Chapter 5 - Design And Doing

Question 1

Elizabeth Shove

Answer 1

“When people adopt new technology they become gifted with new skills and capacities, and cultivate new practices.”

E.G The hammer. When people use it, they grow the capacity to hammer a nail on to the wall.

Question 2

Design Ethongoraphy

Answer 2

This examines how people use products and learn from people’s experiences in everyday life.

• Seeks to see how people use technology’s, how people adopt or reject using technologies
• Seeks to see how people use products and learn from people’s experiences in everyday life.
• It is also important to be aware of how cultural understandings influence how people understand things

Question 3

De-Familiarization

Answer 3

Presenting familiar objects or situations in an unfamiliar way, prolonging the perceptive process and allowing for a fresh experience.

By de-familiarizing a practice that we take for granted, e.g. how we carry a phone, we unfold possibilities as to how we design those practices.

Jon Chipchase: The Anthropology of mobile phones.

WHAT DO PEOPLE CARRY?
3 most imp. Things – (Across culture, context and gender):

1. Keys = provide access to shelter and warmth
2. Money = food
3. Mobile phone = recovery tool

Why? – Survival for our loved ones and us.
• Maslow hierarchy of needs = psychological and safety needs.

Question 4

Participatory Design

Answer 4

Ethnographic research on the culture of the users, which informs prototypes.

E.g. Focus groups or discussion tables.
• Tell users to tell them their opinions. Could you integrate this into your everyday routine? They can make use of the user. Can use them to predict and anticipate technological innovation.

Question 5

Daniel Miller and Heather Horst

Answer 5

How culture influences the way people use technology:

They investigated why in Jamaica and Trinidad, where people have low incomes, they buy expensive phones.

• Maintain social connection. Jamaican Kingship (which is heavily relied on an economy of favors, to run their very day routine e.g. babysitting).

Technology does not go against culture – people often think it goes against or dilutes culture. However in reality, use ethnographic techniques we can see that technology does not goes against culture, but rather becomes part of it. if DOES NOT BECOE PART OF THE CULTURE, IT MAY BE REJECTED.

Question 6

Co-Construction

Answer 6

See how people appropriate technology on an everyday level and use that ethnographic insight to redesign products and services.

E.g. Digicom introduced the ability to ‘pay per second’ in Jamaica.

Cross comparative studies in anthropology:

By seeing how technology is used differently elsewhere, you see how technology has various cultural meaning.

Question 7

Technological change and innovation:

Answer 7

• This is a phenomenon of our time; we have put special emphasis on the ability to innovate. When a company has the ‘cutting edge’ of tech. It implies it is doing well; it is keeping up with trends.
• Ethnography used to appropriate and predict how people use technology.
• Emphasis on change and tech progress puts emphasis on studios like ‘Elab’, which predict and anticipate change – this is what business anthropologists do now.
• How anthropology entered the business world because of technology it was the ICT explosion that made people realize the potential to use ethnography and anthropology to better understand consumption
• Special connection between technology and anthropology people are using technology more and more during their everyday lives and conducting ethnography can show the ways by which people appropriate and use technology in unpredictable ways

Question 8

Book by Keith Murphy – Swedish design

Answer 8

Ethnography on how people in Sweden understand design. He said the characteristic people use to describe Swedish design where aligned Swedish cultural beliefs and values; like democratic, efficient etc.

Question 9

Important to remember:

Answer 9

Technology reinforces cultural practices and articulates them in new ways. Through mobile phones, Indian and Jamaican kingship is rearticulated in practices and ways in their routines.

By using technology in unpredictable ways, consumers and users can integrate technologies in to other technologies. Using technologies to better their lives and everyday routines.

Question 10

Main points:

Answer 10

It is the user and people, who drive innovation, whether new technology becomes accepted or rejected in a new culture and society, it is people who appropriate technology in their owns, and appropriate it to better their routines and day to day activities, practices.

Purpose of anthropology is to pin point how everyday experience and the needs of users can be improved. And Through conducting ethnography and other ways they can pin point what consumers appreciate, what makes a certain product important.

(N.B. what people appreciate in a product is called an ‘added value’. The added value is mostly given to products that emphasize the past than those that are more modern in appearance – Companies use this (appropriate the user insight to nostalgia) ‘nostalgia’ to design new products.

Question 11

Example: Hi tech toilet:

Answer 11

Took of in Japan because of a cultural preoccupation with electronic gadgetry combined with certain ideas about filth, gender, and the association of a clean body with good health.

Question 12

Example: Gershon

Answer 12

She showed in her piece on how American students end relationships that text messaging was valued or devalued not in itself as a technology but in terms of what it meant socially.

Found that young people preferred to break up by phone call because this was perceived to be personal and intimate compared to other options. Whereas older people viewed a phone call in the same impersonal terms as the younger generation viewed SMS.

Technologies are adopted in social contexts and come to have particular meanings depending on the context.

Question 13

The contexts of technological adoption depend on a range of factors including…

Answer 13

cost and availability to ease of use and social meaning.

Question 14

What technology is used for is highly…

Answer 14

CULTURALLY VARIABLE.

E.g.: Genevieve Bell’s work shows how mobile phones have been used for religious purposes in many islamic countries. (With calls to prayer and apps pointing in the direction of Mecca)

Question 15

Designing Appropriation:

e.g. Jan Chipchase

Answer 15

Anthropologists and designers increasingly work together to try and predict the directions of cultural and technological change and to spot new opportunities for services and products.

e. g. Jan Chipchase company: Frog Design.
- Tracks the adaption of technology by users and observing how they use everyday products
- They use the methods of ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH was working with people to design better public services = ‘social innovation’.
- research participates in the lives of the people they are studying, and they are combined with the requirements of the design process to produce what is called ‘participatory design’
- hard for anthropologists and designers to anticipate and know the way which products to services take off and harder to control.

Question 16

Thinking about users:

Answer 16

• Important to consider the notion of the USER as opposed to the CONSUMER.
• The user doesn’t simply establish a relationship with technology as the consumption literature suggests: they incorporate it into themselves.
• People use technology to enhance their capacities to do things in the world, not just consume.
• “The thing and the person come to comprise a kind of hybrid of person and tool”
  e. g. SHOVE ET AL = HAMMER EXAMPLE.
• Having then, is intimately tied up with doing, and what is done depends on the cultural context in which doing certain things makes sense.

Question 17

Readings for topic 5:

Answer 17

• Focus on:
• The place of ethnography in design practices.
• cultural context in which new designs are appropriated.
• not everything that is ‘new’ is technological’. As more market value comes from branding and differentiation between products and services, making new NICHE products become important too.

Question 18

Genevieve Bell: Making by Making strange de-familiarization and the design of domestic technology

Anthropology and Design

Answer 18

• How making everyday domestic technologies seem strange can help reveal the cultural assumptions which inform their use and design, and that this can lead to insights about how such technologies could be designed better to fit in to a relationship with the end user.
• DE-FAMILIARISATION helps designers break away from core assumptions about products and users = provides different insights.
• often what the consumers value is different to what the inventory thinks they value.

Question 19

Wasson, Ethnograpgy in the Field of Design

Answer 19

This gives an account of working practices at ELab: the ethnographic design firm in the early 2000’s.

• Emphasis on how ethnography was a breakthrough for design and practice. It changed perceptions of the ‘user’ to a figure who was CULTURALLY APPROPRIATED and therefore could be expected to respond differently to artefacts and contexts.
• Increasing emphasis on user experience.
• She says that much of what anthropologists do remains in corporations which have commissioned the work which restricts its ability to influence other kinds of anthropologists.
• Moreover businesses based on ethnography may be unwilling to share ideas due to fear of competition.

Question 20

The Anthropology of Technology Change
DANIEL MILLER

“phone ownership in Jamaica”

Answer 20

Jamaica is v poor, but has high levels of phone ownership. But owning a phone is not based on INCOME, but on everyday VALUES that they uphold and its important in their life.

• The introduction of charging per second and sending credit by SMS increased peoples connection with one another as they didn’t normally have landline ownership.
• They used phones to support different patterns of sociality and to maintain a large network of support if they needed it.
• Miller and Horst found that there were distinct gender patterns to phone use as women who were not financially independent were likely to keep a wider range of potential male contacts who could potentially provide support, perhaps a relationship.
• Important for staying connected and arranging support such as childcare

Question 21

(In contrast to Jamaica)

Mobile technology India, West Bengal, East India

Tenhunen

Answer 21

• Villages are poorer here than in Jamaica. Having no electric meant comments to other villages to find ‘charging stations’
• Texting wasn’t an option in Begnali characters meant that people had to call - which was expensive and led to shorter conversations.
• Jamaicans used phones as a means of ‘recording’ a social network.
• Whereas Indians already knew this network from kinship and the villages they lived in.
• Phones may be used to maintain a network with relations in really rural areas, but on the whole not to maintain a network like Jamaicans.
• In India, fewer people owned phones but where men owned phones often their wives were the ones responsible for managing it as a piece of domestic technology.

Question 22

Milk and Photography: Introducing New Products

Answer 22

Jonsson, A Land of Milk and Money

• Examines the changing status of milk as a product in Western Europe through a case study of Denmark where supermarket shelves are now occupied by numerous varieties of milk products and milk drinks.
• Lots of differentiated milk products on shelves. But some of the differences created are through emotional associations of the particular sub brand.

e. g. Old fashioned milk - marketed as if it comes from a family dairy and is made according to traditional values of food production which are in contrast to the contemporary industrial mass production of food associated with faceless factories and corporations.
- This differentiation is about ‘buying an experience’. ‘Added value’

Question 23

The Design of Everyday Life

by Elizabeth Shove

Answer 23

• Explores how everyday objects come to shape everyday practices in the United Kingdom through a study which looks at such mundane items as plastic washing up bowls and practices of home improvement.

Photography: What is deemed as a ‘good photograph’ is cultural, so are the occasions in which they are used. (e.g. would not take photos to a funeral)

‘Amateur photographers’ and families have taken to digital anthropology. As a result, more photos are taken but fewer are seen as they have to be printed out.

Interestingly the new technology offers greater scope for innovation, however, the technology is still being used to replicate the effects of the previous technology it replaces.