Call for papers:

Intertwining design with anthropology:

correspondence and participation

RChD: Creación y Pensamiento - University of Chile

Vol.7, Nº12 | JUN 2022

Guest editor

María Cristina Ibarra, Department of Design, Federal University of
Pernambuco, Brazil. [log in to unmask]

Important dates

from March 17th to April 22th 2022.

Abstract

In this edition of the Journal, we invite design professionals and
professionals from all areas to share their reflections on participatory
processes, where the union of academic and extra-academic knowledge is
evident and where there is a strong anthropological component. The
contributions can serve to explore experiences intertwining them with the
ideas of Latin American thinkers, where there are other perceptions about
time, materials and Eurocentric concepts of design.

Modern age has brought the world to the brink of catastrophe and we need to
do something to overcome this crisis. Design, as the dominant discipline in
modern society, plays an important role in this scenario. In the
relationship between design and anthropology we find opportunities for
action.

For decades, this relationship was based on anthropology as a resource for
design. Ethnography, as the heart of anthropology, has been interesting for
designers, as it promises to reveal a new dimension of “users”. It
investigates not only what people say they do, but also what they actually
do (Wasson, 2000). In this dynamic, the anthropologists' recommendations
are summarized and then the designers translate these findings into design
products.

Alison Clarke (2017) explains that anthropology, as a discipline 'applied'
to design, has dissipated, giving way to a joint practice that questions
what it means to be human today and how humanity could be (re)imagined.
This is the focus of the area of Design Anthropology (DA). A field that
proposes that designers become anthropologists and anthropologists become
designers.

This means that fieldwork would not just be a moment when researchers enter
the world of a certain group of individuals and then write about them.
Fieldwork would also be intentionally interventionist. One of the reasons
why anthropology joins design is to intervene in the field, based on what
is being perceived at that moment. A DA practitioner would not simply be
writing about what happened, about the past, but tuning her attention to
what is happening in the moment, so that she can respond to what she is
perceiving. This means, among other things, that this DA practitioner lets
herself be affected by the world, giving an answer, “giving back”, as the
distinguished British anthropologist Tim Ingold would say. The concept of
correspondence is the basis of what he proposes: a real-time anthropology
that also encompasses the present and the future. Suggesting other paths
for anthropology, he states that it must free itself from ethnography
(INGOLD, 2018).

Correspondence is an attitude that invites oneself to move forward with
people and things, to move forward with them. In design, we can perceive
these correspondences as the answers we give when we encounter the world.
When we correspond, when we get involved in the situation, it is much more
difficult to follow a plan. Design and research processes can be built on
the spot, in the relationship between the body and things. In this way, we
value the body in the design and research processes.

One of the critiques of DA is the linear view of time, structured in past,
present and future. This perspective conceives of the future as the
sequential result of the past and the present. DA approaches propose other
conceptions of time with concepts such as 'emergence' and 'mutual
constitution' of past, present and future (SMITH et al, 2016). Likewise,
for DA, innovation doesn't just come from specialized centers like Silicon
Valley. Innovation, and therefore the future, arises from everyday life.
For Joachim Halse, needs are continually formed “through everyday disputes
between neighbors, relatives, colleagues and the material world in which
they live” (HALSE, 2010, p. 15). Needs cannot be discovered and taken to
the design office for further inspection. The author states that, in order
to tune in to them, it is necessary to engage in everyday responses through
the creation of new horizons of possibilities. In this sense, it is urgent
to be together and foster dialogue with different knowledge, beyond the
academic. Collaborative and participatory practices in design have the
potential to build processes and outcomes more suited to the needs and
desires of humans and more-than-humans (AKAMA et al, 2020).

Participation brings out the experiential knowledge of the participants and
to be in tune with it, as designers, we must open ourselves to the world,
to experiences, to commitments. In this way we would be building more
democratic and plural worlds.

One of the authors who inspires us in participatory processes in Latin
America is Orlando Fals Borda. He was a prominent Colombian sociologist,
pioneer of Participatory Action Research (PAR), an approach that emerged in
Colombia in the 1970s. This sociologist defines PAR not just as a research
methodology, but also as a philosophy of life, which transforms its
practitioners into “sentipensantes” (Fals Borda, 1999, p. 82). He made
essential contributions to rethinking social sciences and Latin American
societies from a decolonial perspective and has been a reference for Arturo
Escobar (sentipensar) and for many other Latin American researchers. The
sociology that he proposed is known as “sentipensante” —thinking-feeling —
(Fals Borda, 2009). In the book "Pluriverse: A Post-Development
Dictionary", researcher Patricia Botero Gómez (2019) defines "Sentipensar",
among other things, as a radical vision and practice of the world, which
questions the dichotomous separation of capitalist modernity between mind
and body, reason and emotion, human being and nature, among others.

AKAMA, Yoko; Light, ANN; KAMIHIRA, Takahito. 2020. Expanding Participation
to Design

with More-Than-Human Concerns. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory
Design Conference 2020 - Participation(s) Otherwise - Vol 1 (PDC ’20: Vol.
1), June 15–20, 2020, Manizales, Colombia. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11
pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3385010.3385016

BOTERO-GÓMEZ, Patricia. 2019. “Sentipensar”. In Pluriverse: A
post-development dictionary, edited by Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo
Escobar, Federico Demaria and Alberto Acosta, 302–305. New Delhi: Tulika
Books.

CLARKE, Alison (Ed.). Design Anthropology. Object Cultures in Transition.
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

ESCOBAR, Arturo. 2014. Sentipensar con la tierra: Nuevas lecturas sobre
desarrollo, territorio y diferencia [Thinking-feeling with the Earth: New
readings on development, territory and

difference]. Medellín: UNAULA.

FALS BORDA, Orlando. 1999. “Orígenes universales y retos actuales de la
IAP” [Universal origins and current challenges of PAR], Análisis Político,
0(38): 73-90. Accessed: 13 oct 2021.
https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/anpol/article/view/79283.

Fals Borda, Orlando. 2009. Una sociología Sentipensante para América Latina
(antología)[A

Sentipensante Sociology for Latin America (Anthology)]. Bogotá,
CLACSO/Siglo del Hombre

Editores.

HALSE, Joachim. Manifesto/Introduction. In: HALSE, Joachim, BRANDT, Eva,
CLARK, Brendon, and BINDER, Thomas. Rehearsing the Future, 2010. p. 10-17.

INGOLD, Tim. That’s Enough about ethnography! HAU: Journal of Ethnographic
Theory 4, no. 1 (Summer 2014): 383-395. Disponível em:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.14318/hau4.1.021. Acesso em:
15 set. 2018.

SMITH, Rachel Charlotte, VANGKILDE, Kasper Tang, KJÆRSGAARD, Mette Gislev,
OTTO, Ton, HALSE, Joachim, and BINDER, Thomas. Design Anthropological
Futures, 2016

WASSON, Christina. “Ethnography in the Field of Design”. In: Human
Organization, vol. 59, n. 4. Society for Applied Anthropology, 2000, p.
377-388.



-- 
*María Cristina Ibarra*
Doutora em Design
Professora Adjunta |  Depto. de Design |
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
Recife (Brasil)
IG/TW: @cris_ibarrah


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