RICHARD FADOK

Architecture studios today commission studies of user behavior in situ while design schools offer instruction in ethnographic methodologies; conversely, many anthropologists employ architecture as a model of inquiry and an object of analysis. The increasingly manifold connections between anthropology and design – the traffic in people, ideas, and practices – has prompted several commentators to ponder the nature of their interdisciplinarity. The current paradigm distinguishes three primary “arrangements” between these disciplines: 1) design anthropology (ethnographies in design research), 2) anthropology as design (design pedagogies, like the studio, in anthropology classrooms), and 3) anthropology of design (cultural analyses of design). This paradigm restricts anthropology’s influence on design to ethnography.

Elaborating on my essay in Platypus, I am writing an article about a fourth and neglected arrangement that I call design’s anthropologies. Long before designers turned to anthropological methods at the end of the 20th century, they employed anthropological concepts. These concepts, like magic, ritual, and culture, helped theorists define the cultural specificity of “Western” design practices. Consider, for example, Christopher Alexander’s dichotomy between “selfconscious” and “unselfconscious” societies in Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964). Informed by my own encounters with anthropological beliefs about “native” design among practitioners of biomimicry (primitivist beliefs that anthropologists now reject), I develop the meta-anthropological notion of design’s anthropologies to characterize the figures of anthropos that designers mobilize to reckon time, generate value, and authorize their expertise. In conversation with Indigenous and Black Feminist scholars, I criticize the grammars of essential human difference that often animate design in order to open up circuits of exchange that are more intellectually rigorous and politically just – that is, cosmopolitan interdisciplinarity.