Anticipating user experience? Approaches to study the future
How can ethnography which allows us to study human knowledge and practices in situated ways, be applied to the study of what is not current but lies ahead of us? Is it suited at all to help in such an endeavour? In this blog post I want to argue not only that it is but that, moreover, ethnography offers a distinguished and remarkably different way to study the future, and can therefore bring a radically new perspective to discussions of this topic. In this post I also want to dedicate some words to how we might approach anticipatory user experience research.
But what exactly might seem so problematic about the future as an ethnographic area of study? At a first instance, ethnography and the future can seem antithetical. Ethnography is produced through an attention to the lived, to what is actually experienced. The future, however, is characterised by how it escapes the present moment, thereby always carrying with it a hint of speculation and aura of the unknown. People might talk about what the future holds, but they cannot experience it in such way that it makes it observable or accessible to an ethnographer. Or can they? What if ethnography's potential offering to the study and our understanding of the future lies exactly in the way it introduces elements of situatedness and the contemporary and connects them to the seemingly opposed - the future.
"The present crucially informs and shapes emerging future possibilities and probabilities. This implies a radical statement about the future made by Pink & Salazar (2017:18), which contradicts many of our popular ideas : the future is never a tabula rasa of endless possibilities."
The future studied from the present
If we think about the future as necessarily carrying an element of uncertainty, we might say that studying it is, in fact, problematic for all sciences. This is especially true for those practitioners who interpret what they do as hard science. How could claims and predictions about the future possibly live up to expectations of methodological rigour, objectivity and testability? Looking at it from this perspective, anthropology and ethnographic enquiry, with their long standing contribution to critiques of scientific objectivity, suddenly don't seem that ill-suited to study the future.
Anthropology is not that concerned with discerning what is true and what isn't or with describing an external world seperate from the social context that produces it. Rather, it's interested in the complex layers of the 'actual', that is, how society and culture work as filters through which humans perceive and interpret such an external world- and showing how they do so in very creative ways. In this sense, anthropology can study the future not by concerning itself too much with predictions of what the future will look like in actual terms but by focusing precisely on the imaginations and projections that people have and produce of the future.
This, however, doesn't meant we're limiting ourselves to what is actually observable and loosing focus on the actual interesting questions about what the future holds. Quite the opposite, it's actually making a strong claim about how the present crucially informs and shapes emerging future possibilities and probabilities. This implies an even more radical statement about the future made by Pink & Salazar (2017:18), which contradicts many of our popular ideas about the future, which is that “the future is never a tabula rasa of endless possibilities.”
Understanding technology through anticipatory anthropology
That is exactly what the field of Anticipatory Anthropology does, a field which is surprisingly older than one might think and actually goes back to the legacy of Margaret Mead who has written extensively on the topic. What draws the field together is the observation that humans have and make heavy use of the capacity to anticipate. People have dreams, fears and hopes regarding the imminent and distant future - and express these all the time.
Technology is, and has long been, at the very heart of all Western imaginings of the future. Whether it is robots or flying cars, new technologies are imagined to shift the possibilities of human life in radical ways. Big, powerful corporations today play a central role in this. What is so interesting about their role is how they contribute to a dynamic that could be described as ‘unequal futuring’ or unequal access to the future.
In a previous blog post, I’ve alluded to the ethnographic work of STS scholars Grint and Woolgar who point to influential power imbalances in ‘user-centred' design processes in a company dedicated to the manufacturing of micro-computers for educational purposes (Grint and Woolgar 1997:78). Although conducted in 1997, much is still true for the present. It is typical for corporations to spent large sums of money and resources on determining what the future might hold and how requirements and actions of users might change. However, in that effort of thinking through and placing strong emphasis on future scenarios (often in a race against competitors) corporate actors actually develop the framework and conditions of the future they are trying to predict.
"Looking at technology through a future lens also teaches us a lot about the general nature of technology and what effects it has in our present. It shows us that more than providing solutions, what technologies really do is create possibilities."
There are many (more recent) examples of interesting fieldwork carried out in the space of future and technology, for example, Hannah Knox’s fieldwork in Manchester which looked at the city’s plans to transform and prepare for the transformation from a post-industrial to a much anticipated new ‘knowledge’ economy. What is so interesting about ethnographic work like Knox’s is that it pays attention to the passage from the present to the future. It looks at planning and ‘futuring’ efforts and locates them in the present, within strikingly mundane processes. It thereby helps us understand which ideas of the future persist into the future, which get lost or abandoned and how these decisions come about.
Looking at technology through a future lens, then, teaches us a lot about the general nature of technology and what effects it has in our present. It shows us that more than providing solutions, what technologies really do is create possibilities.
Going forward: What might anticipatory user experience research entail?
How might we research the user experience of emerging technologies that are predicted to be part of people’s future lives but aren’t really here yet? ‘Anticipatory user experience’ is a term that has been circulated quite a lot amongst UX practitioners and focuses attention on anything that happens before the actual interaction with a 'product'. This could be all actions that users take in order to prepare for the first interaction or their general expectations around this experience. However, looking back at the ways that the relationship of the future wiht the present has been theorised in anticipatory anthropology, I think this attention could benefit from an expansion in focus, to include more interesting aspects and perspectives on future use that go beyond simply what users expect this interaction to be.
As part of a wider research team, anthropologist Sarah Pink has just recently brought together interesting methods in a volume titled “Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds” (2017). When researching user experience in an anticipatory mode, the volume shows us, we can and should draw on many different creative methods and techniques: From the production of speculative documentaries that blur the lines between fact and fiction, films about potential futures co-created with various participants, to workshop activities that deliberately confront participants with uncertainty and situations of uncertainty. In another, especially interesting example, Pink herself conducts in-car ethnographies to explore the future of autonomous driving. She does this by employing existing technologies and familiar commuting scenarios as probes to imagine the future possibilities of this technology.
The volume is an incredibly interesting array for any UX researcher interested in playfully analysing and speculating about the future with their research participants.
Here are further resources:
As part of a wider research team, anthropologist Sarah Pink has just recently brought together interesting methods in a volume titled “Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds” (2017). When researching user experience in an anticipatory mode, the volume shows us, we can and should draw on many different creative methods and techniques: From the production of speculative documentaries that blur the lines between fact and fiction, films about potential futures co-created with various participants, to workshop activities that deliberately confront participants with uncertainty and situations of uncertainty. In another, especially interesting example, Pink herself conducts in-car ethnographies to explore the future of autonomous driving. She does this by employing existing technologies and familiar commuting scenarios as probes to imagine the future possibilities of this technology.
The volume is an incredibly interesting array for any UX researcher interested in playfully analysing and speculating about the future with their research participants.
Here are further resources:
The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future (2005)
edited by Robert B. Textor
Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds (2017)
edited by Juan Francisco Salazar, Sarah Pink, Andrew Irving, Johannes Sjöberg
Un/certainty (2014)
by Sarah Pink, Yoko Akama and Participants
edited by Robert B. Textor
Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds (2017)
edited by Juan Francisco Salazar, Sarah Pink, Andrew Irving, Johannes Sjöberg
Un/certainty (2014)
by Sarah Pink, Yoko Akama and Participants
Presenting my work 'Technology in a share home' at 4SSydney 2018!
I will participate in this year's Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Conference in Sydney (4SSydney) this August. I'll be sharing and discussing my work Technology in a shared home as part of this year’s Making and Doing session.
4S is a an international society that brings together researchers and practitioners of the interdisciplinary field Social Studies of Science and Technologies (often referred to as STS). Broadly speaking, STS researchers study the social context of technological systems and scientific production, which themselves are often thought of as operating seperate from such social contexts, or, more generally, anything that touches on the realm of humanities.
Each year, the 4S Making and Doing sessions take a unique place within the conference program. They give participants the opportunity to share "on-the-ground practices and innovations in scholarly knowledge work in a range of formats extending beyond academic papers or books".
My work will be part of the Methods Practices panel. Along with a diverse group of practitioners and researchers, I'll be contributing to a broader reflection on experimental methods practices in science and technology research.
My contribution touches on the idea of a 'smart home' and explores through a short digital ethnography what this technology means and does in a very specific context of a share house. The work takes the form of a website where I present the outcomes of this ethnography through only a few images and hyperlinks. My presentation at the conference will explore new modes of ethnographic representation and discuss ways of producing and experimenting with non-linear narratives.
The 4S conference website includes a full abstract of my submission and a full list of submissions to the Methods Practices panel.
The 4S conference website includes a full abstract of my submission and a full list of submissions to the Methods Practices panel.
4SSydney will take place from August 29 to September 1 at the Sydney International Convention Centre (ICC) and Powerhouse Museum.
Experiencing the reterritorialized city: Instagram Stories
A lot has been written about the meaning of the local in the context of a "globalised" world. When I first became interested in what the role was of digital technologies in shaping the way people live and experience what surrounds them I decided to investigate how these technologies were changing our perception of space and place. What I found was an interesting dynamic that was twofold: digital technologies both increased a feeling of uprooting and offered myriad new possibilities to create, mold and shape our relationship to places and "the local". Instagram stories is an incredibly interesting example of this dynamic. Before I delve into some of the details of why I think that way, let me just give a bit of background about what exactly technologies have to do with changing perceptions of place.
Uprooting and non-places in a globalised world
My first exploration of place was part of my bachelor thesis and I took Marc Augé's essay 'Non-Places' as a starting point. Here, Augé coins the term 'non-places' to describe the observation that people spend more and more of their time in transient spaces like airports or shopping malls. According to Augé, non-places are non-places because they lack the core quality that defines a place: identity, history and relations. In airports and shopping malls, according to Augé, people remain anonymous and do not share common social references. In fact, whether they are at an airport in Paris or in San Francisco might not even matter because of the generic nature of these places (they might both have a Starbucks, designed in the exact same way and providing the exact same offers).
My first exploration of place was part of my bachelor thesis and I took Marc Augé's essay 'Non-Places' as a starting point. Here, Augé coins the term 'non-places' to describe the observation that people spend more and more of their time in transient spaces like airports or shopping malls. According to Augé, non-places are non-places because they lack the core quality that defines a place: identity, history and relations. In airports and shopping malls, according to Augé, people remain anonymous and do not share common social references. In fact, whether they are at an airport in Paris or in San Francisco might not even matter because of the generic nature of these places (they might both have a Starbucks, designed in the exact same way and providing the exact same offers).
Now, Augé's argument is way more differentiated than I can expose in this brief post and he acknowledges that what is a non-place for one person might not be a non-place for another person, one who might connect memories and references to that place. However, what Augé is saying is that, increasingly (bare in mind this was in 1992) non-places are taking over the lives of people. And this precise argument overlaps with much of what has been said in the literature about globalisation: that processes of globalisation create a feeling of uprooting and a felt "homelessness". From an anthropological perspective interested in offering a complex picture of reality, this argument is of course not easy to make. It lives off the romanticised idea of a primordial village where everyone knows each other and the juxtaposition of this ideal against the notion of a anonymous city life in which even neighbours never speak or interact with one another. However, the impacts of an increasingly interconnected world are not easy to discard either.
With new technologies, the local is no longer the unique context of our experiences
Just think about how mobile phones make it possible for us to be reachable for someone, independently of our or their location. We can communicate with and speak to our friends even when we are far apart, changing thus the meaning of borders, physical distance and what it means to simply live apart. Having access to the internet contributes to these changes in important ways, too. Consuming images, content and opinions from across the world and far away places we gather the deep impression that those images give us a more complete and comprehensive picture of the world that is of matter, meaning and interest to us than our local experiences and observations ever could. With the emergence of a global or transnational public, then, local places and physical points of encounter cease to be concrete and discrete as they no longer generate the unique context of our lived experiences. Where we live and what physically surrounds us might no longer be meaningful for defining who we are or how we make sense of the world. The authority of the local experience erodes under the pressure of interconnection.
But people don't just get lost and disoriented. Just as uprooting and homelessness start to prevail, we re-territorialise and create new meaning and new systems of reference in an interconnected world. Where home is is no longer simply defined in local terms, we use other places, real or imagined, to create a sense of intimacy and locality. And digital technologies play a huge part in this. Instagram stories, for example.
Browsing through content in explorer mode,
Instagram suggests a location-based story
compilation to users.
Instagram stories offers us a new way to see, experience and understand the city
Launched as a feature to the photo sharing application in 2016, Instagram stories allows its users to share small photo and video snippets or compilations of several snapshots and short videos that expire after 24 hours. An interesting way Instagram has made people's stories available to other users is through the location search function. When users click the magnifier icon to explore content related to their 'subscriptions', a small circle with their current location appears in a top row of stories. Mine says 'Sydney'. When I click on that rounded icon, the stories I see are not one a particular user has created or uploaded. Rather, it's a combination of video stories of different users that Instagram automatically compiles. As with many social media apps, the algorithm and the logic of how this is created and compiled is not entirely transparent to users. The only thing that is apparent is that all of the users that appear have somehow activated and tagged their location in their published story. Instagram recognises this tag and shows what these people have filmed to other nearby users, users like me.
Users' stories in Sydney by day...
The videos that appear are recent publications, mostly published within the last hour. I have to say, I've made it a bit of a habit to check these location stories regularly. Being almost in real time and showing you videos of people in different locations around the city, the story gives you an astonishing impression of what live is like for others. Just as the rhythm of city life, the content of stories shifts with times of day. People film themselves going to the gym or working out in the morning, you see lunches being eaten around the same time at noon and people in bars and parties at night. The location-based stories show you around the city you live in through the eyes of anonymous faces, and yet, they show you familiar situations and places. Through watching these stories, users might find out what the weather is like when they are still in bed on a Saturday morning, or what the waves are like at their nearby beach before heading there themselves. They might use other people's stories to discover new places in their cities, as they find out about an art installation or event happening at that very moment just a few minutes away from them. Or what about other places? Through the search functionality, viewing compilations of stories is not restricted to a users' current location. By typing in any location in the world, Instagram will present a combination of strangers' first-hand impressions of what surrounds them. It suffices to say, Instagram stories offers users new ways of experiencing, making sense of and creating meaning in places.
....and users' stories in Sydney by night.
For any researcher interested in people's experiences in the world, Instagram stories offers myriad possibilities to study places and their lived realities. As with many of these social media offerings, privacy is of course a core concern and the ethic and moral implications of seeing people in the intimate setting of their homes in such a crude public way are not easily negated. What is true, however, is that those new ways of seeing, experiencing (and consuming) the lives of people that surround us, are also slowly changing our perceptions of public and private.
In a reversal of view points, we might say to know more than we used to about what the people that surround us are doing everyday, how they experience and make meaningful the places they live in. Experiencing the city through the eyes of others might create the very common references that Augé says are disappearing. And so, in a world where connections reach out to far-flung places, the city might just have moved a little bit closer together.
Complexity-starved
I have criticised common conceptions and industry practices of ‘user-centered’ design on this blog in the past, for example here. However, having now worked alongside designers, project managers, business analysts and executives and having experienced the approaches and processes in the field of UX first hand, I have come to realise that there are things I'm particularly at odds with and I haven't yet been able to put my finger on them. As someone with a background in anthropology and trained in the practice of ethnographic research, I guess working in UX I have become painfully aware of some of the many pitfalls of an industry eager to illuminate and provide bright and clamant insights into the world of 'users'.
The enemy of such work, of course, are the many inconsistencies, contradictions and uncertainties that come with observing and talking to people. Let's take usability testing, for instance. Sitting in a lab next to the participant, the UX researcher is tasked with finding out just how good, or bad, a product performs against the needs and expectations of this user. The person sitting next to the researcher is of course not anyone, he or she has been identified as an ideal participant. Why? Because it's been decided that this person is likely to be using this product in a real life context, whether that is because they can afford it, because they are already users of similar products or simply because the product has been designed with their needs and expectations in mind. In that case, the testing session becomes about validating one's assumptions about who the user might be, to test one's image of the user against the 'real' user. I, for one, must admit that this circular logic has always escaped me. What's more, I've come to think of this practice as missing an incredible opportunity to make designs better.
Often what’s behind the narrow definition of who the participants should be is the urge to control who gets a say in testing. Even if it’s subconsciously, with our decisions on who we should hear and observe we are already limiting our possibilities to learn.
"The testing session becomes about validating one's assumptions about who the user might be, to test one's image of the user against the 'real' user. [...] I've come to think of this practice as missing an incredible opportunity to make designs better."
While this view mirrors many of my own observations and impressions from engaging with users, I would take a further step to argue that complex, multilayered and seemingly "ineffective" use of technology is not only unproblematic from a user perspective but the actual point. It is through this use that people can grasp, understand and make sense of things.
Dawn Nafus' ethnographic work on the Quantified Self movement (QS) provides an enlightening account of what it means to make sense of things through use. Her informants were using their phones, smartwatches and various other devices to self-track all aspects of their lives, such as the hours of sleep they got in a day. Importantly, for QSers this was not simply about looking at a bunch of abstract figures and assessing (or letting the technology assess) what they meant, nor were they ceding complete authority to the supposed objectivity of the data. Instead, they were using it as a technology of noticing and self-reflection. And in the quest for heightened self-awareness, seemingly effective use of technology, through shortcuts and automation, was not only undesired but often detrimental. As one informant explained: “This glucose monitor will automatically upload my glucose levels, but I had to go back to doing it manually. When it’s all automatic, you aren’t really aware of what it is saying.”
Here, entering the data manually, is an integral part of the process of understanding and making sense of the data. And this is not only the case for members of the Quantified Self movement. Often, people comparing and researching products online make decisions about what to buy by juggling different devices, opening various tabs and making lists on papers. When decision-making is contingent on looking in various places and engaging with many levels of details and devices, a machine spitting out an answer may not be helpful at all.
More than often, we fall back into a reflex of ordering, streamlining and making neat. In the end, what we design for might not align at all with the reality of use. Providing automation and offering shortcuts when it's the journey, not arriving at the destination that counts, is an awkwardly misplaced attempt at adding value. Reducing complexity sometimes means destroying the very value a technology provides.
"When decision-making is contingent on looking in various places and engaging with many levels of details and devices, a machine spitting out an answer may not be helpful at all."
I have always found that the conception of ethnography that most resonated with me is one that sees field sites not as “an object to be explained, but a contingent window into complexity” (Candea 2007). Focusing on moments of controversies, tensions, sticking with uncertainty for a while before trying to resolve and untangle it from the lived realities, makes us engage with and discover the core qualities that make people creative.
When we look behind the flaws of people’s inefficient use we can uncover what is really at stake for people when they engage in meticulous calculations, research and tracking processes. In seeing how people use devices and solutions differently than envisioned, prescribed and intended we can recognise the actual value that these technologies have for people, and design to enhance this value. When we allow for overflow, we admit surprising results to inspire us in creating better design.
Understanding the work of visual representations in circulating information and data: The example of Powerpoint
It is often said that we live in a ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘knowledge society’. While it is commonly understood that making sense and understanding vast quantities of data is essential to the work of such an economy, the role of representations and visualizations is often understated or ignored. The assumption here is, of course, that they simply communicate data in a more or less neutral way. In “Raw Data is an Oxymoron” (Gitelman 2013), an excellent collection of essays on the imaginaries of data as a ‘natural resource’, Gitelman reminds us that data is always ‘cooked’, that is, it is always in some way processed.
In this short exploration, I will argue that the attention to forms and aesthetics of digital representations can help us understand their mediating role and how they shape conceptions of knowledge. By looking at the example of Powerpoint, I want to draw out the formal and aesthetic properties that are specific to it, see what kind of work Powerpoint accomplishes and how it creates knowledge. We will see that Powerpoints are not mere visual aids to oral presentations but powerful artifacts in their own right.
In this short exploration, I will argue that the attention to forms and aesthetics of digital representations can help us understand their mediating role and how they shape conceptions of knowledge. By looking at the example of Powerpoint, I want to draw out the formal and aesthetic properties that are specific to it, see what kind of work Powerpoint accomplishes and how it creates knowledge. We will see that Powerpoints are not mere visual aids to oral presentations but powerful artifacts in their own right.
The Powerpoint software, developed by Microsoft, is familiar to virtually anyone who interacts with personal computers on a regular basis or who is familiar with the modern workplace or educational system. Scholars that have studied the use of Powerpoint in scientific and commercial settings (such as advertising agencies, consulting firms and high-tech companies), have not only highlighted the pervasive use of Powerpoint but also observed that there is almost an inherent expectation to present findings or discussions visually through some “slide-based” digital software. PowerPoint, thus, „is a normative and normalising“ part of many corporate workplaces (Wakeford 2006). In most firms Powerpoint presentations are used more generally to enable both internal and external communication. Interestingly, most discussions of Powerpoint that I have looked at mention, at least at some point, a lot of people’s opposition towards the (mis)use of the Powerpoint software. Commenting on this opposition, media scholars Yates and Orlikowski observe in their visits to offices and workplaces that
"In spite of this opposition, however, project managers continued to use PowerPoint extensively. Because they wished to achieve a consistent look-and-feel to both internal and client presentations, they also insisted that everyone in the firm use PowerPoint and its built-in features."
One of the things this makes evident is that the Powerpoint software and the way it is enacted creates a very distinctive and often sought-for form of digital (re)presentation. But what is this form?
Composing a Powerpoint presentation
Powerpoint presentations typically consist of a sequence of ‘slides’. The slides’ design is typically predefined by one of the software’s or a firm’s standard templates. Yates and Orlikowski observe a series of what they call ‘form expectations’. While these expectations arise from previous norms, such as the preference for bullet points over complete sentences, that also exists without Powerpoint (for example in bureaucratic documents) and have existed before it (for example in presentations with transparencies), Powerpoint does reinforce these norms in that it institutionalizes them by making them simple to use and insert. Some recurrent features of Powerpoint presetations are graphs, tables, photographs and agenda and title slides that introduce the subsections of the presentation. An important part of working with Powerpoint, thus, is arranging and composing disparate media forms and data sets in a new medium in order to bind them into a single artifact.
The most distinctive part of a Powerpoint presentation is the bullet point. The property of bullet points might be best described by its lack of such. As anthropologist Strathern has pointed out in her analysis of formal documents, since bullet points are self-contained and each one stands for and by itself, a list of bullet points exhibits no internal relation between its discrete points, unlike a sentence or a text it has no “argumentative structure” and can be rearranged in any order. For Strathern it follows that one cannot critique them or in fact do any intellectual operation on them. They are, thus, mere “bits of information” that can be shuffled and compared.
Distributing a Powerpoint presentation
Importantly, in commercial settings the Powerpoint slides (called “decks”) are in itself often the only final output or “deliverable” that concludes a project, replacing what was once the written report. Thus, in certain contexts where this is the case, the central role of the Powerpoint presentations for the work done in these firms should not be underestimated. I have myself worked in consultancies where this is the case. The creation of a Powerpoint is often central to the work of these firms and involves many people simultaneously. This was in no way typical for older forms of presentations, such as the ones done with transparencies. A common practice in these collaborative works, is copying content from previous presentations and rearranging it for new ones. Whether or not one goes so far as to claim that the software “reinforces the interchangeability of content” (as Crang 2003 claims), it does seem that Powepoint allows for the fencing off, dividing up and easy reshuffling of data. With the Powerpoint presentation, knowledge is generated through the mixing of bits and pieces. The resulting Powerpoint file becomes a powerful artifact of knowledge.
At no point is this more evident than in the emailing, sharing and forwarding of Powerpoint files. Especially when the Powerpoint presentation is no longer primarily a visual aid for an actual presentation, but more an end report, the delivery and distribution of a Powerpoint becomes the concluding step of a project and the file the “real object of value”. As such, it can certainly take on a life of its own when it is no longer in the hands of its creators but sent to others who are not familiar with how the Powerpoint came to be. Here, it is also important to remember, that the elevation of the Powerpoint presentation from a visual aid to an “end report” occurs without many further formal or aesthetic changes and adjustments: it is still mostly a sequence of bullet points and data graphs. The formal qualities of a Powerpoint presentation do, then, also facilitate the disintegration and reassembling of its parts. The crucial point though, is that a Powerpoint is assumed to be transferable and, as Wakeford points out, it is “seen as an objects that can be transmitted without being attached to the context of their production“.
At no point is this more evident than in the emailing, sharing and forwarding of Powerpoint files. Especially when the Powerpoint presentation is no longer primarily a visual aid for an actual presentation, but more an end report, the delivery and distribution of a Powerpoint becomes the concluding step of a project and the file the “real object of value”. As such, it can certainly take on a life of its own when it is no longer in the hands of its creators but sent to others who are not familiar with how the Powerpoint came to be. Here, it is also important to remember, that the elevation of the Powerpoint presentation from a visual aid to an “end report” occurs without many further formal or aesthetic changes and adjustments: it is still mostly a sequence of bullet points and data graphs. The formal qualities of a Powerpoint presentation do, then, also facilitate the disintegration and reassembling of its parts. The crucial point though, is that a Powerpoint is assumed to be transferable and, as Wakeford points out, it is “seen as an objects that can be transmitted without being attached to the context of their production“.
"[…] there is a commonly observable phenomenon across many contexts in which ‘knowledge’ is produced. It is a move that renders multiple values generated by complex social processes into simple and often commodifiable value located in objects, as if those objects retained their value shorn of the social relations in which they have effect. In other words, knowledge becomes a matter of economy."
What Powerpoint and many other visualization tools do, then, is help to advance the logic of a 'knowledge society' by turning data and information into objects that can be easily transferred and exchanged, much like commodities. And that is precisely why, despite many people's opposition, the business world continues to make such heavy use and depend so fundamentally on it.
Moving Wardrobes Project: Ethnographic Vignette I
Gaining access to the field is generally not an easy task, but it seems much harder if one relies on contacting strangers through online discussion boards and when the proposed project implies not answering predefined questionnaires through online surveys but visiting participants in their own homes.
In this initial phase full of disappointing dead-end approaches, it feels nice to at least start somewhere and move in some direction. For this very reason I decided to visit two local flea markets during the weekend and talk to some of the people selling their clothes. Even tough I'm interested specifically in clothes sold online, I thought this would maybe give a good first impression for learning more generally about second-hand clothes. Little did I think about the fact that looking at flea markets and talking to people who did both (selling used clothing on flea markets and online) would point to the ways in which flea markets are radically different to online second-hand marketplaces. Another positive side effect of my trip to these markets is getting to know people and inviting them in person to participate. People seem way less reluctant and quickly find themselves showing and talking about individual items of clothes. I will definitely repeat these visits as they prove to be a good (material) experience and immersion into the world of second-hand clothes. For now, these are my impressions of my first two visits.
In this initial phase full of disappointing dead-end approaches, it feels nice to at least start somewhere and move in some direction. For this very reason I decided to visit two local flea markets during the weekend and talk to some of the people selling their clothes. Even tough I'm interested specifically in clothes sold online, I thought this would maybe give a good first impression for learning more generally about second-hand clothes. Little did I think about the fact that looking at flea markets and talking to people who did both (selling used clothing on flea markets and online) would point to the ways in which flea markets are radically different to online second-hand marketplaces. Another positive side effect of my trip to these markets is getting to know people and inviting them in person to participate. People seem way less reluctant and quickly find themselves showing and talking about individual items of clothes. I will definitely repeat these visits as they prove to be a good (material) experience and immersion into the world of second-hand clothes. For now, these are my impressions of my first two visits.
Strolling through the flea markets, I approached those stalls which sold predominantly clothes. I did not, however, talk to those who were professional sellers and had permanent stalls at the markets. Professional dealers were easily distinguishable from private sellers, in that their clothes were arranged in a more organized way, both in the way they were presented but also in that they seemed to follow a specific style (such as a 'vintage' style). Also, and this is probably the most important observation, the private sellers' clothes are practically the same sort of mass-produced, 'in-trend' garments that are being sold at high street shops. Consequently, and as emphasized by all the sellers I've talked to, people who were shopping at their stalls were essentially looking for a good bargain since they could not so much hope to find one of a kind or rare pieces.
As I had expected, the sellers were mostly women and stalls were shared with female friends or relatives (some had also brought their husbands or boyfriends and some of their stuff along). I could spot two types of age groups, one was in their 20s, and the other type of sellers were in their 50s or 60s. As the former group is more relevant to my specific interest, online marketplaces, I did mostly talk to them.
What do we really mean when we say 'user-centered' design?
While I was writing an essay on the question "How is the user as a person differently constituted within the fields of HCI and Anthropology" I realized that from an anthropological perspective the industry's view of 'user-centered' design is in many ways a pretty misleading idea. I stumbled upon a few interesting articles, some from STS scholars, but the most interesting ones by anthropologists working in the design industry analyzing their and their colleagues work with a sharp ethnographer's eye.
Typically, within a company setting the groups of actors involved in a design project are well defined and kept (mostly) separate. The work of developing, say, a technical product, then, always becomes one of mediating between technicians, designers, and possibly, ethnographers. In this mediation, the seemingly good- natured idea of ‘user-centered design’ works to conceal significant power relations between so-called ‘users’ and ‘producers’. In one HCI study I looked at, the designers used questionnaires as a way to explore what users wanted. But this alone did not seem to be enough to define system requirements, because later on, it was pedagogic experts who were consulted to speak on behalf of the ‘user’ and to further explore how future use could be envisioned and how the technology should look like. This is very similar to what STS scholars Grint and Woolgar describe in their ethnography of a company dedicated to the manufacturing of micro-computers for educational purposes. They observe ”an effective rationale for not placing too much emphasis on users’ views.”. And they note:
"According to this perspective, configuring the user involves the determination of likely future requirements and actions of users. Since the company tends to have better access to the future than users, it is the company’ s view which defines users’ future requirements." (Grint and Woolgar 1997:78).
The ‘user’ here is an outsider to the company that does not understand the technology. This position is reinforced in the stage of usability trials. Here, users are directly exposed to the project, but only when a prototype is ready for use. This is important to highlight, as usability trials confront the user with an already black-boxed technology, that he or she has to somehow try to relate to. In light of this, in this blog post Seavers goes even so far as to parallel the commercial idea of the ‘user’ to that of the ‘savage’, signaling that both terms designate “a class of people disempowered in relation to technology”.
An anthropological understanding of the user, then, recognizes that a lot of technologies are “inflected by the sensibilities of technical elites” (Nafus 2014). It could be argued that designers, in their naivety of 'user-centeredness' are complicit in reproducing this power imbalance. As Nafus notes, users “who do not fit the mold must work even harder as they appropriate technologies for their own purposes”. The so-called ‘user-centred’ design process, then, produces ready-made products that set rules to the game and thus constrain users to play by their own rules. But this is no easy work, as users are not simply on the receiving end but actively interact with products and constantly negotiate and modify the rules that are inscribed in the technology and thus the developers’ idea about who they are and what they do. Anthropologically, the ‘user’, then, can be better grasped with the idea of a designer.
Nafus' article “Design for X: Prediction and the Embeddedness (or Not) of Research in Technology Production.” was published in: Subversion, Conversion, Development : Cross-Cultural Knowledge Exchange and the Politics of Design (2014), which I highly recommend.
And this is Grint and Woolgar's ethnography "The Machine at Work : Technology, Work, and Organization" from 1997.
And this is Grint and Woolgar's ethnography "The Machine at Work : Technology, Work, and Organization" from 1997.
Moving wardrobes – Introducing a new project
I'm currently looking for German users of the second-hand online marketplace Kleiderkreisel.de that are interested in participating in my fieldwork on the circulation of second-hand clothes and its implications for questions of sustainability. Here you can read a project description in German.
Some thoughts on sustainable design
“We are responsible for the world in which we live not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing, but because it is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping” (Barad 2007:203)
In the last blog post I dealt with the question 'What is design and does it make a difference?' Today I want to take those ideas to look at the design of sustainable products.
In no way should this be a comprehensive discussion on the state of sustainable design, but more of a first attempt to link the ideas on the agency of humans and non-humans with contemporary practices in that field. The ideas I put forth in the previous post suggest that design plays a fundamental role in shaping our actions. This is the first consequence for designers, for as Barad’s quote above makes clear, through their work, designers make themselves accountable for the products they design and the actions they enable. Designers have used this realization of the importance of their work to promote the development of sustainable products and thus make human lifestyles a little bit more sustainable. Design, as informed by the Actor-Network-Theory, has the capacity to promote sustainability precisely because configurations of humans and non-humans can be changed “in such a way that we can intra-act responsibly” (Suchman 2007).
Environmental questions have been linked to design since the 1970s. Since then, design theory and practice concerned with environmental issues has been reinterpreted and broadened, taking the field from “green” design, to “ecodesign”, to “sustainable” design. Behind this transition lies the realization that environmental issues touch on all aspects of our daily lives and that the “global model of development” is in itself structurally unsustainable (Manzini 2010). This is similar to what Fry (2011) suggests. For the field of sustainable design this transition means that when designers were concerned with “Green Design” in the 1980s, the aim was to design artifacts that were considered less harmful for the environment. This could mean making changes to clothing fabrics and garments by using low-chemical organic materials instead of synthetic ones that are more polluting.
With the advent of the term ‘ecodesign’ in the late 1980s, the focus shifts to a systems approach, concerned not only with the redesign of single products, but often entire systems of products or even entire industries. One approach developed within that phase is the Lifecycle Assessment or Lifecycle Analysis (LCA). The aim of a lifecycle assessment is to quantify and balance a product’s environmental impact. This is done for all stages of its lifecycle: production, use and disposal. Recently, there has been a wave of critique on this type of approach, suggesting not only that its methodology lacks transparency and that the way the impact data is acquired heavily varies from one model to another, but also that the design proposals resulting from lifecycle analysis are insufficient to solve environmental problems.
In their article “The things that matter”, Verbeek and Kockelkoren present the work of a group of Dutch industrial designers called “Eternally Yours” who propose ways of making sustainable products that go beyond the “technical” solutions that Lifecycle Assessments offer. “Eternally Yours” sees the fundamental problem of making sustainable products as lying in a culture that throws away products before they start being unusable. With this we move from a focus on ‘ecodesign’ to the present stage: ‘sustainable design’. For designers, this move implies a shift away from the design of artifacts or systems of artifacts, to the design of ‘culture’. For “Eternally Yours” this shift means that instead of focusing on technical improvements regarding materials or fabrication processes, the most important work of sustainable design is to make products that people will not want to discard and replace at a high speed. They seek to increase the psychological lifespan of products.
From an anthropological perspective that regards things as important actors in shaping our actions, the reconsideration of design from the unit of the single product, to compromising users, their bond with things and modes of usage, is without a doubt a productive improvement in the creation of sustainable design. However, this shift in vision has also brought with it a change in focus from the material to the symbolic. In their article, Verbeek and Kockelkoren examine the work of “Eternally Yours” critically, concluding that trying to extend the ‘psychological lifespan’ of a product does little to solve the problems of sustainability. “Eternally Yours” tries to create and maintain the bond between a user and a product by making them appreciate the object, for example through choosing materials that seem more attractive with age, strengthening the relationship to companies and their services, or creating stories that “give products more “character””.
These ideas, Verbeek and Kockelkoren argue, “show a certain one-sidedness” as they do not work with material qualities of objects, but with nonmaterial signs. Even when looking at aged leather, “Eternally Yours” does not look at the material and what it does but at what it stands for: high attractiveness. In the end, a product like this could, and will probably be replaced with another one that has the same sign-value.
So?
From an anthropological perspective that recognizes things as what they are, sustainable design seems to benefit from its broadening of scope and from understanding sustainability in more integrated ways, an understanding that encompasses all aspects of culture. However, culture here must mean the relationship between people and material things, and not between people and signs.
The Actor-Network Theory helps understand the role of design in shaping our actions and thus brings forward a view in which design can (to a certain extent) change and improve environmental problems. As Manzini notes: “design can "give form" to a changing world, and "offer opportunities" for new types of behavior”. But since design is concerned with the intimate bond between people and things, the redesign of a world that is sustainable might be more complicated than contemporary design ‘solutions’ assume. After all, Fry’s quest for a redesign of design might be on the right track.
Here some recommended readings:
Design Anthropology (2013)
edited by Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto and Rachel Charlotte Smith
Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys (2008)
by Kate Fletcher
Design as Politics (2011)
by Tony Fry
The Designed World: Images, Objects, Environments (2010)
edited by Richard Buchanan, Dennis P. Doordan, and Victor Margolin.
What is design and does it make a difference?
The way one answers the question “Does design make a difference?” subsequently shapes one’s definition of what ‘design’ is. And how one answers this question depends on one’s understanding of the relation between humans and material objects. In this rather long blog post, I want to put forth an understanding of humans and objects informed by the Actor- Network-Theory. At its heart, the Actor-Network-Theory mobilizes the notion of ‘agency’ to explain human and non-human relations. I will argue that because agency is relational, design has the capacity to create and define human agency.
Meaning over matter?
Let us start this inquiry by challenging the assumption that design as the process of giving an object a specific material form, has any broader, sociocultural implications – let us argue that design makes absolutely no sociocultural difference. Csikszentmihalyi’s psychological study on the meanings of household object might help to prove this point.
Csikszentmihalyi conducted 82 interviews with different families in the Chicago area to find out how art affected the consciousness of the viewer. He quickly noticed that his informants had little to say about the ‘art’ objects that they owned, but they had a lot to say about other artifacts in their houses, which were charged with meanings and towards which they felt very strong attachments. Although there were quite a few (graphic) art objects among the mentioned artifacts, Csikszentmihalyi makes this interesting observation:
Of the 537 reasons given for cherishing the 136 graphic works, only sixteen percent had anything to do with how the picture looked. The objects were special because they: conveyed memories (sixteen percent), or referred to family members (seventeen percent), or to friends (thirteen percent). Formal qualities alone almost never made a picture valuable to its owner.
What this observation suggests is that the way an object looks, that its material and visual qualities, are not acknowledged by whoever uses or consumes the artifact. Rather it is the symbolic relationship between a person and his personal belongings that we have to look at. This observation poses a problem: How can we claim that design has any significant impact if people seem to see and choose ideas, signs and meanings over the actual object? Does the way things look not matter at all, then?
We do not need to be designers to sense that this claim is extremely reductionist. Csikszentmihalyi argues that visual qualities do indeed matter, but that it is not in a “natural” way that we respond to color and form. Instead, he suggests, these are “responses to meanings attached to configurations of color and form“. These responses result from a process in which visual qualities are linked to values. This is a highly cultural process, as these values develop within groups of people and can be “unanimous or contested, elite or popular, strong or vulnerable, depending on the integration of the culture.”. An interesting thing has happened here. In trying to prove wrong the link between the material qualities of objects and sociocultural aspects, we have instead unveiled its complex and deep entanglement. But Csikszentmihalyi view is not unproblematic, as we will see. It still leaves us in the world of signs.
What the Digital entails: Some Misconceptions
Some helpful notes on common misconceptions that should be avoided (or at least reviewed) when talking about the use, implications, effects or consequences of digital technologies.
The virtual/real divide
In his ethnography of Second Life, Boellstorff has shown that the dichotomy between virtual and real is not very useful: Someone who is selling virtual clothes in the world of 'Second Life' and making a living out of it will tell you that his or her business does have real-life implications. In a similarly way, it would be wrong to assume that human communication through digital media is less 'social' or 'real'than face to face interaction.
What's more, anthropologists like Boellstorff are trying to show us that virtuality is inherent to human culture. He says:
'It is not only that virtual worlds borrow assumptions from real life; virtual worlds show us how, under our very noses, our “real” lives have been “virtual” all along. It is in being virtual that we are human: since it is human “nature” to experience life through the prism of culture, human being has always been virtual being (Boellstorff 2009: 5).
However, Boellstorff does recognize the usefulness of distinguishing between 'virtual' or 'digital' and 'actual' (as in 'physical'). Not only is the distinction meaningful to his informants in 'Second Life' (since participants would exclusively interact with other participants 'in-world') but also does the sole definition of 'digital' prohibit the assumption that those two categories could somehow fall together in the future (like Rogers 'The end of the virtual' suggests)
Read more: 'Digital Anthropology', by Daniel Miller and Heather Horst (2012)
Community/network paradigm
community or community of practice: it's more of a normative and cultural category ('folk notion') that is often used in public rhetoric. It doesn't seem to have an empiric referent so it's not an actual social group that we can study. Also, the notion of community (much like 'culture') sort of imagines a homogenous and bounded group. As Postill puts it 'community of practice proponents have played down questions of power and conflict'(Postill 2011: 13). Postill suggests using Bourdieus concept of 'field' instead.
networks: conceptualizing the internet or digital technologies as 'networks' is an incredibly popular idea (especially in Internet studies). Reviewing the value of this concept can lead to more productive approaches. For example, thinking about the social ties in a certain group as a network oversees all 'the constraints, tangles and disconnects that invariably accompany all human endeavour and should not be left out in a ethnography' (Postill 2011: 15).
Read more: Localizing the Internet, by John Postill (2011); Bringing Things Back to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials, by Tim Ingold (2010)
Global vs local
When turning to a defined, physical place (like Silicon Valley or a neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur) in order to look at local uses, understandings and effects of digital technologies like the Internet we need to avoid the idea that a 'seemingly stationary 'local community' is […]impacted upon by 'global' technologies'(Postill 2011: 11)
Rather, as anthropological scholars of Globalization teach us, not only is the 'global' produced within local structures but global structures themselves produce local ones!
Read more: The Internet, by Daniel Miller (2000); Modernity at large, by Arjun Appadurai (1996)
The digital experience is not universal
While we can not deny the ability of digital technologies to connect people globally and its potential of transforming society and culture as such, ethnographic work on the uses of digital technologies around the world show that there is no evidence of a universal digital experience. Instead, there are interesting approaches like Miller and Slaters concept of 'expansive realization' that triy to explain how digital media like the internet is 'appropiated' in different social and cultural contexts (with regard to the false opposition between global/local we should use the word 'appropriate' with caution)
An Ethnography of Reddit: Some thoughts
Here are some thought on a possible ethnography of Reddit. Some of these questions do not only relate to the specific case of Reddit but could also be asked more generally for other online ethnographies.
What is reddit and how does it work?
The idea of reddit is simple: Users (Redditors) can link to stuff they find on the web and share it with other redditors or simply write something and submit it . Others can give that post 'up' or 'down' votes, depending on whether they like it or not. Users can also comment the post and reply to comments already posted. This basic concept doesn't differ a lot from social networking sites like Facebook or internet forums. But there are some distinct features that make reddit stand out. First, the infrastructure allows for an open communication with all users (you don't have be 'friends' with someone and in most cases you don't have to be a formal member of the specific group to interact with them). Second, the up and down votes create lists of posts that are especially popular in the community. A very popular post raises to the top and will be highly visible for most of the users on the home page (front page). The Front Page itself is a selection of the most popular 'subreddit', which is probably the most distinct feature on reddit. A 'subreddit' is like a subtopic in a forum and there are hundreds of thousands of them. If you chose to post on reddit you would first have to decide which of these thematic sub forums to submit your post to. The subreddits are very diverse and defined by various characteristics like hobbies (r/music r/gaming') or by the type of media submitted (like videos in r/videos) or they can be designed to support and help others (r/personalfinance).
Some thought on how to approach fieldwork on reddit.com:
Picking one subreddit and aspect of Reddit
Generally, any active subreddit could be the subject of an ethnography. However, the bigger subreddits like AskReddit where users ask very general questions about virtually anything would be more difficult to overview due to its high popularity and trying to argue for a single shared culture to exist in this space would be rather difficult. A very interesting but also highly problematic subreddit would be 'circle jerk'. In this subreddit redditors make fun of the stereotypical viewpoints and phrases of redditors and especially the fact that a lot of discussions on reddit could be described as 'preaching to the choir' and the same views are repeated over and over again by like-minded individuals. The fact that redditors in this subreddit interact exclusively in a satirical manner makes serious ethnographic work (like interviews) in this subreddit very difficult.
The research question
Although research questions are more likely to emerge after the first weeks or months of observing and participating in the community (or more precisely: for these questions to emerge the initial phase of observation is indispensable) there are nonetheless some interesting aspects one could focus on from the beginning:
Rules. For example, one could look at the underlying rules of the subreddit. What type of posts are allowed? What behavior is encouraged by the mods? In most subreddits these rules can be found in the sidebar but there are probably more rules that are not necessarily written out but become evident after spending some time on the subreddit.
Interaction. One should also focus on the different types of interaction: Replying, gifting gold, private messaging, up voting, down voting. When do users of the selected user group reach out to private messaging? What makes them up or down vote a post or give reddit gold?
Shared knowledge. An integral part of being a redditor is knowing the memes that are being used. It's important to look out for words, phrases or shared memories and the way they are being used and activated in discussions and the way they contribute to the forming of the community.
A potential problem: The Internet & Place.
The relationship between the on - and offline world.
In what way should Redditors offline lives be included in such an ethnography? Should participant observation extend to these offline worlds or stay in the limits of the online community? To what extend can we ignore offline 'worlds' and still have a representative image of these Redditors?
Some good examples: In his ethnography 'The Internet: an ethnographic approach' about Trinidadians and their use of the internet, Daniel Miller and Don Slater integrate the on-line and the off-line worlds. In fact, this entire ethnography is based on previous ethnographic work in Trinidad that focused solely on the off-line world. What's more, Miller and Slater argue against the notion of a placeless 'cyberspace' and suggest that to understand what the internet is as a whole in this specific ethnography you have to consider what 'being Trini' means (Miller & Slater 2000: 1). On the contrary, in 'Coming of Age in Second Life' Boellstorff (2008) studies 'virtual worlds only 'in their own term'' because 'the vast majority [of participants] interact only in the virtual world'. Nevertheless, Boellstorff understands that these virtual lives have a great impact on the social life in the offline world.
More thoughts to follow.
Recapitulating
It’s been three months since I’ve first started to write on this blog. Today, I want to summarize the most important things of the 'Anthropology: Art or Science?' debate. I want to start with briefly outlining all the texts that the blog posts are based on. Then, I will summarize my blog post and finally I will conclude the work by depicting the results that I gathered from this debate.
Process & Progress
In general, the texts and discussions on this blog so far evolved around three main concerns: First, locating the boundaries between art and anthropology, which includes all discussions on the definition and differentiation of these two fields. Second, the ways in which anthropology studies art and art studies anthropology (this part is mainly concerned with the content of such study). And third, the intersection of anthropology and art, where the boundaries between art and anthropology are more or less dissolved and the concerns are more methodological.
People and Baileys textbook introduction and Carrither’s text ‘Is anthropology art or science?’ deal with our first concern. While both try to maintain a clear distinction between art and science, People and Baileys text does this in a very classical scheme of science and art opposition, while Carrithers rejects the criterion of ‘absolute certainty’. People and Bailey’s text also deals with the second concern: The study of art in anthropology and vice versa. Once again, People and Baileys text represent the classical Art-Anthropology with the assumption that artists communicate encoded ‘meanings and messages in symbolic forms’. Victoria Walter’s text deals with the opposite. Here she depicts artists employing ethnographic methods which enable them to study how ethnographers work. All these texts indirectly imply the question ‘What is art and what is anthropology’ but the question is either never explicitly asked or inherently answered. Therefore, they bring little insight to the ultimate question of where to draw the line between anthropology and art.
Moving to the third concern (the intersection between art and anthropology) we expand into the heart of the debate. Schneider’s ‘Three modes of experimentation with art and ethnography’ suggests using visual experimentation in ethnography as a way of improving general research in anthropology. The three examples that Schneider discusses have obvious traits of an artwork, two are even works by artists. So, to put it in simple terms, Schneider suggests using artistic practices to change the way anthropologists do research. The boundaries between art and anthropology are clearly dissolved with one reaching to the other and the other way round.
Ingold’s and Latour’s texts don’t really deal with the question in the way Schneider does but rather uncover the general flaws of the patterns we think and classify in. In a way, one could say that their concern is the intersection between everything in life.
My focus of attention
The sources of impulse for writing the blog posts came from a variety of input. That input material was not only diverse in form (texts, films and digital projects) but also quite versatile regarding its content. So naturally, during the process of coming up with something to write on the blog I had to focus on aspects and subjects that spoke to me the most. I want to take a brief look at what my subjects of interest were and the aspects that had the biggest impact on my learning process.
The main question I had on my mind during the course and while writing the blog was ‘Where do we draw the line between art and anthropology?’. There is still no definitive answer but the material I considered points to one answer in particular. From the dichotomy between art and science to all the assumptions we make about the things in the world, it seems that we might have to rethink everything. And at this point art could be a helpful pathfinder.
I would say that the core of what I learned is reflected in the blog post ‘Ethnography is about experience’. Schneider’s text as well as the works of the Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab (especially Castaing-Taylor’s and Paravel’s ‘Leviathan’) demonstrate that visually creative attempts to capture the lives and environments of people are of high anthropological value and offer forms of immersion in a way that textual approaches are not able to.
What can be concluded?
In conclusion, looking into this debate offered an insight into the ways in which anthropology uses art and the ways in which art practices can be useful for anthropology. Dealing with the question ‘Art or anthropology?’ as an isolated issue seems to be an impossible endeavor since it is always linked to more general, ontological concerns about the nature of research and the way we come to know.
Generally, there are a lot of scholars in contemporary anthropology identifying new perspectives and ways in which anthropology can be thought of. However, this is still happening within the framework of classical research practices, which, for now, makes it difficult to see how the proposed changes can be put into practice. To me, the practical examples of anthropologists at the SEL indicate how future anthropology could look like.Studying humans / Or the question of agency
If one aspect of anthropology remained largely undisputed – and quite frankly there are not so many aspects left – then it’s the shared understanding that anthropology is concerned with the human. It’s even in the name: anthrōpos, meaning ‘human being’. There it is: a small but significant consensus in anthropology. At least this was my impression before entering the world of Ingold and Latour. Suddenly, I’m not so sure what to make of this idea. At least, the traditional idea of a subject (human) acting upon a lifeless and subordinated object (say a stone) seems to be an inaccurate portrait of reality. I’ll expand on this.
On the one hand we have Ingold. Ingold’s great idea aims at making things alive again, seeing things as embedded in the fluidity of materials in the world. He appeals to the vitality of materials and criticizes every attempt to divide the world into subjects and objects. Rather (by illustrating his point with the example of a catflap) he explains it so:
"[…] would it not make more sense to attribute the operation of the flap to the action into which it was recruited, of the cat’s making its way in or out of doors? Surely, neither the cat nor the flap possess agency; they are rather possessed by the action. Like everything else, as I shall now show, they are swept up in the generative currents of the world."
The point here is that there can’t be a clear-cut distinction between the subject (the cat with its intentions) and the object (the flap) and neither can there be something like an agency because things are always in the making, entangled in the flow of materials and not some finished entities with intentions or agencies.
On the other hand we have Bruno Latour and his Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Just like Ingold, the ANT moves beyond the subject/object dichotomy to seek a better understanding of the relationship between the ‘material’ and the ‘nonmaterial’ world. But it does so in a very different way than Ingold's idea of vitality. The ANT gives importance to the agency and attributes that agency to every actor in the network– this can be a weapon or a person. And their respective actions effect other actors.
Of course this is simplifying a complex theory but my point is that in moving beyond the subject/object scheme – whether we end up with Ingold’s, Latour’s or someone else’s version of it – we have to start dealing with the question if anthropology’s research focus on humans can be maintained in its isolated form. Or whether it needs to be expanded to a broader scope including things that are understood as non-human.
Bruno Latour: anthropologist of science
Where do we draw the line between art and science? I’ve posed this question several times now and still have very different answers. If I were to ask this question to Bruno Latour, sociologist and philosopher, maybe he would say: all these distinctions were produced by what we call modernism.
With modernism we started to separate the human from the non-human world and distinguish between the fields of law, science, politics and so on.
In his work of science study Latour tries to trace back scientific findings to the social mechanisms of knowledge production. One early account in the field of science study was his book ‘Laboratory Life’ from 1979 where he did field work in a laboratory and observed the daily activities of the scientists. In short, his work suggested that scientific facts were socially constructed. While he was once clearly associated with this form of constructivism Latour is now trying to distance himself from such claims: He saw the dangerous influence that his critical ideas had on conspiracy theorists, such as ‘skeptics’ in the climate change ‘debate’. Ever since, Latour is defending himself against the constructivist claims.
Rather than saying that science is just another language, thus constructing what appears to be a reality, Latour suggests that there is in fact an objective reality out there and science is able to uncover that reality. It is able to do so because knowledge is produced in meticulous translation work and with help from technologies that – as the advancement of these technologies shows – are neither fully human nor fully non-human. Thus, Latour cannot be a constructivist but he is neither a realist.
What is he? This a very difficult question to answer. His work seems contradictory and maybe this comes from belonging to the type of thinkers that breaks with established thinking schemes. Just like Tim Ingold. The only thing that I could sum up with certainty is that Latour tries to bring together what has been separated in an attempt to be modern. And while his and Ingolds approaches are both radically different from ‘mainstream’ science they also seem incompatible with one another.
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