Things as Co-Ethnographers: Implications of a Thing Perspective for Design and Anthropology

Abstract

As humans, we have complex and intertwined relationships with the objects around us. We shape objects; and objects shape and transform our practices and us in return. Acknowledging this ongoing interaction among people and objects calls for approaches in both design and anthropology that give both parties an equal role. In the current design research agenda however, humans take a central place in methodology with the tools and methods of user-centered design (cf. Greenbaum & Kyng 1991) and participatory design (cf. Schuler & Namioka 1993) i . This focus on the human is essential for investigating the subjective experience of everyday practice, but assumes that possibilities for creativity and innovation are bounded only to human imagination and capabilities. In this arrangement, the relationship between humans and objects is unidirectional: humans are actants that ‘make’ objects with a clear encoded function. But