Dear Ken,
Thank you so much for the generosity of advice in your email. My first book of practice focused mostly on questions of marketing as that is the community I have been mostly involved with, so far. At present, gradually moving further into user experience and design ethnography, these are references that will serve me well for future practice and writing. I plan to dwell on them, with the time limitations that being a practitioner often impose on theoretical exploration (alas).
I was unaware that the term 'epistemic transference' was already in circulation. Is it the term or the idea of it? If it's the term, my apologies to the author. Whatever the case, I look forward to learning more about the work of Jack Ox as well.
Very happy to know that a practitioner of AnthroDesign can actually "cross the line" and interact with a more oriented-academic community, from time to time.
Cheers,
Pedro
PhD Anthropologist/Independent Ethnographic Consultant
Wanna know what I'm thinking? Why not listen to my interview in the New Books network?Here: http://newbooksinanthropology.com/2013/12/25/pedro-oliveira-people-centered-innovation-becoming-a-practitioner-in-innovation-research-biblio-publishing-2013/
On Thursday, January 30, 2014 4:10 AM, Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Dear Pedro,
These are profound questions. I’m lurking these days and I don’t have much to add. Your question outlines the major issues.
The deep question lies at the border of theory construction and clinical research. The question is how we model the properties of something we wish to represent and understand. We engage this question every time we ask “what is the real problem?” This is problem selection. We select problems before we solve them. This question is central question to research of all kinds, basic, applied, and clinical.
You might find two kinds inquiry useful. One series of questions bridges epistemology and ontology by asking what it is we measure or observe when we measure or observe anything. This depends on our perspectives, our instruments, and our selves, for it is a “self” embedded in the universe who does the measuring. Or perhaps, it is the useful and necessary illusion of a self who does the measuring.
Niels Bohr distinguished between conditions on knowledge and conditions on description in ways you may find helpful. (See McEvoy 2001: pp. 181-196, 442-461.)
The inquiry has to do with metaphor, the medium of epistemic transference. Jack Ox’s work involves the ways in which metaphor allows us to generate epistemic transference. Perhaps she would care to comment on this.
Your post raises fruitful questions. Thanks for your valuable thoughts.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
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McEvoy, Paul. 2001. Niels Bohr: Reflections on Subject and Object. The Theory of Interacting Systems. Vol. 1. Sn Francisco: Microanalytix.
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Pedro Oliveira wrote:
—snip—
Please forgive me for interfering in this conversation, but the exchange seems too interesting not to ask a question. I am someone who comes predominantly from a point of view of practice, working as an applied ethnographer in industry, in questions of marketing and design. I am interested in conceptual and theoretical models as they relate to practice or, I believe, what Ken Friedman would likely call the “clinical level of research”.
I have recently written a book on the matter and started wondering how to make the different theories of anthropology systematic towards a theory of practice.
Doing a cross-comparison of several cases I have worked in industry, I am coming to think that certain cases are more prone to a description based on semiotics, others to a description of material culture, others cognitive anthropology and still others, to interpretivism in the most conventional Geertzian sense. By setting different case studies in comparison, I wrote about this process calling it ‘epistemic transference’, with a wink to psychoanalytical theories of transference. Epistemic transference would work similarly in some ways, to the (major) exception that psychoanalytic anthropology would be BUT ONE of the main models that the ethnographer may come to embody in the research of a given case and the production of a particular kind of description informed by that model. Other cases would evoke opposing models.
Thus, the question that often arises to me thinking applied ethnography in industry is why are certain cases more prone to certain models (and the forms of description more often associated to it) than others?
For example, research on consumers goods may lead one to a description rooted in material culture because for that client and that case, the most useful description coming out of the field is one that moves from objects to people.
In others cases, the model behind it may turn out to be cognitive anthropology instead, because for that client and case the most useful form of description (an overly pragmatic stance that I am aware of) may just be one that moves in the opposite direction (i.e.. from cognition to objects). Determining why this is the case, rather than finding a meta-paradigm or opting solely for one main model good for anything and everything, becomes the problem in hand.
Listening to this exchange I wonder whether a parallel of “epistemic transference” would equally apply to matters of design and its different models. Hence, facing a particular problem, the question would be why a given set of ideas in design (e.g. DT in one case OR Systems Thinking on another case) would emerge as the most appropriate set of ideas for THAT particular problem. Determining why this is the case across different problems would become the issue (almost like “contingency” in Richard Rorty’s sense of the word) and setting the comparison across cases would help build theory differently from the ground-up. At least, that’s what I hope that I am contributing too in applied anthropology.
I want to acknowledge that I am out of my depth talking to very eminent people in design in this list. It is an open question and by all means feel free to ignore it if you feel there is no parallel in what I have just described that could be taken into design.
Cheers,
Pedro
PhD Anthropologist/Independent Ethnographic Consultant
—snip—
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