---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christopher M. Kelty <[address removed]>
Date: Fri, May 22, 2009 at 11:58 AM
Subject: [IS-NET] UCI Ethnography by Design, June 1st, Noon. With Jamer Hunt.
To: [address removed]




The Center for Ethnography
University of California
cordially invites you to

Our Third
'ETHNOGRAPHY BY DESIGN'
CONVERSATION

WITH
Jamer Hunt
Associate Professor
Transdisciplinary Design Director, Interdisciplinary Graduate Initiatives
Parsons The New School for Design


"DESIGN CULTURED:
INCUBATING CRITICAL AND CULTURAL PRACTICES WITH DESIGN"

Monday, June 1, 2009
12:00-2:30pm, UCHRI Conference Room 338, Aldrich Hall
Presentation/Conversation
Commentators: Anne Burdick and Keith Murphy
There has recently been what Ross Perot might describe as a giant sucking
sound, as design consultancies voraciously add cultural anthropologists to
their rolls. The reasons for this are myriad, but likely stem from a
relatively recent shift in design methodology toward user-centered design,
a practice that foregrounds the needs and wants of the end-user as central
to the development of new products and services. The emergence of Design
Ethnography, Co-design, Participatory Design, and Design Probes--as well as
other variously named design methods further signal that designers are
increasingly leaning on the tools of social observation as sources for
local knowledge in the research, development, and marketing of new ideas.

This rather unproblematized incorporation of (often quick and dirty)
ethnographic methods into a design process continues unabated, leaving
designers occasionally perplexed and anthropologists increasingly nervous
about the commercial exploitation of their cherished practices. What gets
lost in translation, however, is that the two methods pose fundamentally
different questions about culture, practices, and social change. What gets
lost, to put it another way, is cultural critique.

This presentation will examine the role of the critical within the design
process and design practices. It will explore design work that is
speculative, critical, and experimental work that leads to a questioning of
cultural orthodoxies rather than to problem solving and new product
development. Can a design process--rich with cultural insight re-envision
the social imaginary? What are the forms and impact of prototyping the
social? And what does all this mean for contested space at the overlap of
design and ethnographic methods?



Tuesday, June 2, 2009
12:00-2:30pm, UCHRI Conference Room 338, Aldrich Hall
Discussion

Discussant: Keith Murphy

A discussion of the planning and development of the MFA in
Transdisciplinary Design that Jamer is undertaking at Parsons. ?See
attached planning statement.

Light Lunch Provided - Please RSVP to
Sandy Cushman[masked] or <mailto:[address removed]>[address removed]
For more information about the Center and its events, go to:
http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~ethnog/


Sandy Cushman
Center Administrator
[masked]
[masked] Fax