FOR DESIGN: How might your projects demonstrate the value of employing ethnographic methods — or core anthropological concerns, like kinship, exchange, colonialism, cultural diffusion, etc. — in design practice, criticism, and scholarship? In our understanding of “innovation”?
ANTHROPOLOGY OF DESIGN: Do your projects demonstrate how attention to the designed world — buildings, cities, landscapes, infrastructures, material objects, clothing, mediated artifacts, organizational structures, service protocols, etc. — can help us to better grapple with anthropological questions, or research questions in other social-scientific and humanistic fields of inquiry?
ANTHROPOLOGY AS DESIGN: Do your projects demonstrate how design methods and/or designed modes of dissemination (drawings, photographs, video, sound, prototyped objects, performative systems, installations, constructed environments, etc.) can be applied productively in anthropological work — or in scholarly work more broadly? How does this work speak to the larger epistemological and political implications of validating other ways of knowing, making, and sharing in the discipline and the academy?
DESIGNING THROUGH ANTHROPOLOGY: How might your projects explore other functions of anthropological — or, more broadly, social-scientific and humanistic — work, beyond helping us to understand the world that is? What about the world that could be? What are the potentials and risks of speculative or ontological modes of research and design?
SUBMISSION
Your diverse projects call for a variety of forms! I welcome submission in multiple formats! To facilitate my review, though, I ask that you please try to consolidate all parts of your project into a single file, folder, or link – and, if there are multiple parts, provide clear instructions regarding how I should review the material.
Projects are due by 11:59pm on Thursday, December 9, via this Google Form, and are worth 20% of your final grade.