About Design Anthropology

Architectural users matter

Introducing the humanitarian design approach + Implementing anthropological research methods into architectural design practice

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ARCH 3120 // 23 Nov 2019 // Final Paper

“But architecture today is necessarily complex and contradictory…I welcome the problems and exploit the uncertainties.”—Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

Theme words: society, culture, human welfare, ethnography, participatory design, urban architecture, design anthropology

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A relevant question for the architectural design community asks what role the architect plays in constructing experiential meaning for users. Across theoretical seasons and aesthetic styles in the last 150 years, numerous thought leaders in the field have attempted to answer this question. Modernists laud the architect as an autonomous creator, free from influences other than one’s own artistic intuition. Postmodern theorists critique modernist disregard for local contexts and rigid uniformity, and instead propose a façade in conversation with its surroundings.

In either case, theoretical principles are centralized around issues of form and invoking an emotional reaction within the user. Neither manifesto for architecture focuses on providing equal access to these emotional provocations. In the 21st century, economic and social inequality persist, and architectural design hardly seeks to combat these issues. I recognize that urban architectural projects are mostly driven by private developers or by lower-budget government commissions, which create obstacles throughout the design process.

My research seeks to understand the comparative characteristics of design research methodologies, in hopes of inspiring the government and private developers alike to allocate more resources to qualitative social science-inspired design research that can establish more equitable access for users in the built environment. I want to explore how design-thinking and social science research methods compare to traditional architectural practice. What can architects learn from ethnographic research methods when designing at the urban scale? What does anthropology say about architectural practice?

I feel it necessary to distinguish that design-thinking has emerged as a problem-solving framework for professionals beyond the field of architectural design. For the purposes of this paper, the focus of my critique will consider design-thinking and other research frameworks in context specifically with urban architectural design practices.

This research is important because of the changing definition of ‘space’ in a digital age: the effects technology has on social relationships have created new spatial conditions. Designers need to evolve from traditional design methods to actively respond to these new spatial conditions. Thus, I am advocating for designers to recognize existing moments in the built environment that inefficiently facilitate meaningful social interaction and revise them using nontraditional research methods. In a contemporary world with so much built form, architects must broaden their sense of professional purpose beyond being builders of novel form; architects are also artists of formal improvement, for the sake of experiential equity.

Considering the temporal evolution through modernity, postmodernity, design-thinking, and social science research, I will provide a list of criteria that learn from these theoretical frameworks to characterize a unique, ‘humanitarian’ approach to architectural design. I gravitate to the definition of ‘humanitarian’ as a label for an interdisciplinary, user-centered design approach that is “concerned with humanity as a whole; specifically seeking to promote human welfare as a primary or pre-eminent good; acting [on] this basis rather than for pragmatic or strategic reasons,” (OED).

Humanitarianism prioritizes human welfare, or “prosperity, health, happiness for an individual or a group of people,” (OED), which is precisely the overarching goal of this new design approach to architecture. The empirical tools of social scientists combined with the spatial constructions of architects have the power to create equally accessible social spaces that promote welfare for all users.

The humanitarian design approach 1) appreciates historical ideals and formal aesthetics, but also requires site-specific social context, 2) values the project’s potential to provide impactful physiological experiences for all users, and 3) learns from design thinking and ethnographic research methods. These criteria aim to simultaneously encompass the importance of architectural aesthetics, the welfare of the user, and the research process.

Architectural aesthetics. The humanitarian design approach appreciates historical ideals and formal aesthetics, but also requires site-specific social context

Every contemporary architecture school introduces its students to Le Corbusier’s Five Points in architecture, as they are a foundational manifesto for understanding the Modern architectural style. These Points were extremely controversial, as they marked the greatest deviation from classic design and formal principles in the history of architecture.

The Points call for pilotis supports, a roof garden, a free [open] plan, a ribbon window, and a free [non-structural] façade (Le Corbusier, 100). The divergent ‘freedom’ of these elements invokes a similar artistic ego in the architect, which Le Corbusier celebrates: “Thus the architect has at his disposal a box of building units. His architectural talent can operate freely. It alone, through the building programme, determines his architecture. The age of the architects is coming,” (Le Corbusier, 101).

Le Corbusier’s pride in concise, practical Points mirrors what postmodern architect Robert Venturi describes as orthodox Modernist ‘clarity of meaning’, which prescribes clear standards of formal beauty as well as spatial program. To balance this formal clarity with a desire for programmatic flexibility, multifunctioning rooms are a characteristic feature of modern space planning.

Venturi contrasts the effectiveness of multifunctioning spaces and his ‘double-functioning’ elements by acknowledging the flexibility of an open plan as undermined by ‘separate’ and ‘specialized’ material forms. “In promoting the frame and the curtain wall, [modern architecture] has separated structure from shelter,” he writes (Venturi, 35). An example of double-functioning elements are Gothic columns in the nave of a Roman cathedral because they designate space as much as they support structure. While multifunctioning spaces attempt to achieve an elevated sense of programmatic flexibility, the effectiveness of pilotis supports to designate complementary social spaces is limited if they only serve a single, structural purpose.

It is limitations like the single-functioning supports of modern elements that lead Venturi to critique orthodox Modernism for its adherence to pure uniformity through the ‘exclusion’ of complex combinations and contradictory forms. He advocates instead for a more paradoxical ‘richness’ of meaning that embraces formal ambiguity by referencing a quote by August Hecksher: “The movement from a view of life as essentially simple and orderly to a view of life as complex and ironic is what every individual passes through in becoming mature…Amid simplicity an order of rationalism is born, but rationalism proves inadequate in any period of upheaval. Then equilibrium must be created out of opposites…A feeling for paradox allows seemingly dissimilar things to exist side by side, their very incongruity suggesting a kind of truth,” (16).

This explanation precisely describes the paradox of buildings; static constructions are built to create continuous material space, yet these materials are constantly subject to natural erosion and aesthetic change. I believe that as much as building materials erode over time, their initial social and programmatic functions change over time too.

Maostafavi and Leatherbarrow describes this erosion [change] phenomenon in their article, “On Weathering”: “This raises a question: beyond the general category of weathering as a romantic form of aging, are there other specific ways the unending process of deterioration can be understood, and then intended? Is it possible that weathering is not only a problem to be solved, or a fact to be neglected, but is an inevitable occurrence to be recognized and made use of in the uncertainties of its manifestations?”(Mostafavi, 4). If material weathering by nature can be embraced and considered as part of the initial design process, so too can the notion of social devolution away from the initially intended program.

Human behavior is ever-evolving, so architectural sites must be preemptively adaptive to changes in social program. When any scale of architecture from the interior layout to the urban landscape is static, it presents an obstacle to social progress. As social patterns ‘weather’ and change, a humanitarian design approach would better prepare for future ‘uncertainties’ by collecting more qualitative user input and examining precedent projects that have undergone programmatic change.

Even more importantly, a design process that is prepared for socially-driven programmatic change is a design process that is site-specific. Another framework for site-specificity is ‘critical regionalism,’ as addressed by architectural historian Kenneth Frampton. He describes how cultural resources have developed great civilizations in the past and that universalism destroys the legacy of these cultural resources: “the fundamental strategy of critical regionalism is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place [while] maintaining a high level of critical self-consciousness,” (Frampton, 21).

Critical regionalism as a principle can be applied to the notion of preparatory design processes because it highlights the value and necessity of site-specific, socially embedded context. A design resolution for racially-charged sculptures in New England public parks must be different than a resolution for public parks in the Southeast; the cultural narratives of each region are diverse and distinct, so their design resolutions should be distinct.

I want to push designers even further to embrace the difficult work of collaging double-functioning, adaptive elements into multifunctioning spaces for diverse bodies. This is where the humanitarian design approach asks designers to recognize the value of aesthetic architectural origins as a catalytic source for developing social capital and increasing human welfare.

Human welfare. The humanitarian design approach values the project’s potential to provide impactful physiological experiences for all users

The most fundamental purpose of architecture is to provide shelter from natural elements, but architecture has the potential to serve a more meaningful purpose for its users. Human welfare is defined as “prosperity, health, and happiness for an individual or a group of people,” (OED). Formal buildings, constructed landscapes, and interior spaces have the capacity to incite health and happiness in users by prioritizing aesthetic beauty.

Elizabeth K. Meyer, a landscape architect invested in more beautiful, sustainable landscapes, cites Fredrick Law Olmstead as an advocate for beauty in ecological landscapes. In the 19th century, Olmstead analyzed psychology, art history, and philosophy to conclude that the ‘experience of appearance’ altered a viewer’s psychological state. “There are numerous examples of his belief in the recuperative, transformative power of aesthetic experiences in nature,” (Meyer, 6).

Furthermore, these sensational experiences in the built environment extend beyond the individual to a sociological scale. While I appreciate that architecture serves to create functional structures, the structural function cannot be solely dependent on formal aesthetic actions but also on cultural values in context. Beth Meyer recognizes this responsibility in her manifesto by proclaiming design as a cultural act embedded in nature: “[design] translates cultural values into memorable landscape forms and spaces that often challenge, expand, and alter our conceptions of beauty,” (15)

Ecological landscapes, thus, must insert themselves into existing socio-cultural conditions related to the consumption of constructed spaces. Unfortunately, a reality of human history that persists today is the existence of stratified social classes through engagement with prestigious culture or exclusive built structures. Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, illustrates an explicit relationship between the denouncement of nature as affirmation of more refined culture and the existence of social hierarchies. Because beautiful form indicates refined culture, “art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences,” (7).

It is unacceptable to blindly ignore the role of culture as a tool for systematic stratification. Designers can combat social inequality not by trying to wholly eliminate or demonize larger social institutions like racism or sexism, but instead by creating spaces that facilitate beautiful cultural and physiological experiences for any and all socioeconomic classes.

I believe underrepresented groups deserve to experience the beauty of architecturally formed cultural spaces because, as Meyer explains, these experiences are restorative and socially activating. If urban architecture has the potential to inspire a better quality of life for human beings, it should work diligently to do so, being mindful of the existing identity differences in its site-specific social contexts.

The most powerful opportunities in socially conscious design promote active citizenship. A humanitarian design approach utilizes the sensorial effects of beautiful cultural constructions to incite more empathetic community engagement, which establishes a sense of belonging and ownership among participants.

This is especially true for the Friendship Park Redevelopment project in Charlottesville, VA. Barbara Brown Wilson, an urban planner at the University of Virginia, is working together with the Piedmont Virginia Housing Association and the residents of the housing community to, through a fundamentally resident-driven design process, focus on generating wealth and happiness for existing residents in an unprecedented mixed-income housing project.

This hopeful and uplifting moment in Charlottesville’s deeply racial urban planning history is “modeling a practice where everybody wins by creating a place that is ethical, place-focused, and community-focused,” said Wilson in an online interview.

The incredible, interactive website functions as a part of the whole urban redevelopment project that is practically working to empower historically disenfranchised community members. Through a humanitarian design approach and resident-driven design conversations, the Friendship Park Redevelopment meaningfully inserts itself into existing socio-cultural conditions by combatting historically racist planning processes in Charlottesville.

Research processes. The humanitarian design approach learns from design-thinking and ethnographic research methods

In 1991, David Kelley merged with two business partners to found IDEO, now a global design and consulting firm based out of Palo Alto, CA. Since the company’s beginnings, their design ideology has spread to become a popular phenomenon labelled ‘design-thinking’. On their website, they recognize the way that label has evolved in our contemporary economy and want to define themselves within it. IDEO runs a ‘human-centered’ design approach that seeks an ideal balance of people (desirability), technology (feasibility), and business (viability) (designthinking.ideo.com). This model for innovation serves the company, but it can also serve professionals on a smaller scale.

In his book, Creative Confidence, Kelley emphasizes the power of reframing your mindset for innovation: “Creativity comes into play whenever you have the opportunity to generate new ideas, solutions, or approaches. And we believe everyone should have access to that resource,” (3). The opening chapter features an anecdote about Doug Dietz, a medical imaging technology expert.

Doug’s story is the pinnacle of a successful design-thinking process. After engineering a new, high-tech MRI machine, Doug noticed that children were afraid of the machine’s loud sounds and overwhelming affordances. Rather than ignoring user difficulties that undermined the success of his new machine, he attended a workshop that encouraged him to observe and talk to users to better understand their needs, to collaborate with managers from other companies and industries, and to create a series of iterative prototypes. After much collaboration, he created an adventurous, interactive pirate ship experience for children using the MRI machine, which benefited nurse productivity and increased patient-parent satisfaction.

These workshop steps and IDEO’s three-circle models essentially describe the design-thinking process as a cross-functional, interdisciplinary, and collective effort of many to innovate solutions. No single mind could imagine every solution on the planet; rather, designers can learn from other professionals’ expertise to generate new ideas. And by ‘other’, I mean non-artistic disciplines like public service, medicine, business, and especially social science.

Anthropologists Ton Otto and Rachel Charlotte Smith emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration in the introduction of their book, Design Anthropology, Theory and Practice. This collection of articles is about an emerging academic field called ‘design anthropology’, which combines elements of anthropology and design to create more effective products for users. They define design as “a process of thought and planning [that] is often depicted as a universal human capacity that sets humankind apart from nature” and anthropology as “the comparative study of societies and cultures, based on detailed empirical research in concrete social contexts,” (Otto and Smith, 1-2). The aim of their book is to illustrate the limitations of each field as independent and the potential of theoretical and practical collaboration.

The key difference between the two fields is that the success of design is “measured by the material and social impact, rather than by the validity of its [theoretical] generalizations,” (Otto and Smith, 3) as in anthropology. The product of anthropological research is an ‘ethnography’, which refers to both the initial process of inquiry and the resulting analytical documentation. While conducting ethnographic research, anthropologists are generally concerned with influencing the subjective social relationships they are observing.

However, the concerns of designers are radically different because they are focused on explicit intervention in existing social and material realities. One of the biggest problems raised by design anthropology is the fact that most often, design does in fact intervene but fails to theorize and interpret the meaning of social usage contexts (Otto and Smith, 3-4).

In practice, effectiveness is achieved through user participation in the design process. User autonomy and the notion of cocreation enables disadvantaged groups to engage, as encouraged by Beth Meyer. Participatory design as a source of knowledge that informs change is already popular in the commercial industry. Corporations test iterative trial products, revise technologies, and change organizational structures in the workplace in a way that allows workers to control their work practice rather than being controlled by technologies aimed to replace them, (Otto and Smith, 7).

At the same time, commercial design is particularly focused on human interactions with specific products and technologies, whereas architectural projects loom as larger material spaces that interact with users less directly. Meanwhile, Beth Meyer recognizes that architectural landscapes are inherently embedded in human culture, so urban architecture may be relatively in touch with users; the question is if small-scale design for corporations or larger urban architecture are acting effectively in their broader, even global, cultural contexts. Otto and Smith carve a pathway to more effective solutions by outlining a practical method for observing, theorizing, and implementing design solutions that are grounded in empirical social research.

Similar to the empowerment of low-level corporate workers through participatory design, Dori Tunstall, an academic design anthropologist, believes that design anthropology has a major task in developing a self-governing, independent, and ‘decolonized methodology’ for engaging with social issues that discontinues neocolonial attitudes and combats global inequality. Otto and Smith summarize this ‘decolonization’ phenomenon: “Emergent [global] markets for design [promise] to create sustainable, innovative, and financially potent solutions to socioeconomic issues around the world.

However, as critics point out, such ventures need to set modest and realistic goals, build upon humanistic approaches, and foster sensitivity to [the values] of local populations to [create] morally justifiable change and to avoid…replicating forms [of] colonialism that anthropology was a part of during the 20th century. It is in this context that design anthropology finds its place, opportunity, and challenge,” (Otto and Smith, 13,19).

Otto and Smith’s analysis of design anthropology as interventionist yet empathetic should inspire architects to incorporate ‘decolonized’ ethnographic research into their aesthetic and programmatic design conversations so that their architecture will be understood and celebrated within its broader social context. By combining empirical field research, theoretical interpretation, and applied design solutions based on those cultural interpretations, design is at once much more socially effective for users.

1. A diagram showing the continuum of theory and practice between Anthropology and Design. Image credit, Brandon Meyer. 2. A diagram mapping the design anthropology process, from ethnography to implementation. Image in Otto and Smith.

Conclusion

Now having formed a fuller understanding of the relationship between anthropology and design in theory, I would like to further investigate these ideals by collecting case studies. Many of the projects referenced in Otto and Smith’s discussion of design anthropology are about industrial design, organizational design, or exhibition design. Beyond their reading and the literature from our theory course, I’d like to research examples of design anthropology and other evidence of humanitarian design approaches in urban architecture.

As I wrote in the introduction, I’m interested in bridging the successes of human-centered design, not just with small-scale products as that is already on the rise today, but with broader urban architectural forms and ecological, socio-cultural landscapes. I’m also interested in further researching Dori Tunstall’s notion of ‘decolonized’ design and the ethics of local-global interventionist tensions. I believe architecture has a lot of potential to influence geopolitics and greater cultural literacy among international citizens.

Ultimately, the humanitarian design approach has been established as a combination of priorities towards aesthetic beauty, human welfare, and ethnographically informed design solutions. I agree with Otto and Smith that design has become a major site of cultural production and social change (2), and even further as a catalyst for combatting unequal access to the restorative emotional provocations of urban architectural landscapes.

Institutions that fund the development of the built environment must respond to broad social demands, so architects can simultaneously play in a role in the grassroots effort of changing design culture to be more inclusive of user participation, more informed by the subsequent social knowledge of qualitative research, and, as a result, more sustainable in local-global cultural contexts.

As time passes, society inevitably changes, and this is evident in the fact that design is always needed to reinvent expired solutions. Thus, changing definitions of culture, welfare, and space directly influence the agency of architectural commissions. The empirical tools of anthropologists combined with the spatial constructions of architects have the power to create experiential meaning and equally accessible social spaces that promote welfare for all users. -

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“Like ethnographers, designers have to begin with immersion in real-life situations to gain insight into experiences and meanings that form the basis for reflection, imagination, and design.” — Otto and Smith, in Design Anthropology, Theory and Practice

Citations

Frampton, Kenneth. Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance. 1981. UVA Collab, Peter Waldman.

“Humanitarian, n. and Adj.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2019.

IDEO, Design Thinking Defined. Webpage. Accessed 21 November 2019.

Image in “Clemons Library first floor reopens,” by Kate Bellows for TheCavDaily. 2 Sept 2019. Web. Accessed 23 Nov 2019.

Kelley, David and Tom Kelley. Creative Confidence, Unleashing the Creative Potential within

us all. Crown Publishing Group, New York. Print. 2013.

Le Corbusier. “Five Points towards a New Architecture.” Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architects, edited by Ulrich Conrads, 1926.

Meyer, Brandon. Image in “What Is Design Anthropology?” Excerpt from “The Many Meanings of Design Anthropology.” 2018. Accessed 23 Nov 2019.

Meyer, Elizabeth K. “Sustaining Beauty. The Performance of Appearance: A Manifesto in Three Parts.” Journal of Landscape Architecture, vol. 3, no. 1, Mar. 2008, pp. 6–23.

Mostafavi, Mohsen, and David Leatherbarrow. On Weathering: The Life of a Buildings in Time. MIT Press. March 1993. Print.

Otto, Ton and Rachel Charlotte Smith. Design Anthropology, Theory and Practice. Bloomsbury Academic. Print. 2013.

The Reimagining of Friendship Park. Feature with Barbara Brown Wilson. Website. Accessed 21 November 2019.

“Welfare, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2019.

Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Print. 1966.