Agreed, but what I'm really after in this brief post is the suggestion that it isn't so much design research that is adopting anthropology as a model as society as a whole. Take Hal Foster's essay on the "Artist as Ethnographer" as a starting point, if you will, and take note of the critique, which I find compelling, as I do so much of Hal's work. But whereas Hal was writing in the mid-1990s, a time in which globalization and demographic fragmentation put pressure on dominant models of thought, today the pressure is also very much from the changing terrain of networks. By this I do NOT mean to discount these key questions of identity. Indeed, as far as I can see questions of identity are way way more complicated than they were in the early 1990s and are only going to become more pronounced. The down side of all this is that we continue to lose our capacity for historical understanding. There's nothing wrong with interdisciplinarity, per se, but history seems to be unable to provide ways of apprehending the changes around us. For a discipline that by its very nature investigates change, this is a major problem, a problem I can't excuse any longer.
Agreed, but what I'm
Agreed, but what I'm really after in this brief post is the suggestion that it isn't so much design research that is adopting anthropology as a model as society as a whole. Take Hal Foster's essay on the "Artist as Ethnographer" as a starting point, if you will, and take note of the critique, which I find compelling, as I do so much of Hal's work. But whereas Hal was writing in the mid-1990s, a time in which globalization and demographic fragmentation put pressure on dominant models of thought, today the pressure is also very much from the changing terrain of networks. By this I do NOT mean to discount these key questions of identity. Indeed, as far as I can see questions of identity are way way more complicated than they were in the early 1990s and are only going to become more pronounced. The down side of all this is that we continue to lose our capacity for historical understanding. There's nothing wrong with interdisciplinarity, per se, but history seems to be unable to provide ways of apprehending the changes around us. For a discipline that by its very nature investigates change, this is a major problem, a problem I can't excuse any longer.