The development of design anthropology in business practice

Anthropological perspectives and methods have been implemented in various product design processes. It leads to the emergence of design anthropology as a convergence of business needs and applied anthropology practitioners. There are three stages of development for the relation between design and anthropology (Kjærsgaard & Otto in Gunn & Donovan’s Design and Anthropology, 2016):

1. Ethnomethodologically-informed design: the ethnographer’s role is to collect data from the field and inform designers that are working on the product in the “studio”.
2. Participatory design: ethnographers are the facilitator that mediates designers and users to collaborate on design practices and the context of use.
3. Design anthropology: ethnographer intervenes by collaborating with designers and users as a part of the product development process. They take the role of holistic researcher and practitioner simultaneously.

Background

Anthropology has been seen as a discipline that studies people and their culture. An anthropologist is capable to understand humans deeper than any other discipline, although it is rarely seen that they are experts in their practical context. The legacy of classical anthropology — such as Malinowskian ethnography — limits the implementation of anthropological perspectives and methods into more practical use, including for business needs.

Not until the 1980s that social science and humanities (including anthropology) seen as essential in the product development process, especially tech products. Tech companies like Microsoft, Intel, and Xerox started the trend of hiring anthropologists for their business practice. Ethnography becomes a method born from anthropology that suits the business needs to practice human-centered design. Design becomes a new field for anthropologists to practice the methods and knowledge they acquire from their academic experience.

The growth of business needs — to understand users — meet the capability of anthropology to understand humans. A human-centered design framework that is pioneered by IDEO becomes mainstream in the design industry and ethnography then becomes a “toolkit” to operate this framework. Design anthropology then emerges as a distinct field that bridges the product design process and user needs with a humanistic approach.

The development of design anthropology

Starting from the 1980s, anthropology has been experiencing a big shift from a discipline that used to produce only a descriptive output in the form of ethnographic research into a more practical discipline that intervenes and transforms its research subjects. This big shift is triggered by academic critics of anthropology that focus only on the “faraway others”, such as the life of indigenous tribes, and ignore the “familiars”, such as the urban industrial society around us. Some of the examples caused by this are the development of business anthropology in American anthropology and the emergence of design anthropology as a new form of applied anthropology in the design field.

Anthropology is reoriented to be a discipline that focuses more on contemporary problems by Rabinow and Marcus back in 2008. Their discussion stated that the classical anthropology approach isn’t aware enough that contemporary phenomena in our surroundings are also potential anthropological’s research subjects. The anthropology of the contemporary simply opens up a new way to utilize anthropological perspectives and methods in practice fields, such as business and design.

The field of design in the old days tends to be capitalistic and polarized into business needs only. Design attributes are limited to the object/material, technological change, individual, and market. It is not until the 1980s that design is more perceived to be related to our socio-cultural life. Designers should be paying more attention to the social context as a vital role in successful design. Escobar (2018) tried to decolonize the field of design to show that design is not only sitting at the level of business practitioners. Rather, it is happening everywhere. This is the fundamental of our modern design practice, such as the emergence of the design thinking framework, Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, and then the development of the participatory design that we found in every startup’s UX design process nowadays. The point is that successful design is a harmonic correspondence between the object, its user, and — not limited to — their environment.

Design anthropology is a result of complexity triggered by technological advancement and globalization in the field. Problems found in the field grow to be more complex and could only be solved with a multidisciplinary approach. The engineering approach is not enough to build a product while understanding its context of use. Thus, a multidisciplinary approach is necessary to build a user-centered product by collaborating with other disciplines, such as psychology and anthropology. The collaboration of anthropology in the design field then give birth to the discipline of design anthropology. This new emerging discipline is introduced by Christine Miller in 2018 along with its eight principles:

1. Transformative/Future-oriented: the goal is to transform the current state of phenomena or “future-making”.
2. Holistic: understanding phenomena as a systemic-embedded whole instead of a singular event.
3. Collaborative: working with the other to achieve a common goal.
4. Transdisciplinarity: unite the knowledge from different approaches and disciplines to seek a common solution.
5. Performative: perceive people, things, and/or events as a meaningful process in production.
6. Emergent potentiality: be ready to perceive everything as continuous unfolding possibilities and impactful to the social, political, economical, and other dimensions of life.
7. Iterative: rethink and revise every step throughout the process to achieve complete but also endless results.
8. Critical: identify and evaluate each research process to uncover more results and consequences.

These eight principles are implemented in the human-centered design process through the design ethnography method. Design ethnography is a bit different compared to the — practiced by anthropology scholars — classic ethnography method. Ethnographers are put into both the role of passive researcher and actively intervene in the middle of the design process if needed. The other differents are timeframe and research objective. Design ethnography is done in a shorter duration — up to several weeks — compared to the classic ethnography which is usually in months or years. This is due to the business needs that need an effective workflow in an efficient way. Thus, there are other names for this method: “quick ethnography” and “corporate ethnography”. Design ethnography's objective is to get to know about the requirements for new product implementation while classic ethnography is conducted to uncover socio-cultural phenomena in a descriptive form.

Implementation of design anthropology takes into account that the human factor is as important as the technical factor in the product development process. Design ethnography fills the need to create a human-centered product by understanding humans as a user and the product’s context of use. The development of design anthropology is now more ubiquitous. UX research is one example that implements design anthropology principles, intentionally or implicitly. We can see that semi-structured interview and participant observation is commonly used methods in UX research whilst those are also mainly used in anthropological ethnography. These relevances then strengthen the stance of anthropology in the design field. Ethnography, as the method born within anthropology, is expanding its practicality. It is not only exclusively used to uncover the life of indigenous tribes but also can be utilized in the UX research and design practice to make a technological product more “human”.

Real-world case: Google team’s research on the mobile notification system

Although design anthropology is officially introduced in 2018, some research before that has shown the practicality of design anthropology principles. It also applies to ethnography which is a method in anthropology that became adapted into the design field. In 2016, the Google team conducts research to uncover the significance of mobile notifications to Android users by explicitly using ethnography as its main method. They involve themself in the life of users to get to know about how users respond to the mobile notification in real-time. Users are observed while they are doing their daily activities, such as a mother babysitting her kids, and a working from home lawyer doing his job.

This kind of activity is called participant observation, while collecting data, the researcher is also immersed in the life of users. This method is commonly used in anthropological research. The only difference between this ethnography compared to classic ethnography is the usage of data. Classic ethnography tends to finish the research by interpreting the data and writing it into a descriptive output. Design ethnography used by Google teams is used to collect data, interpret it, and then deliver it to the Android developers and project stakeholders. The overall project is collaborative. Researchers work with the others to achieve a common goal: to make a better mobile notification system for the next Android update.

Users are considered a participant in this project where their activity in natural settings is observed and seen as active input for the design process. This project is not only focused on how to develop a product but also on how to understand the users (as a human) and use that understanding as a guide to developing the product. As a result, this is how the Google team designed the problems they found in the field:

Research result: notification priority matrix

The matrix above shows that notifications are broken down into categories and each category evokes different emotions for the user. This matrix is then used as a guide for Android developers in Google to build a better notification system with a more humanistic approach by considering how notifications are connected to human emotions. From this case study, now we know the advantage of implementing a human-centered approach in tech product development. It also shows the significance of anthropology as a starting point to run a human-centered design process.

End of the line

The development of design anthropology portrays the importance of human factors in the design field, especially tech product design. Human behavior, emotion, and personality are assessed through ethnography and resulting in a holistic understanding of the product’s context of use. The human-centered approach becomes essential in product development and anthropology is one of the disciplines that can provide it.

Design anthropology becomes the new face of applied anthropology. It shows that anthropology has been developing from the discipline to understand cultural relativism (Boasian anthropology) into a “toolkit” that supports modern business needs like now. It also shows that the anthropological approach is more useful if put into collaboration with other disciplines than being on its own. Whether it is to understand the life of indigenous tribes or to empathize with users in UX research, anthropology has shown its capability to solve every problem that needs to be solved. It also indicates that anthropology is a highly adaptive field and has a high possibility to develop again in the future to solve more practical problems in our life.

I hope this article can help more anthropologists to be aware of their capability in business practice and vice versa, to help more designers to be aware of the social aspect in their design projects.

P.S.: This article is based on my final thesis as an undergraduate social anthropology student at Universitas Indonesia. I rewrite this article to present it in a shorter version and more friendly manner that I hope everyone, despite their academic background, can understand the content of this article.

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