Tag: ritual

Exploring Anthropological Imagination

We should explore what kinds of interventions the anthropological imagination discussed by Anusas and Harkness (2014) can envision that design could not. If anthropology is about understanding human cultures and societies, what if design anthropology was about creating new cultural elements? For example, design anthropologists could be tasked with developing renewed social protocols, gestures, ceremonies, rituals, folklore, and other cultural fragments that create meaning for a community. Continue reading →

Creating Space for Transformation

In Transdisciplinary design, we’re always talking about transformation. How can we change the way we record skills in higher education? How can we change our course towards a socially and ecologically unsustainable future? How can we change the way community organizations collaborate? These are big challenges, stuck in webs of complex systems, where the effect of any small change reverberates in unknown ways from one issue to the next. Sometimes we address this with prototyping, throwing an idea into the system and seeing what happens. But other times it feels like anything we create within the system will only promote the current state of affairs. We need a blank slate to try out something new. Continue reading →