'These timely, thoughtful and well-written essays are essential reading as we explore the changing tasks of design in these new times'

John Thackara author of In The Bubble: Designing In A Complex World (MIT Press) founder of Doors of Perception, leading thinker in social design.

'Alison J. Clarke's anthology is a must-read for anyone interested in the growing links between design and anthropology. As designers add social science theory to their box of tricks and theorists seek relevance and impact for their ideas, Design Anthropology is where it all comes together.'

Jeremy Myerson, Director, Helen Hamlyn Centre at Royal College of Art London

11.11.2010, 18:00
At the Seminarraum A,
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Oskar Kokoschka-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna

18:00 – Welcome
Rector and President of the University of Applied Arts Dr. Gerald Bast

18.15 – Roundtable discussion chaired by Alison J. Clarke (Angewandte) featuring:
Maria Bezaitis (Intel)
Jane Fulton Suri (IDEO)
Harvey Molotch (NYU),
Rick E. Robinson (co-founder E-Lab)

19.15 – Book Launch
Design Anthropology: Object Culture In The 21st Century. Introduction by Angela Foessl (Springer) and Alison J. Clarke (Angewandte)

19.30 – Drinks Reception

Design History & Theory die Angewandte
designtheory/at/uni-ak.ac.at

Öffentlichkeitsarbeit die Angewandte
pr/at/uni-ak.ac.at

Rick E. Robinson is a partner in Sideriver Ventures, a new product ventures firm, and a partner at HLB, a design and innovation consultancy. He is a senior research scientist who has spent the majority of his career developing and applying innovative approaches to understanding consumers. He holds a PhD in Human Development from the University of Chicago and is a thought leader across multiple industries, working with diverse companies such as BMW, McDonald’s, Sony, and Pfizer. Robinson has been using observational research as a basis for new product, service, and strategy solutions for nearly 20 years. He was a co-founder of E-Lab, a research consultancy that pioneered new research approaches for understanding the interactions between people and products. In 1999, E-Lab was acquired by Sapient, where Rick became chief experience officer. After Sapient, he became global director of Ethnographic and Observational Research at GFK/NOP World. Among his clients have been Ford, General Mills, General Motors, Hallmark, Intel, Nabisco, Novartis, Samsung, and Unilever. Dr. Robinson lectures widely on research and methodology, and he is the co-author of The Art of Seeing (Getty Publications, 1991) with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He is currently developing a design research online journal with the AIGA and EPIC professional societies and making a book on the principles of ethnographic practice for design and product development.

Harvey Molotch, professor of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies at New York University, conducts research on product design as well as urban development and security. His books include Urban Fortunes (with John Logan, University of California Press, 2007) and Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be As They Are (Routledge, 2003). With Laura Noren, he has edited the forthcoming volume Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York University Press, 2010). Before coming to NYU, he was centennial professor at the London School of Economics, chair of Sociology and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as visiting professor at Northwestern University, University of Essex, Lund University, and SUNY Stony Brook. His awards include: Distinguished Contribution to the Discipline of Sociology, Award for Lifetime Achievement in Urban and Community Studies (Lynd Award), Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Sociology of Environment and Technology (Buttel Award), and Outstanding Scholarly Publication in Urban and Community Studies (Robert Park Award).

Maria Bezaitis became director of Intel’s People and Practices Research Group in June 2006. Previously, she held management positions in marketing and research at Apopleo, Inc., a wireless strategy and network integration firm based in Chicago. Prior to that, she spent four years leading ethnographic research teams and developing the Advanced Research competency at Sapient Corporation, a business consulting and technology services firm. She started her professional career at E-Lab, a firm that pioneered the use of ethnography for product and service development, where she was a managing partner.

Bezaitis has written and presented on topics including collections and seriality, photographic images and identity, media literacy, user experience, and the role of social research and design for technology innovation and development. Bezaitis earned a BA in French Literature from Dartmouth College and a PhD from Duke University in French Literature and Cultural Studies.

Jane Fulton Suri plays a global leadership role in IDEO, evolving content and craft, human insight, and design thinking in support of client projects worldwide. She came to design from psychology and architecture with a pioneering ambition to integrate social science-based perspectives with design practice and to foster a community of collaborators. Jane believes that design, like life, is about seeking creative harmonies with elements of our world – a belief also exhibited in her enthusiasm for wilderness sports. She is author of Thoughtless Acts: Observations on Intuitive Design (Chronicle Books, 2005).

Alison J. Clarke is professor and head of Design History and Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna and research director of the Victor J. Papanek Foundation. She previously tutored as senior academic faculty at the Royal College of Art, London. She received a Masters with Distinction in Design History from the RCA/V&A and gained her doctorate in social anthropology at University College London. She is a former Smithsonian Fellow of History, and author of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (Smithsonian Institution Press), later optioned for an Emmy-nominated documentary film. Her work considers the interplay of contemporary design, fashion and anthropology and she has co-organised several interdisciplinary conferences in this area including Interior Insights: Design, Ethnography and the Home (RCA, London) and The Death of Taste (MAK, Vienna/ICA, London) as well as authoring numerous related academic articles. She is co-founding editor of Home Cultures: Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space, presenter of Home BBC2 TV series, and expert contributor to the recent The Genius of Design BBC2 TV series. Alison’s agent is Capel and Land, London.

Design Anthropology is transforming our material culture. Alison J. Clarke, anthropologist and design historian, brings together leading design thinkers and theorists to consider the future of our object worlds as the analog and digital collide.

Alison J. Clarke is professor and head of Design History and Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna and research director of the Victor J. Papanek Foundation. She previously tutored as senior academic faculty at the Royal College of Art, London. She received a Masters with Distinction in Design History from the RCA/V&A and gained her doctorate in social anthropology at University College London. She is a former Smithsonian Fellow of History, and author of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (Smithsonian Institution Press), later optioned for an Emmy-nominated documentary film. Her work considers the interplay of contemporary design, fashion and anthropology and she has co-organised several interdisciplinary conferences in this area including Interior Insights: Design, Ethnography and the Home (RCA, London) and The Death of Taste (MAK, Vienna/ICA, London) as well as authoring numerous related academic articles. She is co-founding editor of Home Cultures: Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space, presenter of Home BBC2 TV series, and expert contributor to the recent The Genius of Design BBC2 TV series. Alison’s agent is Capel and Land, London.

What makes objects, like the iPhone, iconic? Why do design innovators spend more time observing consumers than styling new products? Is the shift from analog to digital culture really de-materializing our world? Design Anthropology explores design’s radical turn to users, their social lives and rituals, and questions who is really in control of our material lives.

Featuring 16 leading thinkers from design gurus to cutting-edge digital anthropologists, Design Anthropology offers a provocative insight into the future of our design culture.

This book is a must-have read for everyone in design, material culture, creative industries, sociology, anthropology, marketing and cultural studies – and for anyone interested in what is really at stake in our material world.

Vladimir Arkhipov, born 1961 in the USSR, collects and curates ‘self-made’ objects and runs the database www.folkforms.ru as a resource for objects with ‘biographies’. His collection of re-made and self-made objects is internationally renowned and has been exhibited in art galleries across Europe. He is the author of Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts (2006).

Maria Bezaitis became director of Intel’s People and Practices Research Group in June 2006. Previously, she held management positions in marketing and research at Apopleo, Inc., a wireless strategy and network integration firm based in Chicago. Prior to that, she spent four years leading ethnographic research teams and developing the Advanced Research competency at Sapient Corporation, a business consulting and technology services firm. She started her professional career at E-Lab, a firm that pioneered the use of ethnography for product and service development, where she was a managing partner.

Bezaitis has written and presented on topics including collections and seriality, photographic images and identity, media literacy, user experience, and the role of social research and design for technology innovation and development. Bezaitis earned a BA in French Literature from Dartmouth College and a PhD from Duke University in French Literature and Cultural Studies.

Jo-Anne Bichard has a BSc in Social Anthropology from Goldsmiths College and an MSc in Science Communication from Imperial College London. She has conducted a number of ethnographic studies at a range of sites including: Turkish baths, neuroscience labs, public toilets, and corporate workplaces. Jo-Anne is the Academic Research leader at the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre, where she works directly with designers engaged in the inclusive process. Jo-Anne has published widely on her research and is currently completing her PhD on inclusive design and design anthropology in the built environment at University College London.

Kathrina Dankl is a researcher on the theme of design and aging. Her recent studies have included a number of ethnographic investigations around the material culture of aging and kinship. Beyond models of decline, she investigates style and the emotive aspects of things along the life course. Kathrina is currently completing her PhD on design and aging at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She is interested in the transfer of aging and design research to the business world. Trained as a product designer, she is co-founder of the design consultancy DANKLHAMPEL, which is active in design research and assignments, and popular publications on aging.

Lane DeNicola is a lecturer in Digital Anthropology at University College London. Prior to his doctoral training in science and technology studies, he worked as a programmer and simulation designer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and the Center for Space Research at MIT. His doctoral fieldwork considered nationalism, spatial representation, and the development of visual expertise at the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, India’s premier institution for the training of satellite image interpreters. More generally, his research interests include culture and design, the social and political dimensions of open source software and ‘open design’, space industrialization in the developing world, scientific visualization, immersive systems, and gaming. His publications include ‘Swadeshi Satellites: India’s Earth Observation Program as New Media’ in Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers University Press, 2011) and Reading the iPod as Anthropological Artifact (Routledge, 2011).

Rama Gheerawo is deputy director of the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre, leading a team of designers on the centre’s Research Associates Programme. He works closely with organizations from around the globe on projects built on design anthropology. Over 100 projects have been completed with companies such as Toyota, GlaxoSmithKline, and Nokia. Rama’s practical experience in creative industries ranges from automotive and product design to multimedia and design engineering. He writes, lectures, and curates exhibitions on people-centered design for a variety of audiences. Gheerawo develops methods that encourage designers to creatively include people in the design process and transfer this knowledge to business.

Lorraine Gamman is professor of Design Studies, School of Graphic and Industrial Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (CSM), University of the Arts London. She wrote her PhD on shoplifting at Middlesex University in 1999 and taught product, graphic, and industrial design at CSM for ten years before setting up the practice-led Design Against Crime Research Centre (DACRC, see www.designagainstcrime. com), which she has directed since 1999. Her work with Adam Thorpe and DACRC has won several awards for design innovation. Together, they have co-curated over 15 design exhibitions and catalyzed a number of DAC product ranges including Stop Thief Chairs, Karrysafe bags, and Bikeoff anti-theft bike stands. She is a member of the Home Office’s Design Technology Alliance, and is also vice chair of the Designing Out Crime Association. Lorraine Gamman’s crime-focused publications include the design resource www.inthebag.org.uk.

Pauline Garvey lectures in anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She graduated from University College London with a doctorate in anthropology in 2002. Her research interests include material culture, domesticity, design, museum collections, and Scandinavia. She has published on Norwegian domesticity and more recently on ethnographic collections in Ireland (Exhibit Ireland). She is currently conducting comparative research on democratic design and IKEA consumption in Dublin and Stockholm, funded by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, and The Swedish Institute.

Jamer Hunt is chair of Urban and Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons The New School for Design, where he is developing a new graduate program. Previously, he served for seven years at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia as director of the Masters Program in Industrial Design, a graduate laboratory for post-industrial design. In his teaching and his professional work, he focuses on design as a means for exploring the politics and poetics of the everyday. His practice Big + Tall Design combines conceptual, collaborative, and communication design. He is also co–founder of DesignPhiladelphia, an initiative to energize Philadelphia’s design community and foreground the city as a laboratory for innovative design projects. He has served on the board of directors of the American Center for Design and on the editorial board of the forthcoming journal Design and Culture. He co-hosted MIND08 with Paola Antonelli (MoMA) and Adam Bly (SEED Magazine), a conference organized in coordination with the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at MoMA. He holds a doctorate in cultural anthropology and has consulted/worked with Smart Design, frogdesign, WRT, Seventh Generation, and Virtual Beauty. He is currently co- authoring a graphic design textbook for Thames & Hudson entitled Form Follows Context.

Susanne Küchler is professor of Anthropology at University College London. Her research focuses are on the material in art and design, the nature of innovation, and the cognitive work of beauty. Küchler is currently working on a new manuscript, The Material Mind, which develops the theoretical implications of her past ethnographic research into the making of sculpture and the cognitive work of images. It takes insights into the nature of innovation – based on long-term and collaborative research on the take up and transformation of cloth in the Pacific – and places them in the context of ‘mindware’ development in laboratories. The manuscript offers a critical review of existing theorization of material aesthetics and establishes a new vision for the study of sculptural art and design, which takes into account the interface between the material and the cognitive as being symptomatic of knowledge economies.

Nicolette Makovicky is a junior research fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and a research associate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. Her recent research includes studies of the commerce, entrepreneurialism, and transmission of knowledge among craftsmen and women in Slovakia and Poland, as well as among antique dealers in the United Kingdom. A lecturer in the department of the History of Design at the Royal College of Art, London since 2006, she has also published on the relationship between craft, modernity, and ideology, as well as memory and the domestic interior.

Daniel Miller is professor of Material Culture at the department of Anthropology at University College London. Recent books include Stuff (Polity Press, 2010) and The Comfort of Things (Polity Press, 2008). In the past, he has published books on a wide range of material genres, from housing and cars to mobile phones, as well as three volumes on shopping. His current work focuses on global denim and on the use of new digital media.

Harvey Molotch, professor of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies at New York University, conducts research on product design as well as urban development and security. His books include Urban Fortunes (with John Logan, University of California Press, 2007) and Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be As They Are (Routledge, 2003). With Laura Noren, he has edited the forthcoming volume Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York University Press, 2010). Before coming to NYU, he was centennial professor at the London School of Economics, chair of Sociology and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as visiting professor at Northwestern University, University of Essex, Lund University, and SUNY Stony Brook. His awards include: Distinguished Contribution to the Discipline of Sociology, Award for Lifetime Achievement in Urban and Community Studies (Lynd Award), Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Sociology of Environment and Technology (Buttel Award), and Outstanding Scholarly Publication in Urban and Community Studies (Robert Park Award).

Simon Roberts has been researching the interaction of people, culture, technology, and business for over a decade. His academic research career began with a cultural study of the satellite TV revolution in India. He then created a company to apply anthropology to commercial, social, and policy challenges. Since joining Intel in 2005, Simon has led research projects on aging in Europe. He designed and conducted Intel’s pioneering ‘Global Ageing Experience’ study and other research programs exploring aging in Europe. Most recently, his work focused on the intersection of telecare, domiciliary care, and residential housing models for older people in Europe. He is an Intel lead at the Technology Research for Independent Living Centre (TRIL), a multi-year academic-industry collaboration in Ireland. Simon has published widely on aging, technology, and design and is active in promoting the value of social science in successful research and development (R&D).

Rick E. Robinson is a partner in Sideriver Ventures, a new product ventures firm, and a partner at HLB, a design and innovation consultancy. He is a senior research scientist who has spent the majority of his career developing and applying innovative approaches to understanding consumers. He holds a PhD in Human Development from the University of Chicago and is a thought leader across multiple industries, working with diverse companies such as BMW, McDonald’s, Sony, and Pfizer. Robinson has been using observational research as a basis for new product, service, and strategy solutions for nearly 20 years. He was a co-founder of E-Lab, a research consultancy that pioneered new research approaches for understanding the interactions between people and products. In 1999, E-Lab was acquired by Sapient, where Rick became chief experience officer. After Sapient, he became global director of Ethnographic and Observational Research at GFK/NOP World. Among his clients have been Ford, General Mills, General Motors, Hallmark, Intel, Nabisco, Novartis, Samsung, and Unilever. Dr. Robinson lectures widely on research and methodology, and he is the co-author of The Art of Seeing (Getty Publications, 1991) with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He is currently developing a design research online journal with the AIGA and EPIC professional societies and making a book on the principles of ethnographic practice for design and product development.

Jane Fulton Suri plays a global leadership role in IDEO, evolving content and craft, human insight, and design thinking in support of client projects worldwide. She came to design from psychology and architecture with a pioneering ambition to integrate social science-based perspectives with design practice and to foster a community of collaborators. Jane believes that design, like life, is about seeking creative harmonies with elements of our world – a belief also exhibited in her enthusiasm for wilderness sports. She is author of Thoughtless Acts: Observations on Intuitive Design (Chronicle Books, 2005).

Adam Thorpe is the senior designer and creative director of Bikeoff.org and the Design Against Crime Research Centre (DACRC) and reader in Socially Responsive Design at the School of Graphic and Industrial Design, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, where he has worked since 2003. His designs for DACRC are featured as benchmarks of how to ‘design out’ crime by the British Home Office and design organizations including the British Design Council and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Adam Thorpe is co-founder and designer, with Joe Hunter, of Vexed Generation and Vexed Design (1993 – current). Vexed has taken over 20 fashion collectionsto market, and their designshave appeared in over 20 international exhibitions including Safe: Design Takes On Risk at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005), Skin and Bones: Parallel Practices In Fashion and Architecture at Somerset House, London (2008), and Fashion V Sport at the V&A, London (2008/09).

Diana Young has worked with Anangu, Western Desert Aboriginal people living near Uluru, since 1996. Her research interests are material and visual culture, especially the role of colour in consumption practices, a topic on which she has published widely. She was trained as an anthropologist in the Material Culture Group at University College London. Prior to this, she was trained as an architect and worked as a designer in the construction industry. She is currently director of the Anthropology Museum at the University of Queensland and completing her book Re-materialising Colour (Sean Kingston Publishing, Wantage, UK).