#2 // Reflections

We’ve had at least two interconnected goals in devising and conducting the first two ethnocharrettes, one more conceptual/methodological in scope, the other more pedagogical. We are quite hopeful that these events will, in time, help to generate the seeds of new ethnographic forms of a sort that can push ethnographic inquiry in new and useful directions. As we’ve crafted the ethnocharrrette thus far, we have brought participants together to evaluate critically the kinds of ethnographic forms currently active in and vital to anthropology. Our overriding objective has been to see if by tweaking or reworking these forms, pathways for developing new practices, conceptual frameworks, and methods might emerge. We have no expectations that any single event will produce some new ethnographic panacea. Instead the idea we’ve been working with is to use established ethnographic texts as springboards for contemplating ethnography’s possibilities—or, if not the possibilities for “ethnography” writ large, then at least for the participants themselves as they develop their own ethnographic projects and prepare to enter the field. After all, the future of all ethnographic inquiry will unfold through the work of its practitioners.

Following from this, our second goal has been to provide opportunities for our students to orient to ethnographic materials—and learning about and with and through them—in new and unexpected ways. This includes some very basic augmentations of traditional learning experiences, including, for instance, abandoning the seminar structure; relying on collaboration between students; and working in open, transformable spaces. We draw heavily and explicitly from design studio pedagogical techniques because we feel that such techniques lend a new kind of intellectual and methodological rigor to the more traditionally academic pedagogical frameworks that dominate graduate education in anthropology (more on this can be found here).

Not surprisingly, there been some friction in our attempts to blend design studio forms and practices with those of anthropology. While there are plenty of reasons for this, one of the most central is a significant mismatch between anthropology and design along at least three dimensions.

First, studio techniques are more obviously goal-directed than the work anthropologists do. This isn’t to say that our work is not goal-oriented, but rather that the end results are not as clearly defined from the start as they are for design. Designers (and design students) tend to work with design briefs, descriptions of the end products that their clients (or professors) have asked them to make, and most design work is oriented toward achieving results that satisfactorily fit those descriptions. Briefs may be more or less specific, but regardless of their level of detail they serve as the primary device for organizing the trajectory of the design process. As such, a design process without a brief (or something like a brief) will rarely yield anything of much value. The constraint of the brief, while quite generative for practices geared toward producing specific products, in many ways seems unnecessarily restrictive and antithetical to the free exploration of ideas seen as underpinning traditional seminar interactions. Merging our goals as ethnographers with the kinds of goals design processes are good at reaching is a critical challenge to confront moving forward.

Related to this, a second mismatch between design and anthropology stems from the different ways in which creativity is positioned and valued in the two disciplines. Creativity is quite obviously foregrounded as a necessary, and often constituent component of design practice, and most studio techniques uncritically presume creative work—however one defines it—to be the most basic building block of any design process. This differs significantly from anthropology in a couple of ways. First, while almost all the work entailed in doing ethnographic research is in some way creative—for instance devising research questions, crafting grant applications, orchestrating fieldwork, writing up results—such creativity is rarely described or treated as such, nor is it explicitly articulated as valuable to the institution. Second, on a much more practical level, the mundane work of design is all about making things. While anthropologists do “make things” during certain stages of their practices, the orientation to making is quite different, and predominantly restricted to textual (and in some cases audiovisual) forms. In contrast to the seminar room or most home offices, studios are full of raw materials that designers use to work through their ideas—they use markers and pencils to sketch, they make computer drawings on their laptops, they build prototypes with foam and cardboard, a kind of engagement with diverse materials that is rarely found in anthropology. We can summarize all of this by saying that in most instances studio techniques entail working within an infrastructure that both materially and ideologically supports and affords creative projects, a condition that doesn’t quite fit with the current state of most ethnographic training.

Finally, and in some ways most crucially, studio pedagogy recognizes critique as a necessary and generative element of design education in ways that contemporary graduate training in anthropology does not. Embedded in studio practice is the expectation that design ideas are (more or less) always subject to assessment and open critique from peers, and in educational contexts, from instructors. Students are trained to articulate and explain the choices they have made in their work, and to respond to what might be perceived as “bad news” when their instructors offer critical evaluation (a handy skill to have when they’re eventually making presentations to paying clients). Indeed these moments of criticism, in which instructors identify the “problems” in a student’s work (as well as the positive stuff), are where a great deal of the pedagogical work is accomplished in design education. In fact, critique is so embedded and expected in this institutional context that if a student were not to receive some amount of negative assessment, it would most likely be read as a sort of “assault” on her abilities. This, quite clearly, is the opposite of what is expected in anthropological training, on the part of both students and instructors. While critique is more acceptable in certain “private” formats, like paper comments, or at certain obvious stages, like oral exams or dissertation defenses, a regularized public performance of directed, individualized critique, no matter how constructive it might be, is generally no longer a preferred pedagogical practice in anthropology.

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