Yoko Akama and Sarah Pink
Design+Ethnography+Futures is a research programme and initiative that explores techniques of disruption to undermine the certainties that inform conventional ways of knowing – for both researchers and participants – in design and ethnography (Pink and Akama 2015). Design+ Ethnography+Futures attempts to move beyond conventional discourses in design that validate outcomes and resolutions by incorporating user perspectives in the tight locus of the formal design phase. It likewise goes beyond the objectifying tendencies of ethnographic studies of, or about, persons or phenomena. Rather than aiming to do ‘better’ design ethnography, we seek to create an opening where a hybrid interweaving is underpinned by movement towards a shared conceptual foundation. And like our engagements with uncertainties of the future, this is a disruptive strategy because it challenges and undermines what it is that we habitually thought we already knew and did.
The idea of disrupting, as we develop it here, refers to an improvisatory process that ‘corrupts’ ethnographic and design principles when they are brought together. Disruption is implicitly pursued, for example, in critical and speculative design that takes the form of fictional and absurd future-projections to ask difficult and ignored questions and to provoke and disturb common understandings (Dunne and Raby 2013; Michael 2012). In Design Anthropology, anthropologists are bringing design into their research to dismantle ethnography to reconstruct something new (Murphy and Marcus 2013), using interventionist, material, speculative and provocative approaches. However, the coupling of design and anthropology is not neat and seamless. Rather, it is characterized more by a disruptive interdisciplinary endeavour whereby it necessitates the abandonment of competence and specialism to
enter a terrain beset with fears of inability, lack of expertise and the dangers of failure. The transformational experience of interdisciplinary work produces a potentially destabilising engagement with existing power structures, allowing the emergence of fragile forms of new and untested experience, knowledge and understanding.
Rendell 2013: 119
As we discuss, this abandonment of certainty gives rise to discomfort, yet also shows possible ways to produce avenues of knowing about things not yet encountered, possible alterities and potential futures. As such, we place value upon uncertainty and put the not-yet-made at the centre of inquiry: ethnographers/designers are substantively engaged in processual worlds where they work with emergent qualities and people who are sharing their journey into the immediate future.
Design anthropologists have begun to reorient the ethnographic focus towards the future through their engagements with design (Gunn and Donovan 2012). Underlying this movement is a critique of the single, specific and sometimes authoritarian ways that research can shape and restrict our participants’, as well as the researchers’, understanding. Like Gatt and Ingold we have a concern about the predictive and prescriptive orientations to future-making that are promoted in design which seek ‘to conjecture a novel state of affairs as yet unrealized and to specify in advance the steps that need to be taken to get there’ (Gatt and Ingold 2013: 145). Instead, we aspire to building capacity in relation to ever-changing circumstances, to improvise and open up passages (Akama, Stuedahl and Van Zyl 2015). In other words, we are interested in inviting people along on a journey through which they come together to discover, question, converse and reflect upon how we ‘are’ in the ways we understand the world and manifest our understanding, and to propose how ‘we’ become with one another (Akama 2012). This implies that future-making necessarily starts with how we step into the future together. ‘Becoming with’ (borrowing from Haraway (2008)) is an important aspect of our research, indicating a companionship in embarking on this endeavour and a commitment to travel along together, rather than being in fear of making ‘others’.
There is also a double movement happening here whereby the things we make (both objects and relations) and do together, act upon us as we are making and engaging in these very things (Willis 2006). This ontological process is akin to a hermeneutic circle: the world we make is, in turn, making us, undermining what we thought we were, inscribing how we are being and becoming with others. By inviting an approach that embraces uncertainty, allowing the emergent to define what we know and share, our being and becoming with will be situated and embodied but also constituted in relating and co-shaping new entanglements (Light and Akama 2014).
From December 2013 to May 2014, we ran a series of workshops with a variety of researchers from different disciplines (i.e. not just from design or anthropology). These ranged in format and duration, from two full days to three hours, with 12 to 30 researchers and postgraduate students from various universities. Each workshop had a guest facilitator to frame a theme that was of interest to the participants.
On embarking on this series, one of the challenges was to investigate how to facilitate exploration, not with regard to what we already knew, but in relation to what we did not yet know. This required a form of ‘disruption’ on the part of the instigators (also co-facilitators of the workshops), which valued unintentionality, as opposed to intentionality, and created opportunities for uncertainty instead of aiming for certainty. This was uncharted territory and a confusing experience for many, including us as instigators. Activities were randomly suggested on the basis of serendipity, chaos and whimsical ideas in order to experiment with what might happen.
It is no surprise that several workshops resulted in some of the participants leaving partway; in addition, many showed signs of discomfort. For example, the Myths of the Near Future workshop led by Katherine Moline (see Akama, Moline and Pink 2017) to co-explore socio-technical interaction sought to disrupt participants’ relationships with their mobile phones: as such, a familiar, practical, precious and innocuous technology was turned into a research tool. Moline invited the participants to swap their phones with strangers during the workshop to see what the interaction revealed about each other and themselves. This disruptive strategy aimed to interrogate social norms and inculcated habits, and as researchers, encouraged us reflect on how we give ‘permission’ to strangers to have access to our personal lives, and how the other person might attempt to understand through an ‘unfiltered’ medium. Several participants opted out of this exercise, choosing instead to report how they use their mobile phone. However, most participants were keen to embrace the risks. Their casual attitude towards storing personal information on their smart phones was only registered when someone else accessed it. One participant remarked, ‘I know my phone collects and aggregates data of all kinds about me, but rarely see it revealed even in this basic way’. For this participant, this activity revealed a number of things about those interpreting personal phone data:
I learned a lot about what not only my phone ‘looks like’ (and what I look like) through the specific lens of photos and my sporting apps, but [also] about how we understand phones to show things about people, all of this was also specific to the person doing the looking.
A disruptive process prompted participants to articulate new feelings about aspects of smart phones that they might previously have taken for granted.
Another workshop, led by Helen Addison-Smith, interrogated implicit ethics that could be revealed when invited to ingest plants and animals that were still alive. Again, this approach attempted to ‘disrupt’ our habitual attitudes and interrogate the blurry line between what we believe and what we actually do in practice. The act of placing unfamiliar things into one’s mouth brought forth intimate and confronting ways of knowing, exploring and questioning. Several participants were disgusted with some foods that were shared, but all were willing themselves to participate to see what they might discover. For example, trying to eat pungent, sticky and slimy natto (Japanese fermented soy beans) led to rich conversations that encompassed admitting our own contradictions, recognizing emotive responses and cultural differences, and addressing practices that lay beneath attitudes to life and death, consumption, production and waste.
In another activity, led by Elisenda Ardèvol and Debora Lanzeni, the participants were invited to re-make the workshop room into a space to foster innovation. What was once a sterile, impersonal office space in a university became a chaos of coloured threads. Ripped and torn materials were attached, hooked, twisted, tangled and wrapped around furniture and walls. To move around the room, the participants had to duck under coat-hangers, shuffle along the wall, avoid tripping over obstacles – changing our movements, relationally and dynamically in the room – releasing the participants from conforming to normative ways of socially interacting in a formal setting.
These ‘disruptions’ were a provocation to us all (participants and facilitators) to ‘let go’ of our preconceptions, forgo the need for resolution, and step out of our respective disciplinary certainties to consider alternative approaches and experiment with what might emerge out of an assembly of ideas, people and things. They were designed deliberatively to attune, sensitize and become mindful towards the emergent unknowns. It often triggered genuine surprise and reconfigured ways of knowing collaboratively.
Design+Ethnography+Futures endeavoured to explore disruptive emotions and strategies because they provoke questions of ourselves that we might not like to examine. It revealed how neither the present nor change are simple to understand or to design for – thus showing how such work complicates any ambitions to use such research processes to inform ‘better’ outcomes, something that we had already rejected as a possibility from the outset. Instead the implication is that since the present is messy, and complex to research (see Law 2004), we need to be valuing processes of change, and possible futures that are equally messy. They cannot be reduced to simple predictable contexts in which we might design neat future-oriented solutions. These disruptive strategies are not suggested for readers to repeat as methods or approaches, but instead are intended to serve as exemplars in valuing surprise, emergent unknowns and other uncertainties, in ways that are productive and generative, and that might catalyse further thinking on change making.
For more information on Design+Ethnography+Futures, see http://d-e-futures.com/
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