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Design anthropology: What can it add to your design practice?

Design Anthropology

Designers primarily concern themselves with how to create a “successful” communication, product, or experience. But with the past 10 years of globalization, digitalization, and ever increasing design complexity, designers have come to realize that to answer the question of design “success” requires that they answer that question of how the processes and artifacts of design help define what it means to be human. This “humanness” can range from how humans control the environment through tools (homo faber); how high-heeled shoes affect natural ways of walking; to moral issues of how participation in the design process empowers marginalized communities. In this space, the practice and theory of design anthropology has emerged.

Design Anthropology: What is it?

Design anthropology is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand the role of design artifacts and processes in defining what it means to be human (e.g., human nature). It is more than lists of user requirements in a design brief, which makes it different from contextual inquiry, some forms of design research, and qualitative focus groups. Design anthropology offers challenges to existing ideas about human experiences and values.

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