Ethnography by Design: Scenographic Experiments in Fieldwork 9781350071001, 9781350071018, 9781350071032

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Figure 1 Still from “No Decision is Taken Until Everyone Agrees” (2013); Kristen Schnittker, Jesse Zarritt, Kavyon Pourazar, Nami Yamamoto.

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Ethnography by Design

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Also available from Bloomsbury Anthropology and Art Practice, edited by Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright Between Art and Anthropology, edited by Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright Design Anthropology, edited by Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto and Rachel Charlotte Smith

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Ethnography by Design Scenographic Experiments in Fieldwork Luke Cantarella Christine Hegel George E. Marcus

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Bloomsbury Academic Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Luke Cantarella, Christine Hegel and George E. Marcus, 2019 Luke Cantarella, Christine Hegel and George E. Marcus have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. Cover design by Tjaša Krivec Cover image © Luke Cantarella All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3500-7100-1 978-1-3500-7103-2 978-1-3500-7102-5

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

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Contents List of Figures viii Preface x Acknowledgments xii Project Credits xiii 1

Introduction 1

Part One 2

On Scenography 13

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Productive Encounters 27

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Practices for an Ethnography by Design 55

Part Two 5

Unfolding a Process 71

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A Workshop Model 99

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Operations and Micro-strategies 115 Appendix: Games and Exercises 129

Bibliography 141 Index 149

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Figures Please note that all images, unless otherwise stated, are the copyright of the authors. 1 Still from “No Decision is Taken Until Everyone Agrees” (2013); Kristen Schnittker, Jesse Zarritt, Kavyon Pourazar, Nami Yamamoto 2 Uncle Vanya, Goodman Theater (2012); Tim Hopper, Mary Ann Thebus, Larry Neumann Jr. Scenery: Todd Rosenthal. Photo: Liz Lauren 3 Naomi Bueno di Mesquita, Performative Mapping (2015) 4 Model-making for Trade is Sublime (2013) 5 Design proposal for 214 Sq. Ft. (2012) 6 Motel in Garden Grove, CA (2012) 7 Detail from 214 Sq. Ft. (2012) 8 Detail from 214 Sq. Ft. (2012) 9 214 Sq. Ft. at the Balboa Bay Club Hotel (2012) 10 214 Sq. Ft. at the Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County (2014) 11 Meeting room at the World Trade Organization, Geneva (2013) 12 Open doors in the Centre William Rappard (2013) 13 Detail from Trade is Sublime (2013) 14 Still from “Everyone Has to Follow the Same Rules” (2013); Kirsten Schnittker and Nami Yamamoto 15 Still from “No Decision is Taken Until Everyone Agrees” (2013); Kayvon Pourazar 16 Still from “No Decision is Taken Until Everyone Agrees” (2013); Nami Yamamoto 17 Yes, We’re Open (2016) 18 Artpologist Collective, The Brighton Beach Memory Exchange (2011) 19 Brooklyn signs and storefronts (2010–2015) 20 Remembering Bedford Avenue photo collage (2015) 21 Warm-up games, Yes, We’re Open workshop (2015) 22 Fictional store in model form from Yes, We’re Open workshop (2015) 23 Design anthropology workshop, University of Jyväskylä (2017) 24 Yes, We’re Open workshop (2015); Emily Mendelsohn, Christine Hegel, Barbara Adams, Edward Snajdr 25 Problem-setting from HCLGA workshop (2016) 26 Maiju Strömmer presenting a speculative caring tool (2016) 27 Still from “No Decision is Taken Until Everyone Agrees” (2013); Jesse Zaritt 28 Maurice Denis, The Dignity of Labor (detail) (1931) 29 Catherine Bolle, Outre Terre (2012) 30 Proposal showing commodity streams (2013) 31 Proposal for Trade is Sublime (2013)

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i xiv 12 26 30 31 32 34 34 36 38 39 41 42 43 44 46 47 48 50 51 52 54 57 60 65 70 73 74 75 77

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

W. and T. Willis, Statue of Richard Cobden (1868) Michael Lantz, Man Controlling Trade (1942) Detail from “10 Common Misunderstandings About the WTO” (1999) Sketches for Trade is Sublime (2013) Still from “Everyone Has to Follow the Same Rules” (2013); Nami Yamamoto and Kirsten Schnittker Still from “Everyone Has to Follow the Same Rules” (2013); Jesse Zaritt Still from “Everyone Has to Follow the Same Rules” (2013); Kristen Schnittker and Jesse Zaritt Krzysztof Wodiczko, The Tijuana Project (1999), Centro Cultural de Tijuana, Mexico Installing Trade is Sublime at the WTO (2013); Christine Hegel and Jukka Piitulainen Trade is Sublime, translation cards (2013) Detail of Trade is Sublime (2013) Detail of Trade is Sublime (2013) Didactic panel from Trade is Sublime (2013) Detail of Trade is Sublime (2013) Speculative Object (2017) Stern v. Marshall Archive workshop (2014) Call for designers, Central Bankers workshop (2015) List of Knots and Dos, Central Bankers workshop (2015) Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology, Suits of Inquiry (2015) Design Prompt, Stern v. Marshall Archive workshop (2014) Design Briefs, Yes, We’re Open workshop (2014) Term-Setting (2017); Luke Cantarella Speculations, Stern v. Marshall Archive workshop (2014) Marti Guixe, Solar Restaurant for Lapin Kulta (2011) Still from Unified Estonia (2011) Theater No99 Still from Je ne suis pas un homme facile (I Am Not an Easy Man) (2017) Board game collection (2016) Magazine, a design game (2014) Resent and Adore cards, Yes We’re Open (2016) Exquisite Corpse Drawing (2012) Stern v. Marshall Archive workshop (2014); Kent Richland

79 80 81 85 86 86 87 89 91 92 93 94 94 95 98 102 103 104 106 107 110 112 114 118 119 121 128 130 131 133 134

Figures ix

Preface This book is based on a series of collaborations among the authors that began in 2011, undertaken under the auspices of a kind of mobile atelier that we have come to call the Productive Encounters Studio. These collaborations include 214 Sq. Ft., Trade is Sublime, and Yes, We’re Open. We have also organized six workshops through which we have refined our project development process; two of these contributed to the emerging design of Yes, We’re Open, and the others have focused on research projects helmed by anthropologists Douglas Holmes (SUNY Binghamton), Justin Richland (University of California, Irvine), and Sari Pietikäinen (University of Jyväskylä). Cantarella and Hegel, though married, had not collaborated professionally since working on theatre projects in the mid-1990s. Their lives and work began to intersect with Marcus’ during their tenure at UC Irvine, Hegel as a Research Specialist in the Department of Anthropology and Cantarella as an assistant professor in the Department of Drama. Marcus’ Center for Ethnography hosted a series of discussions on design and anthropology, and it was through these talks that our interests began to align. This alignment was further solidified when Marcus, along with then-Chair of Anthropology Bill Maurer, arranged to bring 214 Sq. Ft. to the UC Irvine campus as a temporary public installation. On one level, our interest in the correspondences between design and ethnography and in the possibilities of scenography stems from our particular expertise. Cantarella’s background is in theater design, with experience working in art departments in television and film as well; Hegel studied and worked in theater for a decade before coming to anthropology. As we have developed projects we turned to costume designers, editors, photographers, sound designers, choreographers (designers of movement), and others to collaborate on these projects. We have borrowed the process of theater production as a means of working together to specify and generate elements of our built environments and incentivize the actions within them. But beyond what these collaborators offer in terms of deliverables, our work with designers and performers has afforded us the chance to figure things out using a scenographic approach. Drawing on our complementary skills and sets of knowledge, we three, with the generous and stimulating contributions of a variety of colleagues, have sought to expand into an adjacent territory of experimental, scenographically oriented ethnographic practice. The projects we have undertaken together serve as a point of initial interrogation into what we sought to discover or answer through these efforts. Throughout this book they also serve as illustrations and points of return in order to dwell on particular insights gleaned that moved us forward in our thinking. There has recently emerged a degree of ferment around design anthropology. Generally, work in this vein entails descriptions of projects that represent a variety of design-anthropology collaborations: studies of designers relying on ethnographers to bring “data” to projects and shape design ideas using material from the real world, studies of design practices in the studio by ethnographers, and studies of anthropologists using design strategies to do the work of anthropology. We are focused on the latter, and offer here a rationale and model for doing ethnography using design modalities.

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Our intention is for this book to speak to both ethnographers and designers. It is a call for collaboration on the basis of a proposed reciprocal benefit to both through this kind of work. It is a way for designers to engage deeply in designing for social understanding, versus for “social good” in a utopian sense. We highlight the fact that designers have a strong impulse, like ethnographers, to see the social in its complexity and to arrive at and illuminate social realities for themselves and others. Not “solving the problems of the day” per se. So there is as much for designers in this model of collaboration as there is for ethnographers.

Preface xi

Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the support of many people who gave their time, offered insights, and asked critical questions that have contributed to the development of our work. We are grateful to Justin Richland, Kent Richland, Shonna Trinch, Edward Snajdr, Douglas Holmes, Jae Chung, and Jennifer Friend for allowing us to investigate their work through design interventions as part of developing this approach. Keith Murphy, Valerie Olson, and Kristin Peterson have been interlocutors along the way as we embarked on projects, and Elizabeth Chin has been a fellow traveler and supportive in myriad ways (providing studio space and MA students in addition to participating in workshops, joining forces at conferences, and offering key insights). We are grateful to the many others who also contributed to or participated in our workshops as thinkers and makers, including Lindsay Bell, Jesse Jackson, Yelena Guzman, Colin Ford, Jason Palmer, Tom Ontiveros, Taylor Nelms, Sean Malin, Jenny Rodenhouse, Julian Brash, Adrian Jones, Katie Edmonds, Scott Brown, Louisa Thompson, Miriam Crowe, Matt Acheson, Meredith Ries, Emily Mendelsohn, and Barbara Adams. Large-scale design projects require technical, logistical, and administrative support, which we have received from Keith Bangs, the UC Irvine Department of Drama, Saddleback Church, Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County, the Balboa Bay Club, Bill Maurer, Anna Mueller, and Joseph S. Lewis III. We are grateful to UCIRA for project funding and to Sylvia Lotito and Marilu Daum for endless patience administering it. Since 2016, Luke and Christine have also had the opportunity to work on projects with Sari Pietikäinen at the University of Jyvaskala and to host workshops with her post-doctoral researchers, including Anna-Liisa Ojala and Maiju Strömmer. Thanks to all those not named here who ruminated with us in public and private about design and anthropology. We wish to offer a special thanks to our most trusted confidants and advocates, Patricia Seed and Tosca Hegel-Cantarella, for their patience, insight, support, and love over the course of our work together.

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Project Credits 214 Sq. Ft. (2012) was created by Luke Cantarella and Christine Hegel and funded by the Project Hope Alliance (Jennifer Friend, Executive Director) with additional funding provided by the UCI Center of Ethnography. Video footage was courtesy of Alexandra Pelosi from her film Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County. Sound Designer Associate Designers Properties Assistant Carpenter

Jeff Polunas Andrew Broomell Robin Darling Tiffany Anguiano Geronimo Guzman

Trade is Sublime (2013) was created by Luke Cantarella, Christine Hegel, and George Marcus. Funding was provided by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) with additional funding provided by the UCI Center of Ethnography and support from the World Trade Organization (WTO). Director of Photography Composer Sound Designer Costume Designer Lighting Designer Key Grip Editor Dancers

Rodin Hamidi Edmund Mooney Vincent Olivieri Anne Kenney Thomas Dunn Alexander Freer Amy Jones Kavyon Pourazar Kirsten Schnitkker Nami Yamimoto Jesse Zarritt

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1 Introduction

In Act Two of the play Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, Astrov, the local country doctor, sits at a table talking with Sonia, the daughter of his friend Professor Serebryakov, a retired and chronically ill professor. Astrov drinks glasses of vodka, eventually proclaiming he will never drink again, as Sonia tries to discern whether he might love her. She asks him if he’s satisfied with life, to which he responds: I like life as life, but I hate and despise it in a little Russian country village, and as far as my own personal life goes, by heaven! there is absolutely no redeeming feature about it. Haven’t you noticed if you are riding through a dark wood at night and see a little light shining ahead, how you forget your fatigue and the darkness and the sharp twigs that whip your face? I work, that you know—as no one else in the country works. Fate beats me on without rest; at times I suffer unendurably and I see no light ahead. I have no hope; I do not like people. It is long since I have loved any one. CHEKHOV 1999

Sonia then asks “You love no one?” Astrov: “Not a soul.” As Chekhov writes it, it’s late-night, vodkafueled, idle conversation, and simultaneously a moment of profound implication. Nothing really happens except the quiet unfolding of an evening in their lives. All the dramaturgical architecture, including Chekhov’s particular phrasing and the preceding scene that leads into it, and the typical design of the production—the antique furniture upon which the characters sit, the dimly lit room that evokes a kind of static melancholy, the sound of the wind in the night air and approach of a summer storm—is leading the audience toward compound recognition. Of our capacity as humans to squander moments of possible connection with one another. Of the unrelenting cycle of days in a life. The scene evokes something about the human condition through a deliberate and enframed encounter, offering granular and deeply felt understanding. Such moments, in which a small event or non-event becomes an opening onto something larger, are what ethnographers seek. Geertz’s (1973) classic scene of the Balinese cockfight, often held up as a zenith of observational-analytic acumen, is precisely one of these moments. In other words, a moment in which the ethnographer, through thick description, links meanings to action and through his hermeneutical effort we become keenly aware of the unfolding tension between tradition and behavior, the past and the present. Although environments, institutions and macro-level processes forge the conditions of everyday life, anthropology must reckon with how existence unfurls under these conditions and find ways to register the “unresolved emergent” (Smith and Otto 2016: 34). Figure 2 Uncle Vanya, Goodman Theater (2012); Tim Hopper, Mary Ann Thebus, Larry Neumann Jr. Scenery: Todd Rosenthal. Photo: Liz Lauren.

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This book situates anthropology’s object as emergent social life, recognizing at the same time the methodological challenges that occasions. Facts on the ground are stated as structures of feeling through a combination of narrative and conceptual inventions. This evokes for us the thought and work apparent in theater design. The extent to which scenographic craft can enhance and transform the capacities of ethnographic research in fieldwork is what we explore in this volume. The decades following the publication of the Writing Culture essays, which challenged anthropology’s faith in its authority and ethics, saw anthropology expand and embrace reflexivity, identity, and public culture as new languages of investigation, and materiality and science and technology studies emerge as new broadly influential arenas of research (Marcus 2009: 40; see also Clifford and Marcus 1986; Rabinow and Marcus 2008). But the promise and potential of such a rupture to make room for a range of experiments in epistemology, even while some of the contours of traditional ethnographic research held stable, remained underdeveloped. Once thought the most settled of anthropology’s signature aspects, methodological questions became the most pressing and interesting area for new thinking in the post Writing Culture era. Gunn, Otto, and Smith (2013) build on this realization, noting that “although anthropology has an interest in social change and people’s imaginations of the future, as a discipline it lacks tools and practices to actively engage and collaborate in people’s formation of their futures” (Gunn et al. 2013: 3). As such, this book grows out of Marcus’ insistence that: a concept that conceives of research practice in a way that provides the long view, encompassing the phases of research today in a coherent way, retaining the focus on individual research while incorporating and making visible and accessible to the professional community the complex relations that compose it, is that of the design process. I am not thinking of the idea of formal research design, which is a standard category in the implementation of social science methods, but of design, as it is defined in studio fields like art, graphic and industrial product design and architecture . . .

Ethnography by Design

MARCUS 2009: 26; EMPHASIS ADDED

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Design, powered by and accountable to ethnography, is the engine of several proposals towards a new anthropological practice. Design entails particular ways of thinking and sets of practices that are common across studio disciplines; it is, generally speaking, a “distinct way of knowing” derived from the rhetoric and values of the design and craft traditions of the West (Otto and Smith 2013). It is typically concerned with the material and the properties and affordances of materials, the role of things in human lives, and materialization as a zone of possibility. Design is also concerned with people, their individual habits and concerted efforts, and their relationships to one another alongside and in relation to the material. Design anthropologists work between these two disciplines in various configurations, and although Suchman’s observation that design should be taken up as problem by an anthropology of the contemporary is well observed (Suchman 2011), there is a growing sense that design tools and practices are good to think with (Gunn and Donovan 2012b). Design anthropology is a rich and varied terrain, but includes, for example, analyses of design studios as social milieus and sites of emergent logics and imaginings (Drazin 2013, Murphy 2015), the temporally situated effects of designed objects (Hallam 2013, Kjaersgaarten 2013), and connections between digital technologies and understandings of heritage and the past (Drazin et al. 2016, Otto and Smith

Introduction

2013). Design anthropologists have addressed the different temporal orientations of these disciplines (Kjaersgaard et al. 2016: 4; see also Hunt 2011), used design’s future orientation to experiment with strategies of “rehearsing” the future as part of social inquiry (Halse 2010), and used an anthropological lens to problematize design practices that grapple with the future by “formulating visions, speculating on alternatives and steering toward particular ideals” (Mazé 2016). Attending to the future-possible in order to create a frame for reckoning with the emergent has implications for conceptualizations of the “field.” As Rabinow and Marcus (2008) have argued, the field is a found imaginary. It is found in the sense of being actually experienced and not a figment of the imagination, and imaginary in that it emerges across space and time according to how, and with whom, the ethnographer traverses a set of research concerns. The field, therefore, is always diffuse and ephemeral. Ethnographers delineate a set of things, which come to be marked as a field, foreclosing the inclusion of other possibilities. In other words, ethnographers speculate, both in the sense of conjecturing and risking. An ethnographer’s found imaginary is a conjecture, rooted in empiricism yet mediated by subjectivity, that the field so demarcated is both meaningful and telling. If we accept that the ethnographer engages in a form of controlled speculation in the course of fieldwork, it becomes ever clearer that ethnography is in need of new iterations to attend to the emergent and to do “ethnographies of the possible” (Kjaersgaard et al. 2016). Because ethnographers are always already conjecturing what is true and valuable in order to compose the “found imaginary” space of inquiry, then design modalities that call attention to the making of the everyday world are key to knowledge production in anthropology. Design experiments that are fundamentally interventionist, including co-designing with communities, imaginative endeavors, and materialization, reckon with people’s aspirations and concerns with deliberate assemblages. The kinds of interventions overtly speculate on questions of social life, framing the possible in order to evaluate its alignment with the emergent. This book is an argument for designed interventions in the field, an approach we have come to call ethnography by design. Such an approach can fruitfully upend the dominant eye observational approach typical in anthropology towards the production of contextual and shared insights, and a working model of collaboration emphasizing multiple roles and perspectives and co-creation. To be clear, what we propose here diverges in subtle but important ways from participatory design (c.f. Light 2015, Smith et al. 2017) in its intention; participatory design has generally sought to bring communities into the design process as a democratic approach to real-world problem-solving. What interests us are the more diffuse potentials of collaborative encounters, or, as Binder has framed it, ways of creating “third spaces in which everyday experiences are reconstructed through design interventions” (Binder 2016: 269). Ethnography by design is distinct from ethnography in design; in other words, uses of ethnography to serve the needs of design to access insights into “users” and consumers as can be seen in the development of design methodologies such as Human-Centered Design (HCD) and service design, as well as in corporate design consultancies (IDEO and Fjord, for example). In contrast, we formulate ethnography by design as the use of imaginative and material practices to design ethnographically informed provocations in collaboration with publics who vet, co-design, experience. In turn, such publics are positioned to respond to these interventions as part of their

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Ethnography by Design 4

own emergent knowledge of their communities and the contemporary world. There are linkages here to Tim Ingold’s (2013) suggestion for an anthropology by means of design, in which the designer’s habit of thinking through making might be applied to ethnographic practice. Materialization practices, he posits, move beyond logocentric modes of analysis and in so doing can develop insights by means of identifying and producing correspondences. Ingold’s work has had a deep impact among designers who see anthropology as a legitimating framework and resource for questions about the users and social practices in relation to which their design problems are raised and solved. Yet we distinguish our practice from many of those working in the space between design and anthropology by embracing scenography, its design practices and habits of thinking, as a central disciplinary method. In so doing, we apply generalizable design practices of collaboration, materialization, iteration, speculation, and a focus on problem-setting and problem-solving to the design and staging of encounters with and among various publics. The encounter is a fundamental unit of ethnographic understanding, and by situating our work around points of encounter we are interested in thinking both about how ethnographers might encounter publics and how publics might encounter one another. Moreover, we aim to design encounters that are “productive” in that they set in motion forms of intersubjective discovery among co-makers and publics and create a zone of disputation. As such, productive encounters are materialized propositions that engage publics, informed by and accountable to ethnography as part of a process of social inquiry. Productive encounters are an assertion that ethnography’s boundaries cannot always be resolved by a discursive object like a book or an article and might more aptly be resolved by a project that is closer to ethnography’s enlivened, interactional forms. Our aim is to generate hybrid, deeply felt, embedded, and original articulations of contemporary problems (the object of ethnographic work everywhere) not readily available through other forms (Cantarella et al. 2015). Our own productive encounters, and the design practices they entail in the development process, have sought to create space to confirm, disconfirm, and shift developing insights that traditional ethnographic methods of interviewing and participant observation have not sufficiently facilitated. By shifting the product of research from the ethnographic monograph to the designed encounter, we join a movement away from a representational ethnography and towards an embodied, multi-modal, co-constructed ethnographic experience legitimized by the receptive engagement of its direct witness: a participatory social science. The scenographic model to which we are most closely aligned is that of expanded scenography, which refers to artistic practices that derive from the traditions of stage design but exist outside the normal institutional frames of theater or play-making. Expanded scenography is in tune with movements in art and design that turned towards explicitly social aims, including relational aesthetics, socially engaged art, littoral art, social practice, conceptual design, critical design, design for debate, design art, and others. The typical values of art and design are deferred in these forms towards concerns about social forms and connections. Expanded scenography has design-like habits of problem-solving while also making use of aesthetic fictions. It is a zone of thickly rendered representations; it relies on detail and correspondence, similar to the way that ethnographers in the Geertzian tradition have valued thick description of the “real” (non-fictional) social. In the ethnographic

Introduction

model, the ethnographer observes things and makes meaning; she articulates the authoritative interpretation. In the theater model, the three-dimensional field of signifiers is produced and recursively interpreted by not only designers and performers but also audiences. The fictionalized and often playful space of expanded scenography creates opportunities for embodied and participatory meaning-making about the emergent real. The idea of doing ethnography by design forces us to grapple with the tension between aesthetics and utility in the field. There is an aesthetics to ethnography that is part of its episteme and affective potential. Since the reflexive turn, ethnographers have keyed into modes of storytelling and argumentation that take cues from literature, filmmaking, and photography, among other artworlds. Using these visual mediums and writerly strategies, ethnographers have sought to convey more vividly that they were there and to bring the reader there as well. We make rich and layered compositions that are intended to evoke and transport, not simply to offer evidence that supports a line of argumentation. We build sympathy for our analysis through curation, and just as mathematicians seek not just to solve a problem but to solve it with the most elegant formula possible, anthropologists seek to present the most beautiful, logical interpretation possible. Qualitative researchers do not typically rely on fixed measurement strategies or quantification but rather seek multiple sublime webs of connection. These are essentially aesthetic decisions about what compels, what is trenchant, what aligns. Aesthetic valuation of ethnographic representation operates in tension with the valuation of ethnography in terms of its potential utility. Even anthropologists who focus on the theory-building potentials of ethnographic data understand their work as having broader humanist utility to illuminate and ameliorate social ills. The utility of ethnography is highlighted by entities like EPIC, the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, which brings together people working in the private sector who seek to create “business value” by using ethnographic techniques in arenas such as product innovation, marketing, and user-experience. But EPIC is also a forum for critical scholarship on uses of big data, technology, and design that create and deepen forms of inequality; such critique is intended, in this forum, to impact corporate strategies more directly. Public-interest ethnography and applied anthropological projects in areas such as development, environmental policy, healthcare, prison reform, and the like are explicitly geared towards identifying problems and making change, and there are many ways in which ethnographic research can and should be useful. Yet, it could be argued, a focus on utility as a primary value can obscure less coherent but richer ideas of ethnographic truth. There is a useful parallel in the tension between the aesthetics and the utility of participatory forms in dematerialized art practices in the 1960s. Spurred largely by Debordian critique of the spectacle, the all-encompassing forces of global capital that reduced all human experience to commodity exchange, arts such as the Situationists sought to create detournément, a rupture or hijack of everyday life, with discontinuous experiences that could reconnect the spectator with an authentic experience (Debord 2000). While the medium of these works (happenings, walks, interventions, etc.) was new, the terms of shock and rupture were aligned values of the historical avant-garde (Bishop 2012). Simultaneously, a separate community-based art movement arose that repositioned the artist’s role in the community not as provocateur but rather as facilitator who could

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use art-related practices in the process of community building and repairing social bonds (Kester 2004). This sensibility comes to bear on the ethnography by design approach through its simultaneous attachment to aesthetics and utility in the form of collaborative and materialized problem-solving around meaning and experience. Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces (2004), an examination of socially engaged art projects that artists in the US and Europe have undertaken in recent years, has influenced our work. The participatory art projects he analyzes share a capacity for instigating and making visible dialogues between social actors of different statuses, political affiliations, and races. He points out that some of these pieces, including a piece by the Austrian WochenKlausur arts collective that brought politicians, sex workers, and journalists into a conversation about issues of drug addiction and homelessness, are overtly designed to generate consensus. Others are simply directed towards facilitating dialogue and exchange, not for spectators but as “an integral part of the work itself” (Kester 2004: 8). Although our proposal has its roots generally in the concept of para-ethnography through staging or enframing ethnographic encounters (Marcus 2000), Kester’s argument that socially engaged art practice can produce forms of what Hans-Herber Kögler has called “reciprocal elucidation” is a useful articulation of the kinds of participatory knowledge production we aim for with designed encounters. Kögler proposes a shift away from an “interpreter/outsider” and “agent/insider” dichotomy towards:

Ethnography by Design

a dialogical rapprochement between the theorist and the situated agent. These exchanges would combine the theorist’s command of “methodological and conceptual tools” with the subject’s own complex self-understanding to challenge both the “hidden symbolic assumptions” that define the subject’s context and the limitations of abstract theorization. The result would be a “dialogical cross-reconstruction” of a given social context. KESTER 2004: 95

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The potential for reciprocal elucidation between anthropologists, scenographers, and various publics (who may or may not be characterized as interlocutors per se), and therefore its potential to generate forms of democratic collaboration in social inquiry, is precisely what animates our interest in ethnography by design. Participatory knowledge making might be the central aim of our methodology but it does present challenges when considering to whom this knowledge is accountable and under what disciplinary terms it may be assessed. We begin with the supposition that productive encounters are fundamentally oriented towards the aims of anthropology to deepen our understanding of social life. Of course, to borrow a designer’s phrase, anthropologists are often grappling with “wicked” problems. As an aspiration, productive encounters could be thought of as an alternate embodied form of ethnography that reflects ethnographic questions back to a localized audience of co-creators for whom the work has a special relevance or meaning. It is in this sphere that the projects might gain significance. In this sense, they have more affinity with the transitory nature and affective power of performance than the permanence associated with writing. This is not to say that suggesting an alternative form does not create a tension between the primary and secondary audiences. Is the fidelity of a project tied to its ability to produce insights for both direct participants and secondary audiences (the scholarly colleagues for whom one publishes)?

We might look for possible insight toward Claire Bishop’s critical examination of this tension in participatory art. Bishop identifies participatory art as focused on experience: “It tends to value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change, a change of energy, a raised consciousness” (Bishop 2012: 6). As a result, it is an art dependent on first-hand experience, preferably over a long duration with an ethical relationship to its participants, framed most often in the form of social good. For Bishop, in the context of art history, this is a critical challenge because very few observers are in a position to view and evaluate long-term participatory projects. In addition, their goals as social projects attempt to negate a responsibility to aesthetics writ large or their positionality within “the story of art.” However, as she points out, power flows make the work ultimately accountable to the secondary audience of the art world compromising the position of the initial participants especially when they are from marginalized populations. Many of the ethical challenges between the primary and secondary constituencies are well-rehearsed and even bureaucratized in the social sciences. Due to the focality of field research in anthropology, direct and enduring engagements with people in communities are not problematized in precisely the same way that they are in the art world. But we might find the same skepticism of an approach to designed interventions that grapple with aesthetic questions as much as anthropological questions, that claims fidelity to anthropology but may not produce results in a form that cannot be assessed according to the terms of anthropology, just as Bishop argues for participatory art. As an experimental practice, we have no simple answer to this concern. While we might seek to ameliorate this tension by suggesting that both constituencies share responsibility for legitimization, in more concrete terms we can envision two ways that the issue of legitimacy might play out. In one case, scenographic experiments in the field might generate data and analysis from which scholars could generate the traditional work products of scholarship (books, articles, etc.). In this model, scenography is a tool that amplifies, clarifies, and uncovers tacit knowledge in the service of anthropological inquiry. In another scenario, the continued expansion and proliferation of expanded forms of this practice creates a legitimate marketplace for affect and experiential understanding that does not distill nicely into anthropological discourse. With enough experimentation, notions of purchase, engagement, and impact will become clear whether or not there is a transversal move towards theory within or across specific disciplines. This later version might be seen as a reframing of what Marcus evoked at the conclusion of his early essay on multi-sited ethnography as ‘circumstantial activism,’ a realm of ideas generated by ethnographic research that exceeds the forms of reception of disciplinary anthropology itself (Marcus 1995).

Structure of the book Introduction

This book is envisioned as a set of dispatches from the projects on which we have collaborated since 2011. We three (Luke Cantarella, Christine Hegel, and George Marcus) have attached ourselves to a variety of nascent or revisited projects helmed by other anthropologists and brought to fruition in designed interventions that seek to deepen or widen ethnographic insights from these projects. We offer reports on these projects in order to convey the particulars of how designed ethnography has unfolded for us over the years.

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Ethnography by Design 8

We have structured this book into two sections. The first section (Chapters 2–4) explicates the theory of the book by laying the foundations and arguments for an ethnography by design. Chapter 2, “On Scenography,” considers how the new terrains and framings for ethnographic inquiry might be linked to current developments in scenography, the key design discipline that informs our practice. This begins with a description of how scenography, traditionally understood as a stage design, has recently undergone a turn towards the social, moving from the confines of the theater into the realm of the real. Our interest in this movement (expanded scenography) is to understand its ethnographic dimensions and how the use of fictions and the staging of scenes of social life offers affordances for design anthropology. This expansion of scenography occurs within the context of parallel movements both in art and design towards a social inquiry and from anthropology in exploring affect-oriented and design-based ways of knowing. To clarify our understanding of scenography as a way of knowing, we focus then on the genealogy of scenography followed by a definition of how scenographers work and their habits of mind. We conclude by drawing observations about how scenography and ethnography share affinities and linkages that create opportunities for collaboration. Chapter 3 of the book is dedicated to giving substance to the idea of designing ethnographic interventions, or productive encounters, both by offering definitional frameworks and by narrating and illustrating our own projects. The productive encounters modality facilitates a way of identifying and thinking through anthropological questions by way of a lateral practice in scenography. In its best, most evolved form, it involves publics directly in the process of design through participation in designed experiences in order to provoke reciprocal elucidation and to cultivate knowledge production in situ rather than after-the-fact via data analysis in the academy. Productive encounters are framed by ethnographic, rather than art or design, values, and we posit that they entail a specific set of working principles that are distinct from those of traditional ethnographic practice. The first section of this chapter provides a more in-depth discussion of the productive encounter as an interventionist research modality developed as part of an ethnographic inquiry that produces and engages publics. Following this, we illustrate how a design-inflected modality can emerge at various points in ongoing research and examine the trajectories of three of our own projects, 214 Sq. Ft. (2012), Trade is Sublime (2013), and Yes, We’re Open (2016). We think of 214 Sq. Ft. as found ethnography in relation to its initial attachment to the goals of a non-profit organization that commissioned a designed environment to draw attention to the issue of homelessness, and its later emergence as a space of ethnographic encounter. By contrast, Trade is Sublime was a “second-act” project not only because it was temporally subsequent to initial field research but also because it re-presented findings in the field site in order to provoke public interpretation. Finally, we discuss Yes, We’re Open, as an example of how anthropologists and designers can instigate productive encounters in response to and as part of a deep engagement with others’ anthropological research projects, especially in their early stages. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the ramifications of an interventionist model that is based on the centrality of aesthetic ideation and material production and the necessary infrastructures to make these practices a viable modality. Designing an interface for bringing publics together that instigates new ways of thinking about ethnographic problems and requires changes in infrastructure including new approaches to training, funding, and the producing of public anthropology.

Introduction

Chapter 4, “Practices for an Ethnography by Design,” describes more generally designerly ways of approaching questions in and about the world that can inform anthropology as a practice. The idea of design thinking as a generalized approach toward cognition has been well-argued (Laurel 2003, Moggridge 2007). In our examination we focus in on the features and possibilities of five principles of design practice: (1) collaboration, (2) problem-setting and solving, (3) speculation, (4) materialization, and (5) iteration. Although we reference various design theories and the way these concepts are brought to bear in specific design fields, we are most concerned with their application to the broader project of building infrastructures that can facilitate the doing of ethnography by design. For instance, there are funding infrastructures in place to support traditional forms of ethnographic research, and academically normative procedures for developing and sharing discursive outcomes, such as peerreview, symposia, and conferences. But there are few labs or studios that support collaborative work between anthropologists and makers, and few funding sources for multi-modal projects; we articulate features of design practice in order to foment discussion about what new collaborative and multi-modal infrastructures could look like. The second section of the book is oriented towards practice and opens with “Unfolding a Process,” Chapter 5, a fine-grained narrative of our process of developing and exhibiting Trade is Sublime at the World Trade Organization at the Centre William Rappard in Geneva. Our conversation focuses largely on the politics of an ethnography by design approach, illustrating both our challenges and insights as we navigated the interplay between the ethnographic aims of the project and the needs and desires of stakeholders at the WTO. By focusing on the iterative decision-making and consensusforming processes, we highlight how ethnographic hunches take material forms. Our narrative points to the complex entanglement between sources of inspiration and unresolved questions in the ethnographic data and the aesthetic forms through which we were drawn to work. Once the design of Trade is Sublime was completed and ready for installation, processes of vetting and gatekeeping at the institution, which revolved around logistics and internal policies, were likewise revealed to be vital zones for developing ethnographic insight. We discuss our engagements with interlocutors in the Secretariat about their interpretations of the installation; our reflection on some of these challenges is part of an ongoing consideration of how such projects might produce the kinds of participatory engagements we believe are necessary to ethnography by design. This dialogue is annotated with photos, drawings, notations, and ephemera that demonstrate the material facets of the design process. Chapter 6, “A Workshop Model,” offers descriptions of and instructions for workshop techniques used in the development of our projects and in five different multi-day workshops that we have facilitated with anthropologists and designers in Finland, California, and New York. The immediate goals of these design-based workshops were to activate collaborative materialization as a lateral analytic process, but they also had the second aim of developing proposals for productive encounters that could be implemented in the real world as part of ongoing research. A workshop does not require embeddedness in a field site, but rather offers an intermediary space where designers and scholars can undertake collaborative analysis, either early in the development of a project or long after the findings have been published. In this chapter, we discuss how to prepare and assemble a workshop space, the use of warm-up games to create trust and rapport among participants, the

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Ethnography by Design

creation and use of design ethnography briefs as a method for making anthropology legible to designers and local informants, techniques for facilitators to guide and shape the flow of workshop, and ways to assess and collect results. In the development of an emergent field such as design ethnography, we find it helpful to look at models of hybridity from other fields where we see overlap between material practices and an interest in the social. In Chapter  7, we look at projects from participatory, relational and socially engaged art, applied theatre, speculative design, and expanded scenography that have provided inspiration and models for our work. We identify a series of operations from these projects, each of which is to varying degrees experiential, symbolic, playful, disruptive, dialogic, situated, and interpretive. Our intention is that this small collection of selected works can add to the literature on speculative design methodologies that has particular resonance for ethnographers (Dunne and Raby 2013, Marlow and Egan 2013, Shea 2012). Finally, we have included an appendix to the book with instructions for design games and exercise that we have developed or adapted for use. Included are five warm-up games and nine exercises that can be used and modified for the classroom, workshopping studio, or in the development of designed interventions. To expand the field to include designed interventions in the midst of everyday life, we need to reckon with the implications of such an approach: what forms of knowledge it may or may not produce and its capacity to contribute to the ever-growing scholarly canon, its “validity,” its ethics. At the same time, what are its potentialities: its vitality as a response to other developing insights in anthropology, its capacity to amplify taken-for-granted understandings and introduce new forms of rigor, its capacity to enliven and give substance to the humanistic and democratic claims of ethnography? In the following chapters, we explore these implications through our own work and offer a foundation for others to continue building an ethnography by design.

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Part One

11

Figure 3 Naomi Bueno di Mesquita, Performative Mapping (2015) (photo: Viktor Tusec).

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2 On Scenography

When the Dutch group Platform Scenography began setting up their exhibit for the 2015 Prague Quadrennial for Performance Design and Space (PQ), the leading international exposition of scenography and stage design, it was clear that they had something new in mind. They did not bring beautifully detailed scale-models of scenery, renderings of costumes, or photographs of past theater productions. Neither had they created sculptures, environments, or scenographic installations. Instead, they carried with them ten color laser printers that were networked to create a system of data collection. Their plan was to use the tools of scenography as a way of investigating public space with an aim to “make a visitor to the PQ or unsuspecting passersby experience the city in a different way or to shift their perspective in a subtle or not so subtle way” ( Ten Bosch et al. 2015). Their project, entitled Between Realities, was a collaboratively authored series of interventions (walks, interviews, discussions, drawing activities, and photo collecting), described as “an on-going research in the public space of Praha 1, the city center of Prague.” The team of designers cast themselves as investigators and construed their audience as user-participants. They aimed to recontextualize and alienate the experience of navigating the old city of Prague and in so doing stake a claim for scenography as a form of knowledge produced through aesthetic modes of inquiry. The group even created a typology for their interventions, organizing them into five strategies: fight, flee, shelter, negotiate, or surrender. Each strategy was authored by a designer who then placed themselves in the adopted role of an expert. For example, designer Naomi Bueno de Mesquita took on the role of “cartographer,” creating a series of performative mapping projects in which she interviewed local residents and asked them to create maps that reflected impulses and desires to hide. In one interview, an informant described her memory of Praha 1 under Soviet control when the buildings were lined with scaffolding because no one could afford to repair the crumbling facades (Bueno de Mesquita 2015). Navigating the city center was like walking through a series of twisting and turning tunnels before emerging into one of the large public squares that would later become the staging grounds for the Velvet Revolution. Classified as a “shelter” strategy, recordings of these interviews and others were then made available to an audience (mostly PQ conference attendees) who could walk the maps while listening to the dialogues. This project by Platform Scenography is one of many that seeks to repurpose the habits of meaning-making traditionally associated with a theater practice, scenography, as a way to develop social understandings with and among publics. Although the investigation of social life has always been a primary reason for making theater, what makes Between Realities important in our context is how it calls out as a primary goal the use of social fictions to investigate social facts. Their work falls into an emerging category of scenographic practice known as expanded scenography, which

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Ethnography by Design 14

amongst other things has broadened the frame of scenography beyond the theater as a way of enclosing real life within a delimited space of for aesthetic inquiry, or what anthropologists describe as a field site. While anthropology has been attuned to the construction of the field and its tentative and unstable boundaries since the reflexive turn, we are interested in the way that the enterprise of ethnographic observation can be drawn attention to and denaturalized to create moments of revelatory alienation, in the Brechtian sense, that establish criticality. The shift to more reflexive models of inquiry via new modes of writing and representation in response to the Writing Culture critique has created a fertile instability in ethnographic practices that have pushed towards both explicitly interventionist modes of research and creatively driven modes of representing and reproducing ethnographic knowledge (e.g. Hamdy and Nye 2017). We are interested in how scenography (along with other forms of social practice) has begun to resemble ethnography while pointing towards a workable model for collaborations between a design practice and anthropology. In this chapter, we examine the modalities of scenography, including in its expanded forms, and consider its linkages to forms of socially engaged art and design. In order to define some of the useful parameters for a scenographically informed design practice, we provide a genealogy of scenography and its development that contextualizes these new practices within a historically bound set of norms and traditions. Finally, we identify some the affinities this type of practice has towards anthropological collaborations, particularly in the way that scenography creates interventions in everyday life that construct fields of inquiry. Expanded scenography, a term first identified at PQ99, denotes artistic practices that derive from the traditions of stage design but exist outside the normal institutional frames of the theater and without a necessary specific reference to a text or narrative. As Joslin McKinney and Scott Palmer note, while expanded scenography exists in vastly heterogeneous forms, at its core are “mode[s] of encounters and exchange founded on spatial and material relations between bodies, objects and environments” (McKinney and Palmer 2017). They trace a compelling argument for the development of the form with a particular emphasis on its development in Europe and the UK where, due perhaps to the more porous borders between art and theater practices, the form has developed more rapidly. In the context of the United States, the development of expanded scenography might be traced with several broad movements in the field that began to emerge in the 1970s, including the use of alternative spaces for performance, changing role and use of duration and the emergence of visually driven performance projects. The use of alternative spaces, sometimes called site-specific or spatially engaged practices, is built upon the work of theater artists of the 1960s and 1970s who, for practical and political reasons, created productions in non-purpose-built venues (Schechner 1968). While originally so-called alternative spaces were used to stage plays, it quickly became apparent that spaces themselves could become the central organizing principle for a performance. For example, choreographer/artist Noemie Lafrance’s Descent (2001) was a site-specific piece performed on multiple levels of a spiral staircase the New York City court building clock tower. As Lafrance notes, “the audience was invited to view the performance looking down through the center well of the stairs and to descend the entire staircase to experience each of the multiple tableaus” (Lafrance 2001: n.p.). Outside the

On Scenography

institutional pressures of the theater and influenced by new practices in performance art, land art, and related-forms, scenographers began to experiment with duration, creating extremely long or short performances or pieces with few clear references to an intended duration (as is more typical in the gallery experience). Simultaneously, designers and artist working in time-based media also became increasingly interested in their capacity to function as authors, influenced by the rise of a postdramatic theater that did not rely upon originating dramatic texts (Lehmann 2002). In these cases, visual, spatial, haptic, and kinetic gestures were used to create the central text of a performance. In certain cases, theater makers trained as visual artists, such as Robert Wilson or Roberto Castelluci, adopted forms of scenography as their primary method of writing although rarely using the title of scenographer, a term in the United States most frequently associated with academic contexts. Gradually the combination of these two liberations (from the space of the theater and the text of the play) developed into the expanded scenography of the twenty-first century that appears in a vast variety of forms including parades, bike rides, walks, dinners, meet-ups, podcasts created by a range of makers from designers to artists to architects to dramaturgs and theorists. But beyond changes in location, temporality, or models of authorship, more central to our interest in an expanded scenography is the interest among scenographers in forms of knowledge production as a goal. In her opening comments for PQ15, festival curator Sonja Lotker explicated this turn towards the social by remarking on scenography’s potential to create “a space for sharing, relating, and also being in conflict—a place of connection and difference” (Lotker 2015). Clearly, in this expansion from the aesthetic concerns of the theater into a socially-engaged practice, expanded scenography has begun to rub up against the concerns and practices traditionally associated with anthropology. This closeness to anthropology in scenography’s social turn occurs in tune with other movements in art and design that arose in the early 1990s that sought direct investigations of social relations. Couched under a panoply of labels, including relational aesthetics, socially engaged art, littoral art, social practice, conceptual design, critical design, design for debate, design art, and others, these practices have differing goals yet a shared interest in deferring the normative values of art and design to achieve other aims. Often (although not always) staged outside or in opposition to the frame of a gallery, museum, or market, they move the spotlight away from objects towards encounters in an attempt to destabilize, re-contextualize, or aestheticize experiences between people. In many ways, creating conditions for human relations has always been an underlying goal of art and design projects. But this aim was more traditionally made manifest through the creation of specific objects or experiences for contemplation. In this model, the primary concern was the encounter between spectator or user and object. The turn towards the social began to take up human relations as a medium in lieu of object creation. In the art context, curator Nicolas Bourriaud describes this as a relational aesthetic in which “art [takes] as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context” (Bourriaud 2002: 14). In the field of design, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby describe this work as critical design in that they seek to use design to “question, critique and challenge the way technologies enter our lives and the limitations they place on people through their narrow definitions of what it means to be human” (Dunne and Raby 2013: 34).

15

Clearly this cluster of practices with its attendant shifts away from the centrality of objects and towards the interactions of actors, spectators, agents, users, attendants, and participants appear to be of particular use to an anthropology interested in operating by-means-of- design as Ingold (2013) suggests. While all these practices hold interest for the anthropologists, in this chapter we are paying special attention to the sensibilities that give rise to the types of scenographic experiments that have driven our productive encounters. As such it might be useful to further explicate our specific understanding of what scenography is by offering a short genealogy of the practice.1

Ethnography by Design

A short genealogy

16

While the term scenography derives from the Greek word for scene painter, skinográfos, the idea of scenography as it interests us is more recent. In modern professional parlance, it usually refers to the collective efforts of scenery, costume, lighting, sound, and projection designers to create spaces for performance. The term gained prominence as a means of elevating design practices from the status of theater crafts to a form of writing (graphy). The design of a production, some have argued, should be not be seen merely as an illumination of a dramatic text, but instead as its partner (Jones 1941, Simonson 1950). In What is Scenography? Pamela Howard goes even further to define scenography as “the seamless synthesis of space, text, research, art, actors, directions and spectators that contributes to an original creation” (Howard 2002: 130), or in other words just about everything that makes up performance. We offer a slightly narrower role for scenography as the design and creation of environments and objects that condition action. In the theater, scenography functions to make plausible or necessary the symbolic actions of a performance. It is created collaboratively by designers, directors, writers, and performers. In the world, scenography utilizes similar powers of mise-en-scène to frame built environments that condition encounters. These built environments are created by users/participants who inscribe spaces to influence actions based on the push and pull of expectations (the past) and emergence (the future). The scenographic can be found in many places within everyday life but may be especially noticeable in architecture, urban planning, politics, gardening, cartography, and of course a wide variety of art projects from painting to installation. When considering scenography as an intentional practice, it is important to note that its development and techniques are closely interwoven with the history and technologies of the theater. Even in the expansion mentioned above, the literature and value systems of theatre remain the primary points of reference. As such, we offer here a brief and largely European history of the form. In 1588, Vespasiano Gonzaga, a minor noble related to the powerful Gonzagas of Mantua, invited Vincenzo Scamozzi to construct a theater “in the style of the ancients” in his town of Sabbioneta.

1

For a more comprehensive description of expanded scenography practices, see McKinney and Palmer’s “Introduction” in Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design (2017). The authors take up a version of Rosalind Krauss’s analysis of expanded sculpture (1977) as model for defining an aesthetic practice that lacks medium-specificity.

On Scenography

Sabbioneta, was a new development in a relatively un-hip part of the Po River valley. The town was Gonzaga’s attempt to construct La Citta Ideale, an ideal city according to new humanist principles. He laid out star-shaped walls that defined the urban space as an island rising from the Lombard plain. Adjacent to his ducal palace, Gonzaga wanted a theater. Theaters, as dedicated spaces for performance, were the latest thing in cinquecento Italy. Since antiquity, theater had been performed in temporary structures, in public squares or halls as part of festivals, weddings, or royal occasions. But the sixteenth century saw a burst of building activity including permanent theaters in Ferrara (1531), Rome (1545), Mantua (1549), and Venice (1565) (Pevsner 1997). Scamozzi, in fact, had just finished designing scenery for perhaps the finest example of the new form, the Teatro Olimpico (1585) in Vincenza. The scenography of the Renaissance theater was a staging of urban space as a reflection of the social order. The encounter between sovereign and subject was mediated by the experience of a setting and a seating that focused a collective viewing experience. Whereas the walls of Gonzaga’s city defined the boundaries of a limited zone of sovereignty, Scamozzi’s theater harnessed the new technology of perspective to extend this zone to the horizon; to make this space limitless. Perspective, which had been rediscovered a hundred years earlier by Brunelleschi, was originally thought of as a drawing technique to inscribe three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. Architects and theatermakers quickly realized that it could serve equally well as a building technique to magnify the illusion of three-dimensional space within built environments. Their clever retooling of a forced perspective allowed for the creation of dimensional tableaus that extended real space into the infinite distance (Serlio 1982). Thomas More had introduced the concept of Utopia in 1516. Some seventy years later, Scamozzi actualized it in settings that were a kind of virtual reality technology. Positioned in the center of town, the scenography doubled the effect of Sabbioneta like the figurines on a wedding cake double the bride and groom. Gonzaga, who could not exert actual power on an entire region, used his considerable resources to create a microtopia. The theater here was not drama or conflict but rather an encounter in which spectators and participants speculated together on an emerging social contract. This technology transferred to England in the form of the Court masques of James I in which the guests came dressed in elaborate costumes and intermingled with performers in the manner of today’s immersive theater experiences. By the start of the seventeenth century, the static, three-dimensional tableau of scenographic space had been transformed into a parade of flat and moving images. If the early modern scenographer could best be captured in the image of a surveyor laying out imaginary city blocks, the baroque scenographer was an engineer fiddling with the winch and pulley. In the theater of the Enlightenment era, settings were transformed by a series of “chariots” running on tracks underneath the stage that carried sliding panels with painted depictions on them. The effect was not to trick the eye into clever illusions of three-dimensional space but rather to embrace the artifice of painterly flatness. The ability to illustrate the stage like a picture book spurned the creation of a new form of music-theater, opera, in which elaborately plotted scenarios occurred in fantastic and varied locations (the heavens, fiery depths, distant palaces, high seas, etc.). Scenography created a dance of moving pictures for the audience, who witnessed dramatic encounters in the form of speculative or historical fictions. Handel, for instance, gives us plots with witches (Alcina), Romans (Giulio Cesare), and Persians

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Ethnography by Design 18

(Xerxes), amongst others. These settings function as optimized symbolic spaces, best of all possible worlds, in which to stage conflicts. But the function of scenography in this era was not just to frame the drama as a form of transference through which an audience might empathize with characters and their dilemmas. The theater was still a well-lit experience in which the stage was as bright as the auditorium. It was akin to contemporary sporting events in which collective witness is key. Watching a performance entailed not just the unfolding of a story but the unfolding of a complex ritual that included large numbers of actors, but an even-larger number of stage-hands who operated the theater machine. Complexity was valued as a form of virtuosity, and the scenographic spectacle became increasingly complex. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scenographers designed and costumed thousands of fictions for the opera houses of Europe. Each one played out the range of social problems acceptable for public discourse under a monarchical rule and became an available resource for speculating what we might now call alternate futures. Scenography’s ability to speculate futures came to fruition in the “Age of Revolutions” when radical political inversions created the need for new visual forms. Jacques Louis-David’s revolutionary designs for civic costumes are a prime example. Commissioned by the Société Républicaine et Populaire des Arts in Year II of the French Republican Calendar (1794), the costumes attempted to materialize the Republican political philosophy by imagining a completely new style of dress detached from prior associations of class and wealth. Parisians would have been keenly aware of how clothing conditioned day-to-day encounters at a time when dressing in breeches (culottes), a garment of the aristocracy, versus pantaloons (sansculottes), could lead one to the guillotine. Louis-David’s designs, no doubt influenced by his love of the Comédie Française and friendship with the actor Talma, remained more speculative objects than actual productions. But they did serve to fuel great debates over notions of equality, status, economy, and health (Zieseniss et  al. 1989). This temptation to use costume to radically visualize newness repeated itself after the Russian Revolution. Whereas the Bolsheviks preferred to mirror the dress of workers from the Petersburg factories, Russian Suprematists such as El Lissitzky offered wild new visions of man in the age of proletariat (Figes 1997, Prudence 2013). The staging of revolutions offers an image of the scenographer as political philosopher. In the nineteenth century, the house lights dimmed. Advances in illumination that allowed spectators to plunge into a cocoon of darkness and gape at the lit stage completely reframed the encounter within the theater. Theater moved towards the status of dreaming in which the audience lost track of their body and everyone else. The greatest scenographer of this era, Richard Wagner, understood the power of that dream and sought to create a performance experience to match it. Like Gonzaga, he needed to build his own theater far from the culture capitals of Paris or Vienna to realize his vision. Wagner’s theater, the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, sits on a hill above the city where audiences, having taken a pilgrimage to the site, sat on hard wooden benches to gaze upon the performance. Their glimpse into the stage-world was softened by the use of an immense system of steam pipes that emitted a curtain of haze over the proscenium opening. Operating like the effect of multiple layers of glaze on oil-painting, the mist obscured the evidence of how the performance was constructed, and presented it as a seamless beauty that dominated the viewer. It was an attempt to synthesize and de-materialize the dimensional forms of stage space into fields of light,

On Scenography

color, and sound. While Wagner worked with the romantic aesthetics made famous by the Hudson River School, his followers in the twentieth century achieved the same effects through abstraction. Wagner played the role of scenographer as magician, offering no moments of negotiation, disputation, or communication with the viewer, and seeking instead to overwhelm her with the sublime. As Grant Kester points out, “the sublime exceeds our capacity to measure, categorize, or understand, and, importantly, it reduces us to mute awe (it silences our ability to communicate)” (Kester 2014: 85). If Wagner’s moving dreamscapes embodied a kind of endgame of subjectivity in scenographic effects, we quickly see a move back towards dialogic spaces at the start of the twentieth century, in what Bertolt Brecht called his scientification of the theater. In his Short Organum, Brecht explicitly presented theater as an interventionist form of social science. He critiqued forms of theater like Wagner’s, writing that they “[show] the structure of society (represented on the stage) as incapable of being influenced by society (in the auditorium)” (Brecht 1964: 146). In response, he attempted to construct a theater that “not only releases the feelings, insights, and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations . . . but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself” (italics added) (Brecht 1964: 189–90). In other words, instead of deploying the power of the scenographic towards validating the legitimacy of a representation, it was used to point out the conditionality of representation and as such to suggest the potential for alternatives. For Brecht and his key design collaborator Caspar Neher, scenography was always a lab experiment. In their Epic theater, they isolated whatever elements of the human relations were necessary to play out the scene and didn’t bother filling in the rest. This accounts for the emptiness, lack of color and functionality associated with Brechtian aesthetics or Neue Sachlichkeit (new matter-of-factness). The half-curtain is a classic example. Why bother with dividing the top of half of the space since the bottom is where the performers are? As Neher’s sketches suggest the focus was not on completing a scenic image but rather on testing out relationships through the physical dynamics of human interaction. Neher would often make sketches for a scenario concurrently with Brecht writing it out as a kind of proof-of-concept. The Brecht/Neher collaboration is a touchstone for understanding scenography as an alternate form of authorship. The Epic theater, which had aspired to the conditions (and aesthetics) of the laboratory, found the stage necessary as an autonomous space. Although Brecht wished to strip it of its political hierarchies, as he did in his Theater am Schiffbauerdamm by having a large red X painted over the imperial eagle on the Kaiser’s box, the artificiality of the theater frame clarified and heightened the intentional nature of his fiction experiments (Barnett 2015). It seems only natural that his inheritors would seek to transport these fictions out of the theater laboratory and into the field. As mentioned earlier, this off-site movement started in earnest in the 1960s, first by abandoning traditional theater buildings to create an environmental theater, and then by abandoning buildings altogether and bringing performances into the street. There are numerous and well-told examples of the first model in the works of Richard Schechner (Dionysus in ‘69), The Living Theater (Paradise Now), Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed and many others. We will not rehearse those here and focus instead on the subsequent move into public spaces

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seen in projects like the Thieves Theater’s production of Heiner Müller’s Despoiled Shore Medeamaterial Landscape with Argonauts (1991). The company, led by Nick Fracaro and Gabriele Schafer, staged the play within a purpose-built teepee at “the Hill,” a shanty town that existed at the foot of the Manhattan bridge (Ferdman 2015). Although they staged only eight performances of the play over two weekends, they went on to live in a teepee for the next three years until it was bulldozed by Dinkins administration in August of 1993. During their residency (which was also a form of performance), Fracaro and Schafer enacted some of the classical strategies of ethnography including collecting and retelling stories. As Fracaro writes: Gabriele and I told the story first. We would congregate with our neighbors and visitors inside the teepee, where Gabriele had hung her Tarot court cards, portraits of the shantytown residents, as the lining of the teepee walls. These kings and queens on The Hill enjoyed sitting around the fire within the circle of gathered images of themselves displayed as if they were a tribe. Gradually each of them would tell their own version of the tale to visitors, coloring the history in their own inimitable way. MANHATTAN 2007

This project might as easily be framed as expanded scenography, aesthetic intervention, spatially engaged practice or interventionist ethnography. It demonstrates a way in which a particular habitus might be explored and simultaneously embodied in a scenographic form: a structure as a set, as a field site, as a domicile, and community center.

Ethnography by Design

Scenographic thinking

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This brief history shows the challenges of defining scenography on the basis of any singular aesthetics, medium, infrastructure, or educational tradition. And while we suggest that one of its unifying tenets is an interest in maximizing the performativity of durational encounters, we feel that it is also possible from the point of view of the production of scenography (as opposed to its reception) to identify several distinctive habits common to contemporary scenographers that further explicate the form. While there are often terminological debates in the field between practitioners who prefer to be considered artists rather than designers, we hold that scenography functions as a design practice working in service of or under the conditions of art, typically theater. In this sense, scenographers are aligned towards the traditional status and relationships of the design fields in which utility (i.e. the solving of problems and evaluating successes based on that problem-solving) precedes aesthetics. However, because scenographers work in the service of fictions, as opposed to physics, they may redefine the terms of their efficacy based upon the discipline of aesthetic laws, not natural ones. In this sense, while they may choose solutions that are minimal, efficient, and feasible, they are equally attracted to Rube Goldbergian strategies that emphasize the impossible, complex, childlike, or failure-prone. In contrast to theater-making as whole or art practices that have traditionally been held to be autonomous forms, a scenographer’s work is decidedly supplemental. As Glenn Adamson in his discussion of Derrida explains, “the supplemental is that which provides something necessary to

On Scenography

another, ‘original’ entity, but is nonetheless considered to be extraneous to that original” (Adamson 2007: 24). Scenographers, with their habits of framing, decorating, and setting works, occupy this double position of the necessary yet extraneous. They always operate in relation to another thing. The scenographer’s task is to think through how the large-scale visual, spatial, and aural fields can provide context. Unlike history painting, frescoes, murals or panoramas, architecture or installations, scenographers request no autonomy. They understand that their work is partial and cannot be evaluated on its own, but rather must be evaluated on the basis of its co-constructed collaboration with authors, directors, performers, and spectators. The nineteeth-century material form of scenography appeared to be genre paintings executed on smoothly stretched canvas frames positioned at prescribed distances from a viewer. This is still recognizable to us as “scenery” just as overly decorated, colorful, or fantastical clothing is labeled as costume. These paintings, however, are simply a means to an end in the creation of an immersive experience of witnessing. Scenographic materials are a hybrid with no preferred form or materials. They can be made from wood, plaster, smoke, dirt, clothing, noise, darkness, etc. While the framing and conditioning of space have always been considered central to the medium, the scenographic gesture implicates all aspects of the visual and aural fields. They exist in a multitude of forms from architecture to lighting to sound to kinetic and haptic events, even to commentaries on institutional framing. There are no aesthetics of “good scenography” in the way that there have been an aesthetics of “good design.” A scenographer can be wicked or tame, debased or refined. And their attitude is determined primarily through relations to a client or project. The American tradition of scenography most strongly embraces this chameleon-like definition: one who is capable of adapting style and approach to respond to the dramatic problem. In contrast to other designers or artists whose primary concern is with establishing a mark, look, style, or market, scenographers do not need to maintain aesthetic fidelities and do so only in relation to the institutional identity of the companies for whom they work. Scenography exists within time and with specific references to duration. Traditionally this is within the time of a performance which uses conventions to declare beginnings and endings. Although these vary greatly from Shakespeare’s two hours of stage traffic to the lengthy preparation and conclusions of the Cambodian dance theater where performers spend hours being sewn into their costumes and then gingerly disrobed, the time of performance (and thus of scenography) is always defined (Barba and Savarese 2006). This time-based and time-defining orientation clarifies some of the fuzzy boundary between expanded scenography and installation art. Scenography is a speculative practice that invents worlds. Using its status as a fiction (something illusory, false, and pretend), it makes real materialized representations of the imaginary. To ape Elinor Fuchs’ definition of theater, scenography is “not a description . . . of another world, but is in itself another world passing before you in time and space” (Fuchs 2004: 3). This was as apparent at scenography’s beginning, when it emerged from stage architecture in the late Renaissance, as it is today when powerful digital tools render virtual worlds in fantastic detail. But this power to realize fictions simultaneously works in reverse in fictionalizing the real. Within the frame or quotation of the scenographic gesture, real objects (a chair, wall, or floor) achieve an instant doubleness as becoming both the things they are and things they are performing.

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Scenography exists in relation to performers or publics. It is the result of observations made on a certain viewing vector(s) that establish indices between the fields of meaning created by performer and spectator. Codified as the sightline (although were one not to privilege the visual this might also be the sound-line or smell-line or feel-line), the scenographer controls the directionality, positionality, and magnitude of these vectors to determine limits and shapes of the scenographic space and to create linkages between viewer and spectacle. A proscenium-like stage, for instance, aligns all the vectors in one direction privileging surface decoration, unity, and hierarchical relationships. The thrust theater or arena collides multiple vectors shifting the emphasis towards materiality and dissensus. Finally, scenography (like anthropology) understands and speaks to humans most effectively at the scale of the individual and small groups. It is enlivened and motivated by texts that concern specific (fictional) people in the particular conditions of living. Primary users in scenographic terms are specific performing bodies (characters, participants, or attendants), whose motivations and anticipated behaviors shape the design process. Secondary users are publics or audiences that have traditionally been understood more generally—although expanded practices have collapsed this distinction in many cases. In the development of scenographic ideas, these two groups are evoked through research, speculation, and the push and pull of people that create the central resistances and affordances in the scenography process.

Ethnography by Design

Linkages between scenography and ethnography

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As the turn towards the social in art, design, and scenography has brought these fields in closer contact with anthropology, some artists and designers have borrowed the techniques of ethnography. Forms of participant observation, for instance, have become key strategies for artists such as Tania Bruguera or Thomas Hirschhorn, who both seek to create work that resonates with specific communities (Kester 2004; Bishop 2012). Tino Sehgal and Hans-Ulrich Obrist have developed practices that frame the interview and encounter aesthetic mediums (Obrist 2011). Designers, who had once been more focused on human problems than on humans per se, took up ethnography forcefully to develop the practice of human-centered design (HCD) that seeks to listen first to the needs of users and communities in the development of products and services (Laurel 2003). Ethnographic approaches have facilitated the exploration of complex social realities in art and design fields. Within this context, scenography’s relation to the ethnographic presents an interesting set of possibilities. Traditionally scenography exists as a kind of bridge between the traditions of art and design, being both aligned with design-like habits of problem-solving but comfortable within the context of aesthetic fictions. In addition, an expanded scenography explicitly positions itself in direct relation to social life. The question for us is what are the natural affinities between scenography and ethnography that might be generative for anthropologists? Scenography designs encounters that develop over time towards an eventual moment of “staging” in which something novel, yet reflective and interwoven with its context, arises. The scenographer pays attention to the totality of the environments we inhabit and the way objects and bodies operate within them, parallel in many ways to the ethnographer’s commitment to thick

On Scenography

description of the ethnographic scene. This commitment to details can often be seen in a scenographic practice in which the smallest details (the sound of door creaking, weight of envelope, crackle of the fire) might prove the crucial detail in communicating a dramatic intent or completing an experiential veracity. Within the process of creating scenography these crucial details are often non-obvious and only revealed through a careful processural investigation of a dramatic premise. Scenographic design, like ethnography, attends to, and therefore values, details in an environment. In scenography, the details of value—objects, architectural detail, color, the texture and tone of surfaces, etc.—are, given the European roots of the tradition, often valued through a narrow Eurocentric lens. This shapes what “looks right,” and reflects assumptions about what will generate an emotional response to a design environment or will create a sense of violence, decay, comfort, exoticism, and the like. Countless hours have been spent thinking through the nuances and details of a limited range of domestic environments of human existence (the living rooms of the upper middle classes, for instance), while discounting, ignoring, or exoticizing other environments and other lives. Perhaps a richer alignment with ethnography might offer a remedy for a scenography that too often relies on the picturesque, clichéd, and exotic when encountering the non-Western other. As Murphy and Marcus point out, “[b]oth design and ethnography are anxiously people-centered” (Murphy and Marcus 2013: 258). Scenographers participate in representing fictional people in ways that make them recognizable and allow the audience to form connections to them. Like ethnographers, they face the challenge of alignment. As Holmes suggests, an ethnographer’s task is not merely to find informants to whom they can direct their questions, or among whom they might undertake observation. Rather, the task is to align one’s research concerns with interlocutors’ concerns (Holmes 2014). The classical approach to achieving alignment was, and is, durational immersion: situated first-hand observation, linguistic fluency, and participation in the everyday over time. Durational immersion is often a hallmark of ethnographic inquiry. Yet, in fact, alignment more accurately encapsulates the “why” of these strategies. In other words, do the questions that guide the ethnographer correspond to the questions that animate her interlocutors? Are the insights she seeks the same as those they seek? Alignment means that the ethnographer is no longer standing outside looking in but rather inside looking out, alongside and with a shared sensibility with her interlocutors. Could a design-based practice, specifically a scenographic one, serve as a tuning device to confirm or disconfirm whether the ethnographer is in alignment? Through the modalities of design, the scenographic experiments test speculative propositions—a kind of hypothesis, but operating on a more subtle level of vibratory resonance and without the specter of reliability. They suggest and offer a vantage point into structures of feeling ( Williams 1977). The logic of this practice is to use scenography to draw publics towards something, to hail or trap or seduce by virtue of a designed interface. If the designed interface does not achieve this, its failure (or partial failure) is an indication that something is out of alignment. This disconnect between how a public sees itself and what it desires and a design interface that does not reflect with accuracy or meets these desires is instructive; it guides by revealing misalignment that can be refined through the process of iteration (discussed in Chapter 4). On the other hand, a designed interface that ensnares a specific public, that provokes

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Ethnography by Design

a response or investment of value, indicates some measure of alignment. Design thus deployed proposes and tests ethnographic insights and creates a new kind of rigor. At the same time, ethnography conditioned by design in this way is intended to democratize access to ethnographic insight, with publics (participants, interlocutors, communities, etc.) producing and claiming insights in tandem with anthropologists. Because this model of working emphasizes a collaborative design approach and experiential encounters among publics, it suggests an expanded role for non-anthropologists and non-designers in knowledge production. In contrast to these affinities, scenography offers some useful tensions to a traditional ethnographic practice. Scenography’s manifest intentionality, the practice of staging scenes in order to engineer encounters, is more explicit than in ethnography where there remains a strong connection to the discovery of the ethnographic scene rather than its invention. In theatrical terms, this might be thought of as an affinity towards naturalism over artifice. Here we can see how Brecht’s critique of naturalism can be brought to bear. He called for theater that did not suspend disbelief or transport its audience but rather called attention to itself as an artifice in order to emphasize the truth within the make-believe. Ethnography practiced by means of scenography might similarly deny the participant-observer the sleight of hand that often redirects an interlocutor’s gaze away from the artifice of data collection. Instead, by pointing towards the construction of the everyday through staged or designed encounters, one might create experiences simultaneously “unreal” and revelatory. By making the seams in the enclosure of the field visible, the scenographic experiment co-constructs representations of the culture concept while simultaneous questioning its stability and pointing towards what it is in the process of becoming. In our work, we have focused on the encounter as the primary form to be designed and scenography as a central practice for designing it. Scenography puts questions into play by framing them through the specific problems that are generated during a material process of representation. In designerly terms, the encounter is a design interface that must have a function or utility to ask (or answer) questions in which we are interested. In our thinking, the encounter is an experience that facilitates the co-construction of meaning by bringing user-participants together. The process of figuring out what an interface or experience might be, designing its operations and aesthetics, and making it legible to publics can be analytically generative—or productive—for anthropology. While scenography’s great appeal comes from its particular attention to the details of environments, intimate scale, and alignment towards publics, it cannot be imported, even in its expanded forms, wholesale to design ethnographic encounters. We see it simply as a jumping off point for the development of a set of robust materializing and aesthetically informed practices for ethnography.

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3 Productive Encounters

Like any creative and intellectual practice, our process has evolved over time through experiment and reflection. While the prior chapters attempt to contextualize our work within broader developments and concerns within the fields of scenography, design, art, and anthropology, in this chapter we describe and analyze the projects we have undertaken in developing the model or framework of productive encounters. By examining the evolution of this work we hope to provide key insights into the practices that have come to form the outlines for an approach to doing ethnography by design and, equally, how these scenographic experiments might fit within the flow of a research trajectory in anthropology. Through our work both in the studio (conceptualizing, workshopping, and refining projects) and out in communities (installing designed environments and objects in public environments), we have continued to formulate a practice and clarify our aims. Our efforts run parallel to those of fellow anthropologists who have likewise been investigating the potentials of design practices and thinking for anthropology. Although productive encounters utilize aesthetic energies in their formation, thinking of or evaluating our projects as art has been less generative than thinking of them as design projects, for reasons we discuss further in Chapter 4. Fundamentally, we share an interest in making and materialization, and see its value for opening up spaces for reflection in the studio and in the field. What is distinct about our methodological proposal is that we focus our design efforts on bringing people—anthropologists, designers, and publics—together and towards an idea, question, or concern through a participatory process that we have begun to call productive encounters. We conceive of productive encounters as scenographic interventions that engage publics informed by and accountable to ethnography as part of a process of social inquiry. We use the term “productive,” in the sense of generative—generating new questions, interpretations, affective experiences, and lateral analysis. Provocatively reframing anthropological questions through fictionalization, negation, counterfactual representation, and hyper-speculation is generative in the sense of allowing “impossible” or “wrong” insights to be put into play. We see failure and the cycles of iterative understanding as productive. Moreover, we focus on ways to design “encounters” that bring people together in dialogue and shared consideration. Our purpose in designing such encounters is to generate intersubjective discovery and original articulations of contemporary problems not readily available through other forms (Cantarella et al. 2015). Our own productive encounters, and the design practices they entail in the development process, have created space to confirm, disconfirm, and shift developing insights that traditional ethnographic methods of interviewing and participant observation have not sufficiently facilitated. They have Figure 4 Model-making for Trade is Sublime (2013).

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enabled us to restart stalled conversations in the middle of research, or alongside it, and to enter into ongoing research through a side door. In this way, design practices help us work against the grain of the kind of cumulative logic that social scientists tend to bundle with notions of validity. Designing productive encounters has created opportunities to test, interrogate, and poke holes in what we thought we knew. Ethnographic research conditioned by design is not inherently interventionist. For instance, it is possible to envision how ethnographers currently do, or might, adopt strategies like materialization or speculation from designers as part of developing a study design or data analysis. These strategies might simply complement a more traditional data collection plan and could be used in such a way that the ethnographer seeks to minimize intervention or effect on a process or informants during the research. We propose, however, that designed interventions are already aligned with contemporary ethnographic practice. This is the case because “the field” is an open signifier, constituted through the ethnographer’s partial gaze and necessary foreclosures. We are already in the business of carving out field sites from larger fields of interaction and interconnection, subtly molding one specific scene out of innumerable possible scenes. Designing encounters merely takes field-making one step further, and makes explicit the artificial nature of ethnographic inquiry by revealing its seams and highlighting its operation. Although it appears that designed, speculative interventions disturb the traditional field work model, in fact, contemporary projects of ethnography entail controlled speculations that are a key to what they produce. These controlled speculations in either form are predictions around which we build and test the conceptual apparatuses described below.

Ethnography by Design

214 Sq. Ft. (2012)

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214 Sq. Ft., which we consider our first scenographic experiment in the field, laid the groundwork for our subsequent projects. This project was a large-scale installation piece commissioned by the organization Project Hope Alliance (PHA) to raise awareness about families coping with unstable housing and homelessness; PHA provides a variety of services to such families throughout Orange County, California, many of whom live month-to-month in the small motels that encircle Disneyland. Developing and materializing this installation instigated our curiosity about how designed environments could create opportunities for ethnography. When Luke was initially approached to create a performance for the annual PHA gala benefit at the elegant Balboa Bay Yacht Club, the piece had already been pre-envisioned to some degree by our contact, Jennifer Friend. Jen’s proposal to Luke was to stage a scene of motel life with a high degree of verisimilitude based on the experiences of PHA’s clients living in Santa Ana, Anaheim, and Garden Grove. In her mind’s eye, the scene would be staged in a motel room enclosed in plexiglas and placed adjacent to the hallway where gala attendees would mingle and drink. Inside the motel room actors would inhabit the roles of a functionally homeless family going about their daily life while spectators watched. This mundane performance would exist in peripheral vision to the socializing and silent auction until just before attendees were to be called away into the ballroom for

Productive Encounters

dinner. At this moment, the actors would call attention to themselves in some way—an argument, a thrown dish, a child’s tantrum—that would draw the audience towards the installation and focus their attention on the human drama unfolding. Lights down, and guests would be ushered into the ballroom for the next phase of the event. This dramatic event, illuminating the imperiled and stressed existence of the unhoused, would, she hoped, generate a profound sense of empathy to the organization’s cause and increase their generosity. Jen’s detailed proposal drew on her experience organizing Project Hope fundraisers in past years, events that she perceived as failing to generate deep empathy for their cause. It was also rooted in her memories of growing up in a family that was cyclically homeless. We met with Jen multiple times in the winter of 2011/2012 to discuss the project and she gradually shared her own stories of the stress and shame she felt as a teenager as her parents bounced from living well in the suburbs to barely scraping by and sheltering in their car and in motels. These memories were evident in her vision for filling the motel room with a density of possessions—the clothes and makeup that helped her avoid detection as homeless, the keepsakes that anchored her family to their past, etc.—as well as in her idea for a culminating moment of shouting and broken plates. But her proposal raised concerns for us as well. Performing poverty and homelessness in the midst of a gala, and framing this experience in a zoo-like enclosure, were both ethical landmines. As a design problem, we needed a way to capture the immediacy of the challenges these families faced while avoiding a representational strategy that was over-determined and that literally enframed poor and homeless families as violently other. This prompted us to move away from a performance towards a space that would perform itself as a multi-sensory and immersive installation. In making this shift, we began to re-envision how the installation might be experiential, rather than oriented towards passive spectatorship. This new iteration was not only a response to the politics and ethics of representation but also an assertion of how a designed environment might generate the kinds of responses Jen sought through sensory entanglements rather than enactment. Once we moved beyond thinking about peopling the space as a strategy to tell one story, we could turn our attention to the possibilities of surfaces, materials, and objects to tell a multi-vocal story. It was perhaps at this point that we began to think in a more focused way about how to design anthropologically; to identify and resolve design problems by foregrounding social questions. We were looking for opportunities for convergences between these domains. The installation was not attached to an ongoing research project in a field site, nor was it commissioned in order to ask or seek answers as part of social inquiry. It was commissioned to raise awareness and raise money. But as the design process evolved we found ourselves continuously assessing how it might provoke social questions both in the development phase and as a public exhibition. Jen provided us with a version of ethnographic data, a recent documentary film made by Alexandra Pelosi, Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County, that profiled many of the organization’s clients. We also visited the organization’s school for a public event to meet some of the families, made trips to nearby motels to take interior and exterior photographs, and gather additional photos and texts produced by PHA to generate awareness through their website and print

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Ethnography by Design

Figure 5 Design proposal for 214 Sq. Ft. (2012).

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materials. Luke’s initial sketches were based on photos of motel rooms in the area and he determined early in the process that the layout and dimensions should match those of an average low-budget motel room. These 214 square feet, containing a bathroom sink area, a closet, a kitchenette, and living/sleeping area, became the spatial constraints within which we required ourselves to work (Figure 5). Designing a naturalistic set involves the careful reproduction of a space that relies on an understanding of its physical qualities as reflective of a particular time and place. Many small Orange County motels were built in the 1950s as part of the construction of highways, the suburban boom, and the emergence of the southern California vacation industry. They have between twenty and forty rooms on average and are two-storied structures with exterior hallways and metal railings facing onto a parking lot. Many have flashing signs bearing names such as “The Caprice,” or “The Tropic Motor Lodge.” Most of the motels Luke visited on his research trips had been renovated in the intervening years, with furnishings that dated from the 1980s and 1990s, and the wallpaper, carpeting, wall art, and furniture reflected a greater concern for cost-effectiveness and durability than contemporary aesthetics. Therefore, Luke made an effort to think like a motel owner as he designed

Figure 6 Motel in Garden Grove, CA (2012).

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Our budget of $10,000, a gift from a donor to the organization for this project, also placed a constraint on the design of the installation.

Productive Encounters

the basic elements of the space, designating materials that could be sourced from discount carpet dealers, big-box hardware stores, and furniture outlets.1 At the same time, a naturalistic scenic design attends to how spaces are used by inhabitants. Where do they congregate? Are some areas more private or more communal? Are there pieces of furniture that attach more strongly to one person than to others? What gets accomplished in the room? Scenographers are trained to read and create spaces to index values and norms. A space is imbricated not only with personal histories but also with gender, race, and class ideologies that can be revealed in specific objects and their colors, textures, and materials. A scenographer creates a fiction that is linked to values, norms, and ideologies in the real world. We were doing the same; the motel room was a “replica” of local motel rooms on its face. Yet what we sought to create was an environment that was a speculative rendition of its kind, that took liberties through design in order to emit soundings with which spectators could grapple. These soundings, propositions of possible values, memories, ideologies, were built into the quality and arrangement of objects and multimedia components. In the film, Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County, which guided the interior and property design, Pelosi reveals the way many of her documentary subjects keep large amounts of personal

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Ethnography by Design

possessions in the motel rooms that serve as their temporary homes. In order to acquire enough household items to achieve this density, Luke and Tiffany Anguiano, a UCI undergraduate and properties assistant, purchased two “miscellaneous” lots at the bi-weekly auction of the Goodwill organization. Each lot was comprised of over three hundred pounds of unsorted items, which could only be briefly viewed through mesh cages before bidding began. Christine joined them when the lots could be retrieved the following day and as a team they sorted items alongside traders from the second-hand goods market in Tijuana and other Mexican towns, as well as local sellers who were sorting their own lots. These experienced traders helped our team navigate the non-obvious rules and norms of the auction and sorting hall, and we were intrigued by both the mutual aid and competitive practices of this second-hand market community. Assisted by UCI scenic design students and a hired carpenter, we spent over a week on the construction, painting, carpeting, and installation of basic furnishings in the motel room. Following this, we began to layer onto this foundation all of the elements that would express the complex circumstances of its imagined inhabitants. Influenced by the work of Pepón Osorio,2 we came to think of every surface and object as a potential carrier for multi-sensory engagement. We ran audio loops from Pelosi’s film through the air

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Figure 7 Detail from 214 Sq. Ft. (2012).

2

Pepón Osorio is Puerto Rican-American installation artist noted for his use of video embedded within architectural installation such as En La barberia, no se llora (no crying in the barber shop) (1994).

vents and a bedside alarm clock; video clips played on screens nested in a dresser drawer and a kitchenette cabinet; and phrases of dialogue from the documentary film were subtly printed onto the wallpaper, rugs (Figure 7), canned food labels, plastic bucket labels, bedding, toys, and laundry. For instance, the following dialogue excerpts from the film were used in the installation, either printed on objects or emanating as audio loops: We are survivors. You know how the economy’s going down? We’re not feeling it. Because we’re already there. I’m grateful I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs. My husband doesn’t drink, he doesn’t do drugs, he’s never been incarcerated, I’ve never been incarcerated. So those are good things. Because we don’t want to be bad role models for the kids, right? Even though we’re in the ghetto, we don’t have to act like we’re in the ghetto, you know what I’m saying? I don’t like this room. Small. Sometimes I have a hard time looking for the clothes I wanna wear. It takes me time. He lays on my toes and almost squishes me off the bed! We have to be together no matter what. We have to live in the same room. We have to deal with each other. There’s no WALLS besides the four walls that we all share. We don’t have walls to run away to. The bathroom’s like the only security . . . You get no privacy. Every time you want to watch something they’re always in the way. HOMELESS 2010

Productive Encounters

We moved the motel room to the Balboa Bay Beach Club the day before the gala benefit, and during the benefit we positioned ourselves as passive observers. We overheard visitors, wearing elegant gowns and suits and sipping champagne, pointing things out to one another and watched them open cupboards, run their hands along the wallpaper to trace its words, and sit on the bed, and lean in to listen to audio emanating from wall vents and objects (Figures 8 and 9). We began to see how the installation could provoke reflective encounters among strangers by watching one man in particular, a member of the PHA board, who took it upon himself to guide attendees through the exhibit. Welcoming spectators at the front door, almost as if he lived in the room, he began his narration at the bed: “This,” he points out, “is where a family of five will sleep. These plastic buckets store the family’s extra clothing and toys.” He walks them to the galley kitchen where canned stew simmers in a crock pot, noting the stacks of ramen noodles that are easy to prepare with a hotpot, a necessity in a kitchen with no stove. Opening his arms widely, their tour guide somberly informs them that this is the only place this family can afford to stay: “Like many families that have insecure housing, this family likely has at least one family member that works full time at minimum wage. That’s not enough,” he notes, “to save up for a deposit for their own apartment.” As the audience continues to move at their own pace around the room, their guide welcomes another cluster into the room. On the one hand, his narration delimited visitors’ experience of the space; left to their own devices they may have conjured very different interpretations of what they saw and heard. At the same time, his work as a spontaneous guide illuminated the possibilities of 214 Sq. Ft. to provoke interactions within and to the designed environment that might be ethnographically informative. This encounter, in its doubled meaning, prompted a dense hermeneutics of homelessness, poverty,

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Figure 8 Detail from 214 Sq. Ft. (2012).

Figure 9 214 Sq. Ft. at the Balboa Bay Club Hotel (2012).

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3

Since 2012, 214 Sq. Ft. has been exhibited in more than forty sites around Southern California.

Productive Encounters

labor, and family. Layers of obvious and non-obvious details embedded in the motel-set prompted our impromptu tour guide to interpret it for others; its affective potential emerged in his telling. He was not alone; other guests began to narrate for one another, drawing attention to particular objects and projecting their sense of the world onto them. The juxtaposition of the low-end motel-as-home in the context of the yacht club courtyard, as “matter out of place” (Douglas 2003), was part of its provocation. We intended for the attendees’ entrance into an environment that departed dramatically from its plush and tasteful surroundings to be slightly jarring. Often, scenic design’s greatest trick is to transport an audience to another time and place. As in the theater, the installation brought spectators into an imagined version of a slice of their community that would not ordinarily be visible to them. 214 Sq. Ft. came into being as an advocacy piece, and served its purpose as an empathy-generating device; the organization raised over half a million dollars at the benefit, more than had ever been raised at past benefits. Alongside its official purpose, we hijacked it as a thought piece for instrumentalizing designed spaces for social encounter. By enclosing and fictionalizing a site that we could imagine as embedded within a larger field site, the installation posed questions about what a designed environment might allow for ethnography. How else might designed scenes of encounter guide, trace, or uncover ethnographic possibility? Might this kind of work offer a medium for extending or re-opening inquiry that typical field research strategies inhibit? Could it productively unsettle our own understandings as ethnographers by bringing interlocutors directly into our interpretive work? These are among the questions that we grappled with in conversation with George, and which led us to discuss the possibilities of moving the installation to other sites in order to continue exploring its possibilities. George was instrumental in bringing the installation to the UCI campus for a two-week exhibition, during which we hosted discussions in the space and casually observed students interacting in and with the room. Following this, PHA was invited to bring 214 Sq. Ft. to Saddleback Church for the weekend and this staging furthered our sense of how a material practice, and particularly the collaborative efforts it entailed, could enrich ethnographic endeavors.3 To defray the costs of hired labor, we asked for church volunteers for the move from the Second Harvest Food Bank (Figure 10) to Saddleback and five men signed on to help. These volunteers worked closely with us throughout the daylong move and installation, which included the placement of more than two hundred objects in the space. We were working quickly and encouraged the volunteers to decide where they thought certain objects would likely be found in the “home.” Over the course of the day, the volunteers contemplated and debated, with us and with one another, where objects should go, whether they were realistic, what they thought was missing. They became our epistemic partners, through a sustained co-laboring and co-design process, in thinking about the meaning and morality of insecure housing and poverty. Because of their association with Saddleback in particular, they became our guides in perceiving socio-economic vulnerability through the lens of their faith and its particular power to alleviate or ameliorate social problems. One of the volunteers admitted that at one point he had been living in his truck and the church had helped him get back on his feet; his intimate familiarity with the experience of precarious housing in high-rent Orange County was a curious counterpoint to the position of the other, wealthier men.

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Figure 10 214 Sq. Ft. at the Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County (2014).

The material demands of design forged paths into communities and spaces—like the Saddleback Church community, the community of traders at the Goodwill auction, and others we lack the space to describe here—and created opportunities for reciprocal exchange about the ideas embedded in the piece. Practices of co-making and decision-making around the material interface were openings for social inquiry, producing diverse encounters among diverse publics.

Ethnography by Design

Trade is Sublime (2013)

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Following 214 Sq. Ft., our next project began more intentionally as an intervention that evolved out of an ethnographic study, in this case a multi-investigator study of the WTO spearheaded by French anthropologist Marc Abélès. George and his colleague Jae Chung were part of this initial multinational team. Carried out over two years (2008–2010), the researchers were given an open mandate by thenDirector General Pascal Lamy to produce wide-ranging studies of the organization. It was upon this foundation that we developed Trade is Sublime, a multi-channel video installation that functioned as “second-act” project—a return to the site of previous investigation in order to enrich and reinvestigate questions that could not be asked or adequately answered using traditional research strategies

during the initial field research. This project was particularly generative for clarifying a way of working with inner publics, which in this case entailed seeing our exchanges with gatekeepers at the institution as a source of ethnographic data. It also clarified that the interpolation of outer publics was a built-in problem to be solved as part of the work, and revealed how a lateral aesthetic practice could contribute unexpected insights about the ethnographic data. The model of an inner and outer public is derived from Krzysztof Wodiczko’s delimitation and use of publics in his large-scale participatory artworks ( Wodiczko 2015). Inner publics, in his schema, play multiple roles: a project’s first audience, informed interlocutors, fearless listeners, witnesses, tactical advisors. Inner publics form a nucleus or core of participants who inform a project’s development and are distinct from spectators who comprise the outer public; at the same time, they contribute to the public reception of a project and to its social afterlives. The outer public, in contrast, serves as an audience or spectator. They legitimate the performance experience, but unlike the performer they are distant; they participate in something created for them. Most importantly in the theater or art model, they have only indirect relationships to the design process. The performance or other creative interface becomes the conduit through which a transformative connection can be made between design-creator and user-receiver. George had conceived of the “second act” project at the WTO as a re-insertion of the investigator back into the flow of fieldwork to disrupt analytic concretization. It was a form of second-order observation that allowed a re-entry into the field site under new conditions. This return was a particularly necessary response to the challenges the initial research team had faced in the field, including gaining access and clarity on the nuanced and emergent social relations in an institution so heavily reliant on expert languages, diplomatic discretion, and bureaucratic routines. As he pointed out: Mastery of the exotic technical language and culture of trade was a very high bar for most of us. So were the rules of discretion—frankness in privacy, but “not for attribution.” We needed more lawyer-anthropologists among us, to provide what Annelise Riles has called “collateral knowledge.” MARCUS 2016: 48

Productive Encounters

He saw the potential of circumnavigating this problem through a designed intervention in the spirit of multi-sited ethnographic inquiry (Marcus 1998) that would produce a site within the field site. After attempting to develop projects with other teams of artist/collaborators, George invited Luke and Christine to develop an intervention at the WTO. We brought to this project the insights we had developed through our work on 214 Sq. Ft., including a better understanding of how designing spaces and objects in relation to a set of ethnographic concerns wove questions of material specificity through questions of meaning and action in ethnographic data. Because the form of this new project was not predetermined as it had been for 214 Sq. Ft., we had the new challenge of determining which design medium would tap into the questions that George and Jae wanted to explore. We also had to solve the problem of identifying what kind of designed intervention would resonate with and interpolate members of the Secretariat at the WTO. In general, art was an interest among the high-level staff in the 2012/13 period of

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Figure 11 Meeting room at the World Trade Organization, Geneva (2013).

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renovation and redecoration at the Centre William Rappard (CWR),4 yet was a largely non-political, uncontested, perhaps unimportant, space. George felt strongly that this was a zone of exception that we could occupy (Marcus 2016). Having not been part of the original research, Luke and Christine could approach this second act unconstrained by the imperatives of that project and proceed in the role of designers. Jae and George, who essentially commissioned the piece, were our primary source of information on the organization and our guides. We began to have regular Skype meetings in which they discussed their fieldwork and delineated the curiosities that continued to percolate. They shared published and unpublished work and field notes with us, describing the physical space and tangible and intangible characteristics of the institution; its formality, silences, divisions of labor and space, its trepidations and sensitivities. In March, Luke visited the CWR, reconnoitered with key members of the Secretariat about logistical aspects of an installation, and took photos and measurements of interior spaces (Figure 11). This site visit was critical for gathering spatial and aesthetic information about the renovated building that we eventually incorporated into the piece. For instance, private offices had 4

The WTO is housed at the CWR; the building was formerly home to the International Labor Organization and sits on the shores of Lac Leman in Geneva.

Figure 12 Open doors in the Centre William Rappard (2013).

Productive Encounters

modern white doors all kept open at the same angle, gesturing to a renewed commitment to ‘transparency’ at the WTO (Figure 12), and romantic early twentieth-century murals from when the building housed the International Labor Organization had been restored as part of new emphasis on art (Figure 11). We found the contrast between decorative and architectural elements provocative. George was particularly interested in using an installation to instigate discussion among and with the Secretariat about how they envisioned the future of multilateral trade and trade regimes. We attached ourselves to these concerns, which Jae shared, as a designer attaches to a script, seeking ways to translate these questions into aesthetic forms that could ask questions of a public. What emerged after much speculative talk and sketching was an idea for a “proposal for a monument to trade.” The “proposal” in the form of a scale model, common in architecture and urban development, was interesting to us because it was both inherently suggestive and a request for a kind of exchange or collaboration. It was a future-tense lacunae that we sought to frame as an explicit question and to place in the space of ongoing operations at the WTO. Members of the Secretariat, the delegates, and the international community were asking themselves a similar question: What is the future of the organization, given the failure of the Doha round and the impending change of leadership? The installation could crystallize this question in concrete form.

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Ethnography by Design 40

Yet the installation was not intended merely to concretize something that was in the air. We were interested in asking this question through a designed interface that was playful, visually arresting, and that provoked both dialogue and reflexivity among viewers. We began by devising a title, Trade is Sublime, that we felt opened a mischievous space of interpretation and curiosity for interlocutors at the WTO. Could trade be sublime? Were we exaggerating, or perhaps being ironic, hopeful, or nostalgic? Moreover, in the spirit of playing with the question of how to “monumentalize” the institution, we decided that our installation would entail different possible versions of a monument in order to invite viewers to evaluate and weigh in. In other words, we sought to include members of the Secretariat in the design process post facto. We continuously moved back and forth between the ethnographic material and design speculation, adjusting both in response to logistical constraints that became clearer and to our own prototypes and renderings; we discuss this process in more detail in Chapter  5. The final design was a triptych of videos that would each revolve around statements published in a WTO pamphlet (“10 Common Misunderstandings About the WTO”) that revealed the principles of the organization as a multilateral trade regime. The videos would render these institutional principles through an abstract and embodied medium—contact improvisation— in order to allow us to detach from discursivity and work in field of pure aesthetics.5 The aim was to use beauty as a lure within the frame of “proposals for a monument” by nesting these videos in quarter-inch models of the CWR that we would position on plinths in a corridor (Figure 13). This was interesting metaphorically because it allowed viewers to peer down into the CWR to see its “inner workings” in miniature (Figure 13). Although we considered a number of alternate ways to display the films (projecting them onto the ceiling, downward into the palm of one’s hand, or onto piles of “trade” goods), we were constrained by potential power and light issues at the site. The design process entailed making three short films in collaboration with a design team, a film crew, and dancers trained in contact improvisation; designing the CWR models and didactics that would render them legible to the public; and designing the plinths for displaying these “monument proposals.” Here, we will focus on the making of the films because that process helped to solidify for all three of us the potential of an aesthetic practice to generate lateral insights about existing data. We scheduled a four-day production calendar that set aside two days for filming and two for set construction and lighting. Unlike a traditional filmmaking process, there was no storyboard, script, or breakdown of shots or set-ups per se, only two documents that Luke and Christine devised: (1) a “structure,” which articulated a design and cinematic sensibility for each film, and (2) a movement “score” designed to prompt specific actions and qualities of movement. Over the course of two days on set, we produced more than ten hours of footage, which we would ultimately distill down to two three-minute films. Jae was unable to be in New York for the filming, but George was on set both days with Luke, Christine, and the entire team. The first day we

5

Contact improvisation is movement tradition in which dancers put themselves in physical contact with each other and communicate through the negotiation of balance, gravity, and inertia (Paxton 2008). Contact improvisation is unchoreographed, and builds organically among a group of dancers “relating to physical, bodily or movement notions, rather than being narrative or psychological” (Millard 2015).

Figure 13 Detail from Trade is Sublime (2013).

6

This film was shot on location on the Long Island Sound and the Quinnipiac River. Rather than using contact improvization to embody the notion of free-flowing trade, we collected footage of the same “exchange objects” (white boxes filled with sand) flowing with the currents and tides on these waterways. 7 Scratch music refers to temporary soundtracks used during filming or editing that are later replaced with original composition, but that set a tone or rhythm to guide the direction or cutting.

Productive Encounters

shot the film we had titled “Everyone Has to Follow the Same Rules,” moving the next day to “No Decision is Taken Until Everyone Agrees.” Given the evolving nature of our process, we decided halfway through the second day that the third film, “Allow Trade to Flow More Freely,” would be filmed outside the studio; this was both a logistical necessity because we were short on time, and a rethinking of the film’s structure and score.6 The film crew worked through the structure we had given them by setting up shots; when the Director of Photography (DP) began shooting a take, the performers worked and reworked through corresponding prompts in the score. The sound designer selected scratch music to play, building a series of increasingly complex sonic fields in response to the movement the dancers were creating and to which, in turn, they responded physically.7 The lighting designer operated in a similar vein, laying out color fields for each take that evoked a mood and delineated areas of action and then reacting to the movement improvisation by varying lighting cues within takes and for subsequent segments. The DP and his two additional camerapersons moved around and over the set, at one point filming from a suspended camera above the stage (Figure 14) and at other times capturing footage from the sides or in slow front dolly shots.

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Figure 14 Still from “Everyone Has to Follow the Same Rules” (2013); Kirsten Schnittker and Nami Yamamoto.

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The shoot was dialogic and improvisatory, and creative decisions were emerging as a form of collective hunchwork between the dancers and the film crew. Both the film crew and the dancers were developing a formal aesthetic language that generated an internal feedback loop and making decisions inspired by, but not tethered to, the frameworks we provided. By day two of the shoot we were shifting into shooting footage that evoked increasing levels of tension, disagreement, and possible chaos. This set of conditions yielded what we have come to call “moments of fascination” for us and George, and there are three such moments from the filming of “No Decision is Taken Unless Everyone Agrees” worth examining. The first was a captivating take focused mainly on one dancer, Kayvon Pourazar (Figure 15). Staring intently into and then away from the camera, barefoot and dressed in a disheveled suit, Kayvon barely moved as he rotated a small box around his body, forcing other dancers away. His gestures, focused and uncompromising, illuminated tensions posed by the film: how do people truly negotiate? How does a body of individuals make consensus-based decisions? How do they resist the pressure to do so? Kayvon harnessed the tangled complexity of these questions, embodying them before the camera. In conjunction with this series of gestures that pointed (in our reading) toward the anxieties around trade, Kayvon also generated a movement phrase that evoked a kind of organizational ennui; holding a cup of coffee and slowly stirring, his eyes conveyed some combination of submission, inertia, and resignation. Kayvon was not privy to the ethnographic findings of Jae and George and was generating movement passages based on the score and in response to the aesthetic choices of the design team. What was emerging, unexpectedly, was a rendering of the very observations Jae and George had made in the field. Kayvon’s embodiment provoked a kind of reckoning with the profoundly human interiority of this institution.

Figure 15 Still from “No Decision is Taken Until Everyone Agrees” (2013); Kayvon Pourazar.

Productive Encounters

Another moment of fascination was a series of takes in which two of the dancers responded to the prompt “one trader must break away from established rules and make a distinct performance (‘peacocking’).” The dancers, Jesse Zarritt and Nami Yamamoto, stood in piles of mulch that seemed to bind their feet in place and took turns holding forth in expressive, spasmodic solos. There was a wildness to their movement, guided by pulsating music, but also a sense of unwanted constraint; the two dancers had tacitly determined to contain themselves to a designated spot. The “peacocking” prompt was based on an observation made by Jae that WTO delegates from less powerful countries would periodically stand and pontificate during committee meetings and, in her words, “peacock.” Her interpretation of these moments was a provocative rejoinder to the WTO’s assertion that “No Decision is Taken Until Everyone Agrees” because it highlighted the relatively weak position of these members; a delegate might be fully aware that their perspective would not sway a committee vote yet would use his speaking rights as a member to speak out against historical and current injustices against his country. As we watched the dancers’ embodied interpretation of this ethnographic observation we found it immediately odd and funny—the notion that delegates might stand and flail in this way was delightfully preposterous. At the same time, these movement pieces had a sense of raw urgency and profound complaint that we found riveting. What could this suggest about the formal rule-bound processes for negotiating and creating consensus at the WTO—what forms of silencing did they engender, and how did the silencing systematically embed itself in particular bodies? On the other hand, what would it look like if an institution like the WTO allowed for such complaint, for such rawness? Could it reckon with uncontained oppositional energy? As we sat in front of the monitors during these takes, George moved back and forth between the present unfolding of the shoot and the past and future of ethnographic encounter, between

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Figure 16 Still from “No Decision is Taken Until Everyone Agrees” (2013); Nami Yamamoto.

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apprehending the footage and reflecting on questions about the WTO that enframed the entire project. As the performers worked, the DP was attending to whether they were in frame and whether the light was creating interesting shapes; by contrast, George was zeroed in on gestures and noting how they subverted or indexed institutional norms. Some of his commentary filtered outward to the film crew and the dancers. But more importantly, this intermediary form was acting on George in the moment, fomenting new questions and making submerged insights evident. Another moment of fascination illustrates the tangential analytic capacity of this collaboration. At the start of the day, we had to decide how to transform the set (comprised of three adjacent light-colored walls and a glossy white floor) to set the tone for the second film. One idea that Luke floated was to film around the perimeter of the set; in other words, to set the performance around the back of the set rather than on it. Another idea that we began to play around with was “exploding” the tightly contained interior; breaking apart the walls to create dark shadowy spaces between them. This design quandary set up a series of considerations relating to how we might visualize and materialize our institutional subject. If we were suggesting that the interior of the set was the WTO itself, and we positioned the performance external to the set, would that evoke bilateral trade deals that occur outside the purview of the organization? If so, would it raise questions for viewers about how bilateralism weakens the institution? Or questions about how the institution seeks to incorporate bilateral trade relations into its mission? If we ruptured the interior to allow for murky zones of entry and exit, would that highlight some of the very ruptures and dim interstitial zones currently straining the cohesion of the organization? The design problems were an avenue for asking different questions about the ethnographic subject. One could argue that contact improvisation (and the filming thereof ) is a clumsy tool for social analysis; for us, this clumsiness was

vital to its ability to expose things that rested deep in the seams and far on the margins of the ethnographic frame. Although the installation was displayed as a kind of art piece, Trade is Sublime solidified for us that our work was most strongly situated between ethnography and design rather than art.8 Design is premised on solving problems, not infrequently in information-poor situations, and has an audience/ user in mind. Our work moved between imaginative practices and solving problems of logistics, interpretation, and readability or usability. As any good designer will acknowledge, constraints can be useful; they carve out a more limited space of possibility and provoke creative thinking. Among the logistical problems we needed to solve were issues of portability, since we were designing a piece that needed to be moved from New York to Geneva. This limited the scale on which we could operate, and our potential reliance on local collaborators, since we would only have a couple of days for installation. We also had to solve the problem of designing a piece that prompted some kind of interactive engagement yet did not disrupt the flow of people through the passageway or room in which it would be displayed. Neither could it be distracting for those in nearby work spaces, which placed limits on multimedia elements. Wherever we found institutional constraints, we understood something new about the institution. In Chapter 5, we discuss the negotiation of bureaucratic constraints before and during the twoweek exhibition and our efforts to glean its effects and residual affordances. One of the outcomes of this project was that it led us to develop a schema that outlined our general approach to productive encounters, as distilled from our working practices. The schema delineated three interconnected nodes: (1) a design interface that would allow a prompt generative concept development process and result in the design of a productive en counter between and with (2) interpretive communities, which would have some stake in the project as inner and outer publics, in order to provide opportunities for reciprocal elucidation on (3) the subject of the work—the ethnographic concerns of the project. We applied this general schema to our next project, Yes, We’re Open.

Yes, We’re Open (2016)

8

Our contacts at the WTO tended to see it as an art piece, however, and in our publications we have previously described the piece as an art intervention (Marcus 2016). 9 This project was funded by the UC Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) and the UCI Center for Ethnography.

Productive Encounters

In our first project, 214 Sq. Ft., which began as a commission, we had full access and insider status. For Trade is Sublime, our position was more tangential. While we were invited in by the ethnographers, the organization itself only permitted us access and provided basic logistical and promotional support but no direct funding nor involvement in the design process.9 Our attempts to obtain buy-in were multi-layered and involved both submitting formal proposals and design documents to officials for review as well as numerous informal communications between George, WTO officials, and ourselves. We also sought to subtly stimulate interest in the installation prior to our arrival in Geneva

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by having comment boxes installed at the CWR into which delegates and members of the secretariat were asked to complete “translation cards” (on which they translated our title, Trade is Sublime, into their native languages). During the installation, we held a series of meetings and casual gatherings to promote dialogue about the piece. As noted above, it was during this phase of acceptance that we discovered how these encounters with gatekeepers could become meaningful extensions of the project. The artists Jean-Claude and Christo refer to this as a “software”10 phase, during which a discourse and consensus are formed around the project through the acquisitions of permits and permissions (Christo and Jeanne-Claude 2018).11 Our third project, Yes, We’re Open, began with a desire to work in Christine and Luke’s local community (Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn), which has been undergoing rapid change since around 2000 (Figure 17). One of the manifestations of this change, typically glossed as gentrification, has

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Figure 17 Yes, We’re Open (2016).

10 In contrast, the “hardware” phase would be the actual fabrication and assembly of the actual installation. We refer to our projects that have existed only the in “software” phase as Productive Encounter Workshops. 11 While these artists have worked at the scale of the city, region, or even nation-state, we were working at a more local, institutional scale. For interesting writing on the politics of permits, see Bertie Ferdman’s (2018) work on urban dramaturgy.

been the shuttering of existing small black-owned businesses and their replacement by new cafes and shops catering to new residents, a majority white mixture of the professional-managerial class and artist-bohemians. We also took inspiration from a project called The Brighton Beach Memory Exchange (Figure 18). Staged in 2012 on the boardwalk in Brooklyn, the piece was a pop-up shop created as a collaboration among artists Daniel Gallegos and Diana Yun, anthropologist Zhanara Nauruzbayeva, the Brighton Beach Neighborhood Association, and Cafe Tatiana.12 It relied on a barter operation to bring people into conversation about their experiences of a specific time and place. The artists created close to one hundred watercolors of everyday life in Soviet Russia and stills from iconic Russian movies and set up a display table on the Brighton Beach boardwalk. As locals approached the table to view the paintings and stills they were prompted by anthropologist Nauruzbayeva to share their memories of

12

This work was undertaken by a group of artists and anthropologists who collaborate under the umbrella of the Artpologist Collective. The Brighton Beach Memory Exchange, and other projects, are documented on their site: http://artpologist.com/ projects/brighton-beach-memory-exchange (accessed July 27, 2017).

Productive Encounters

Figure 18 Artpologist Collective, The Brighton Beach Memory Exchange (2011). Photo: Daniel Gallegos.

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Soviet life that were stimulated by the images. In exchange for their memories, participants chose a piece they liked from the vending table to take with them. Reciprocal exchange, many have argued, creates or strengthens webs of connection; barter is not fundamentally about exchange relations but does require a coincidence of wants and values between exchange partners. By requesting a gift (a story) in exchange for a gift that was anticipated to be equivalently desired, the creators of The Brighton Beach Memory Exchange made creative use of the generative possibilities of both reciprocity and barter for ethnographic ends. From the beginning of Yes, We’re Open, we were pondering the possibilities of designing an encounter that would entail exchange operations as a way to bring into focus the competing and parallel notions of value that are part of gentrification. Brighton Beach resonated with some of our concerns about Bedford-Stuyvesant, focusing as it did on the absence of shared experiences and on a desire to bridge the community’s history with its present. Our interest in Bed-Stuy, which revolved generally around questions of gentrification as it manifested specifically in the changing commercial-scape, drew us to the work of sociolinguist Shonna Trinch and anthropologist Ed Snajdr. They had been collaborating for several years on NSFfunded research examining the changing language of commercial signage as a medium through which to analyze tensions rooted in racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic differences in gentrifying Brooklyn. We began meeting with Trinch and Snajdr to discuss their research and proposed working alongside and in conjunction with their project as partners on an as-yet undefined design intervention. This is, indeed, an unusual kind of request; anthropologists may sometimes collaborate on research, but typically do so in ways that are meant to expand the breadth of data collection. The

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Figure 19 Brooklyn signs and storefronts (2010–2015). Photos: Edward Snajdr and Shonna Trinch.

Productive Encounters

value of working in a design modality, we were realizing, is that we could propose an adjacent analytic process to scholars whose work fascinated us, which would both enable us to continue to refine a design-based ethnographic practice and potentially expand the insights of their ongoing research. Trinch and Snajdr gamely agreed and provided us with readings and an in-depth presentation of their work, including questions that they were still in the process of trying to answer and photographic data (Figure 19). The project quickly coalesced around the idea of a pop-up shop in an existing but empty storefront, and we titled it Yes, We’re Open in reference to the classic sign still found on many shop doors. Logistically, a pop-up shop made sense due to the plethora of unrented storefronts in our immediate vicinity. Analytically and aesthetically, a storefront project would allow us to explore the affective registers of signage and interior design and to tap into exchange as a modality of encounter. Stores are public spaces yet, as Trinch and Snajdr have posited, they are not democratically public and interpolate very different consumers based not only on their products and services but also on their aesthetics ( Trinch and Snajdr 2017). Designing and installing a temporary store offered interesting possibilities for drawing neighborhood residents into a space that, by design, could generate debate, pose questions, and provoke varied responses from a public that Trinch and Snajdr were also interested in thinking with and about. From a scenographic perspective, a store is an environment in which action plays out among actors, conditioned by the design of the space and its logic. This project has helped us refine several aspects of our approach to doing ethnography by design, including focusing on a longer temporal frame for projects by using a multi-stage process. A slower and more articulated gestational period was supported by (1) refining our strategies for working with inner and outer publics, and (2) formally workshopping projects with teams of designers and anthropologists, and (3) shifting from imaginative to highly speculative thinking and making. In relation to the first of these, we had begun thinking even more about how this project could offer a medium for co-reflection with a local inner public of immediate neighbors, including members of our block association, and local business owners in our small corner of Bed-Stuy. Following Wodiczko’s lead, we wanted to bring an inner public into the process as epistemic partners. To initiate this and generate buy-in, Luke and Christine hosted an event at the local YMCA that was billed as “Remembering Bedford Avenue.” We posted flyers around the neighborhood that promised a free spaghetti dinner (a common offering at local church events and block association meetings) and asked attendees to bring photos, memorabilia, and stories about Bedford Avenue, a major thoroughfare zoned for both residential and commercial buildings (Figure 20). At the event, we displayed a “memory board” of old photographs, from the early twentieth century through the 1980s, of buildings along Bedford Avenue. Attendees, about fifteen in all, were asked to tell us about any of the buildings in the photos that they remembered, some of which were still in existence but had been repurposed, some of which had been demolished. Placards on each table offered a list of prompts to stimulate attendees to share stories (Can you recall a story about a place in our neighborhood—a store, a school, an organization—that is no longer here? Can you recall a story about a person from our neighborhood who is no longer with us? etc.), and we circulated with audio-recorders to document people’s stories. The spaghetti dinner was a first step into thinking through with our neighbors about continuity and change. The stories they told alternated between

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Figure 20 Remembering Bedford Avenue photo collage (2015).

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hopeful and wistful; many had lived throughout the violence of the 1970s through the 1990s related to the crack epidemic and were relieved by the changes, but also felt like they no longer recognized familiar blocks or could afford to shop in local stores. Following this event, we planned two Yes, We’re Open workshops. The first of these, in February of 2016, included Trinch and Snajdr, Luke and an additional scenic designer, Adrian Jones; Christine acted as facilitator and was responsible for documentation. The second workshop, in March, included twelve participants from various fields: lighting and scenic design, directing, anthropology, and several graduate students from the New School for Social Research Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Theory (whose skills and expertise bridged design and social inquiry). The purpose of both workshops was to bring designers and anthropologists together in a studio environment to generate possible concepts for a pop-up shop through dialogue and materialization (sketching and model-making). We brought into our Yes, We’re Open workshops our discoveries from two prior workshops that we hosted in 2014 and 2015. In particular, we had learned that a studio-workshop needed a process for participants to build trust and a sense of connection across their disciplinary divides. Anthropologists and designers come to the table with very different approaches to problem-setting and problemsolving and we had developed and borrowed exercises that were intended to help these nascent collaborators see through one another’s eyes. In addition, we sought to cultivate a sense of play and uncritical making because we had begun to move more strongly in the direction of speculative design. Inspired by conceptual designers like Dunne and Raby and by Elizabeth Chin’s “Laboratory

Figure 21 Warm-up games, Yes, We’re Open workshop (2015).

Productive Encounters

for Speculative Ethnology,” the aim of the workshop was to generate designs for a pop-up shop unconstrained by realism or feasibility. We didn’t want our collaborators to simply work imaginatively together; we wanted them to stretch their thinking into futuristic, highly conceptual, absurdist realms, to detach from what we already knew and experiment with proposing alternative, and unpack the complications of a divided community. To ground the speculation process in ethnographic concerns, participants had been given a draft of Trinch and Snajdr’s article on signage in Brooklyn as a mode of place-making. As we describe in Chapter 7, we used time and material constraints for warm-up activities to limit “over-thinking” and to force spontaneous decision-making (Figure 21). Participants collaborated in three-person design teams and began the process by responding to two prompts that narrowed their design task (an example of one was “Design a store that operates on the model of a community garden”) in the form of a “storyboard” or narrative of what the experience of shopping in the store would be like. Teams were then asked to take a “sensory walk” through stores in the neighborhood and record their observations in audio recordings and using worksheets that prompted them to sketch and attend to particular sensory registers of their experience. Following this, the teams moved into model-making, where they used a variety of materials to create three-dimensional renderings of their pop-up shops, following by an open-ended discussion of the models. Both workshops generated more questions than answers. Some primary questions remained on the table (What kind of store is it? What does it sell?), and broader and more interesting questions emerged: Does the store need to be economically viable (i.e. a real store) or can it be design fiction? What issues around sustainability can we address through the design? Is it a utopian space that speaks to discrete communities in precisely the language to which they might respond, or a utopian

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Figure 22 Fictional store in model form from Yes, We’re Open workshop (2015).

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space that somehow erases the existing borders between them? Is it dystopian, rather than utopian, upending a kind of hopeful vision of seamless integration? Is it merely provocative, asking questions of the public about what they want for their neighborhood, what their needs and aesthetics are? Is it unrecognizably fabulistic—a store filled with giant marshmallows that gives away free car parts? Attempting to answer these questions through design, in which the answers must take some material form, challenged all of us, from Trinch and Snajdr to our team of designers and anthropologists, to consider what a store can and should be in contemporary Bed-Stuy, where white people and wealthy developers continue to move in and alter the landscape of a historically middle-class Africanand Caribbean-American neighborhood. The outcomes of these initial Yes, We’re Open workshops were ambiguous. After all, speculative designs for a pop-up store entailed imagining not only exterior and interior design but also a business model for exchange and specific goods or services to be exchanged, which was a high burden for our design teams. But this kind of expansive thinking was important for clarifying what might alienate or interpolate possible consumers, which was a parallel way of joining Trinch and Snajdr in thinking through the specific desires and concerns of local communities divided by race and class. It allowed us to consider the multiple sensory registers of the consumer experience and engaged us in a material practice that grappled with the unseen borders of cities within the city. We sought to reckon with how the racialized and increasingly stratifying commercial-scape in our neighborhood manifested itself through all of the elements of commercial enterprises, from their facades to their business models and products. In the months that followed this workshop, we met with Trinch and Snajdr to reflect on how the workshop had contributed to their thinking as they revised their article for the Journal of Sociolinguistics. In addition, a local resident who also attended John Jay College, where

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We do see affinities for working softly in contemporary works of social practice that seek quiet entry, buy-in from stakeholders, and participatory design (Kester 2011, Coombs and Thompson 2015).

Productive Encounters

Trinch and Snajdr are faculty members, joined us in developing a hypothetical mapping “service” that would pick up on a theme that emerged from the workshop. This free service would entail creating personalized maps of the neighborhood, and in so doing offer insights into how newer, white residents of the neighborhood chart different courses through the commercial landscape than longterm residents of color. Although this project, and the pop-up store designs were only developed as prototypes in model form, and we don’t currently have plans to implement any of the proposals, the workshops and residual brainstorming sessions created a framework for Snajdr and Trinch to engage in imaginative, lateral thinking around their analytical concerns with non-anthropologists. In conclusion, our projects have all entailed a kind of designed intervention. At the same time, we have sought to work softly; to seek resonance without creating extreme disruption. Working softly may be a common attribute of interventions that are informed by ethnography. In fact, while we have often in this volume employed the term intervention to refer to our strategies, it may perhaps be a misnomer. Intervention is strongly associated with art practices both in the historical Avant Garde (Surrealists, Dada), the Neo-Avant Garde (Fluxus, Situationists) and in contemporary practice from street art to works of institutional critique. Although the nature of interventions vary greatly,13 they often carry the implicit promise of subversion or shock that seeks violent re-framings of social, architectural or aesthetic norms. We suggest that our work attempts to avoid this violence and looks for subtle or partial disturbances. We seek a middle ground between the camouflage of the ethnographer as participant observer blending seamlessly into the field site and the artist as instigator creating moments of détournement. Our projects have all strived for a double valence—to be simultaneously interfaces that are legible to and engage an audience, as well as interfaces for ethnographic inquiry and elucidation. Perhaps a better metaphor than intervention would be to think of the process as one of cultivation. In cultivation, changes develop slowly through the establishment of root structures and subterranean conditions. Only then do they begin to thrive. A cultivation process involves the assessment of conditions, preparation of soils, patience and experimentation. As all backyard gardeners know, while one may design a garden, the plants speak back. They thrive in certain places; wilt in others. They must be tended to, adjusted, re-positioned, fertilized, cared for, and protected. When working with our experimental cultivars, we cannot anticipate outcomes but must follow growth as it occurs. As often as they thrive, they fail, but both trajectories can be considered integral to the process. Highly experimental cross-disciplinary projects are not easily nurtured and legitimated in many academic institutions, with their disciplinary and hierarchical divisions that channel material support in recognizable ways. As we discuss in the following chapter, there are some labs and institutes dedicated to facilitating work that brings anthropology and design together in various configurations, and we posit that such infrastructures are key to making this kind of work feasible. As part of encouraging the expansion of such infrastructures, we discuss five design practices—collaboration, problem-setting and problem-solving, speculation, materialization, and iteration—that we see as key to cultivating and sustaining ethnography by design.

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Figure 23 Design anthropology workshop, University of Jyväskylä (2017).

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4 Practices for an Ethnography by Design

The projects we have developed in what we have come to think of as our Productive Encounters studio, or atelier, evolved as we followed our intuitions, took imaginative leaps, and built on emergent insights. In other words, there was no master plan for how to do ethnography by design, but rather a focus on creating designed encounters and a willingness to borrow strategies external to anthropology, notice what seemed useful, and learn from failures. As Dunne and Raby have noted: “Design can give experts permission to let their imaginations flow freely, give material expression to the insights generated, ground these imaginings in everyday situations, and provide platforms for further collaborative speculation” (Dunne and Raby 2013: 6). Throughout the development and implementation of our collaborative projects we have seen anthropological concerns freed, expressed materially, and grounded by design thinking and practices. In this chapter, we think more generally about the designerly ways of approaching questions in and about the world that can inform anthropological inquiry. Design thinking is made manifest through specific working practices in design fields. Although we have often taken cues from scenography in our projects, we have appropriated working practices from graphic design, product design, interior design, and various other fields. Whether the focus is on material objects, spaces, services, or systems, there are shared modalities in contemporary studios and companies that override the specificities of medium. In this chapter, we examine modalities of work specific to design toward a systematic appraisal of what might be required to build an infrastructure for doing ethnography by design. Our aim, however, is not merely to support and encourage ethnographic experimentation that borrows strategies from designers. Rather, we are thinking through how to develop a replicable framework for doing ethnography by design so that interventionist, explicitly aesthetic, and experimental modalities can begin to move from the periphery and become part of the ethnographic toolkit. There have been some notable efforts towards creating studio infrastructures across design and anthropology. These include Marcus and Murphy’s Ethnocharette Series implemented through the Center for Ethnography at the University of California, Irvine, and CoLED (Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design) based at the University of California, San Diego; Elizabeth Chin’s Laboratory for Speculative Ethnology at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California; the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University; and the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, & Social Thought at the New School for Social Research. In Copenhagen, the Center for Codesign Research at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (KADK) is a hub for innovative research between designers and anthropologists. Although now concluded, the Research Network for Design Anthropology was

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a collaboration between the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Aarhus University, and the University of Southern Denmark, funded by the Danish Research Council. In the Netherlands, TRADERS (Training Art and Design Researchers for Participation in Public Space) projects at the Design Academy in Eindhoven facilitate collaboration between artists, designers, and social scientists. The Incubator for Critical Inquiry into Technology and Ethnography (INCITE) founded by Nina Wakeford at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2001, is yet another example. These and other labs draw on studio models in design fields to create space for collaborative work and to facilitate materialization. The complex infrastructures that support team-based research in the hard and behavioral sciences, including designated funding sources, hardware and software, and training and procedures, are a useful model—not for the purpose of steering anthropology towards radical empiricism but rather to build a more robust foundation for cross-disciplinary experimentation in the mode to which we subscribe. In the following, we locate and consider five practices—collaboration, problemsetting-and-solving, speculation, materialization, and iteration—that we have borrowed from scenography and other design fields for developing ethnographic interventions. Independently they have distinct affordances; as a set they create a frame for anthropological collaboration in workshop, lab, or studio environments.

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Collaboration

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By bringing people to the table to work together, literally or metaphorically, collaboration initiates and intensifies processes that might otherwise have remained dispersed. It produces a type of ideational density through overlapping effort. But even more so, it forms a collecting pool of energy around a problem or a question. There is a joining of forces, a turning together and in concert, towards the problem. The fact that the effort is concerted both raises and lowers the stakes. Collaborators develop a kind of inter-reliance on each other as their questions become others’ questions or even their answers. Even where collaborative work takes place in virtual spaces, there is a sense of thinking alongside and with each other. The notion of “thinking with” others has been taken up in various ways, including most notably in anthropology by Hutchins in his examination of coordinated navigational processes on US naval ships (Hutchins 1995). Hutchins proposes that knowledge of complex systems or processes exists across individuals and artifacts out in the world (not confined to the individual mind); cognition is situated and coordinated through interaction. Murphy takes up the idea of situated cognition in his work on architectural design activity (Murphy 2005), observing that architects engage in what he calls “collaborative imagining” that is facilitated by material objects, gestures, and talk. In face-to-face design meetings, they explicate hypothetical proposals to one another using hand gestures that represent the movement of doors, or using objects like pencils or drawings that represent features of a building. Designers perceive what their collaborators imagine and respond in kind using their own gestures, talk, and objects. What Murphy describes for architects holds true for scenographers working with teams of theatrical designers and a director; collaborative imagining emerges through

Figure 24 Yes, We’re Open workshop (2015); Emily Mendelsohn, Christine Hegel, Barbara Adams, Edward Snajdr.

Practices for an Ethnography by Design

the sharing of sketches and models, the use of gestures indicating the movement of people and objects on a stage, and other practices that allow members of the design team to perceive others’ imaginings and then debate and build on them. Face-to-face collaboration, this suggests, allows for particular kinds of imaginative cross-fertilization made possible by subtle gestures and uses of material objects. Collaborative relationships based on complementary specialization can also inhibit collaborative imagining. When collaborators bring distinct knowledge and skill sets into a project, there may be few shared referents, barely a common language, and a sense that others miss the point entirely. Yet these disconnects can also produce fruitful tensions, including the need to speak across zones of expertise, which interrupts a reliance on tacit understandings and instigates a kind of decoding process as we translate our questions and commitments into other discourses. Another tension exists between discursive modes of expression, on the one hand, and visual, tactile, aural, and other sensory modes on the other. In addition, hierarchical norms of decision-making in a team-based work modality can stall or redirect a project. These tensions can produce a sense of frustration, particularly in the throes of profound dissensus as collaborators try to coalesce around solutions and answers from radically different perspectives. However maddening, these insurmountable-brick-wall moments are a symptom of both the agency of collaborators and of the uncomfortable sensation of being forced to disrupt routinized approaches to a problem. Unsurprisingly, the potentials that inhere in collaboration—efficiency through a division of labor, invigorated and alternative thinking, etc.—have strings attached, although these strings may actually be lifelines. Collaboration is a well-developed tradition across design disciplines. In some fields collaborative models are considered a “best practice” yet are malleable in how they take shape. In other fields, like

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scenography, they are solidified through union rules and hiring practices. Ethnographic research, by contrast, has historically been a lone wolf operation. Despite calls for more deliberate research and writing collaborations with interlocutors as part of shifting the dynamic between researcher and researched (i.e. Lassiter 2005), ethnographic projects tend to originate in the academy, shift into forms of information sharing, interpersonal connection, and mutual reliance with informants in the field, and then return to singularity in the analysis and write-up of research. Ethnographers rarely put together multi-specialty teams for a field project, or include members of the community they might be studying in the planning or write-up of research (for some notable exceptions, see Hegel 2019). We propose, however, that collaboration is critical for developing productive encounters. The well-established modes of interacting with one another’s research in the discipline—attending conference panels, participating in short seminars at which scholars present semi-completed articles and engage in a more sustained conversation about issues of theory or interpretation, or reviewing publications for journals and presses—are not collaborative in the sense we envision. Although they can generate dialogue across finished or nearly finished work, this dialogue entails forms of distanced debate rather than a close, participatory, creative investment of time and intellectual energy. We propose a mode of collaboration in which anthropologists come together in a studio setting to focus on a particular set of questions or concerns arising out of a research project, around which they pool energies and engage in collaborative imagining through materialization practices. We want to explore the potential of gathering together to workshop a new project, a new trajectory in an existing project, or an unexpected set of observations. Because we are explicitly interested in how to layer design thinking into ethnographic research, it is also critical to bring designers to the table as active collaborators. Designers not only bring specific skill sets that facilitate envisioning and materializing environments, objects, systems, and processes, but also have experience working collectively and under time pressure. We have organized a number of workshops, each of which brought anthropologists and designers together for at least two long days to focus on a specific research project (Justin Richland’s nascent project on the Stern v. Marshall Archive, Doug Holmes’ work on central banks and central bankers, Ed Snajdr and Shonna Trinch’s research on gentrification in Brooklyn, and Sari Pitikaainen’s work on “human-centered” retirement homes in Finland). The designers we invited to collaborate with anthropologists came from varied design fields. In our experience, the specific skills a designer brings with them are far less important than their capacity to tackle a complex set of questions as a maker with an aesthetic sensibility. These workshop experiments have given us insight into what might be required to create an infrastructure for normalizing and supporting collaboration between designers and ethnographers. If collaboration rests on the potential to energize people around a problem or question and pool not only their intellectual and creative energy but also their specialized knowledge and skills, it requires new spaces and event frames where collaborators can literally be in the room together. It also requires developing specific processes to cultivate and strengthen collaborative relationships. Trust and mutual faith in the value of a project have to be nurtured in order to progress from the initial stages of developing a rapport to stages of intense risk-taking creative work. Just as anthropologists spend time and share information to build trust with informants, collaborators gathered together to

begin work on a new project need strategies to build a level playing field in which everyone is able to engage creatively and intellectually with one another. This open space for development is common in many collaborative artistic disciplines; we borrow workshopping strategies common in the theater that use warm-ups to help participants leap into temporary working relationships. Exercises have various goals, including: leveling collaborators with differing professional stature, practicing making decisions together through low-stakes decision-making processes, loosening and deflating formality through playful and spontaneous problem-solving, developing awareness or sensitivity to one another’s zones of expertise or ways of thinking through turn-taking tasks, facilitating interdependency and shared experience through an unexpected challenge, and the like. As with any working relationship, there are questions to be answered about whether all collaborators will have equal input or control over the direction of a project, or whether some hierarchy should be articulated. Collaboration generally rests on a social contract in which contributors make some level of commitment to a project; to what extent will one be asked to commit? In what capacity? For how long? Will collaborators be compensated, and if so how and how much? How will intellectual “credit” be allocated? There are models of structured collaboration in other fields—theatre, biology, architecture, archaeology, performance art, music, etc.—that can be drawn on to think through the kinds of commitments and expectations the collaborative project at hand might entail. What seems most critical is to begin to establish research studios or labs in which anthropologists can come together with the expectation of sharing everything from raw data and nascent impulses to “finished” work that they want to rework and reconsider, and engaging in a collective design process. Like designers who work with communities as part of a research and development phase for a space, a system, or a product that will impact that community, we also strongly advocate for collaboration with members of communities—“inner” and “outer” publics. Models of community collaboration in fields like design for social change or participatory design are useful for considering how collaborative arrangements with local publics can “trap” the problems and concerns that cannot be seen by outsiders. Collaboration with communities can exploit varied and overlapping zones of expertise and recenters ethnographic inquiry as a process of reciprocal elucidation through collaborative imagining.

In all design fields, there are working principles for how to generate and refine ideas. These principles are rooted in the notion that design solves problems. Unlike art, for instance, design is underwritten by the idea of usefulness, which simultaneously implies a subject for whom the thing/system will have use. In fields like user-interface design, or graphic design for marketing, the aim of interpellating specific possible users or consumers is particularly explicit, although the imagined user is embedded in all design effort. The English word “design” is derived from the Middle French word desseign, with the meaning of “a scheme or plan in the mind” (OED). But contemporary understandings of design as an activity are tied to problem-solving, which has been linked to modern industry and the proliferation

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Problem-setting and problem-solving

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Ethnography by Design

Figure 25 Problem-setting from HCLGA workshop (2016).

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of new situations and conditions that create new problems to be solved. For example, the auto industry successfully designs and produces electric cars to alleviate over-reliance on fossil fuels, which instigates the need to design electric charging stations and systems for collecting payment for their use. In this model, designers respond to industry-determined design briefs that define the problem. The aim may be increased efficiency, affordability, accessibility, or otherwise, but the designer is charged with solving a problem that has already been set. But there has also been resistance to the notion that design operates in service to industry, beholden to its prerogatives and terms. Design companies like IDEO, which formed in the 1970s, turned the industry-led model on its head by asserting the primacy of designers not merely to solving problems but to devising them. Minimally, this emerges in the notion that design is rooted in the natural affordances of materials and objects. In other words, a material like wood has a natural affordance of solidity, carve-ability, and support, and a designer’s work is to tap into and align the needs of humans with the affordances of materials in the world (Norman 2002: 9). Ingold puts this somewhat differently, noting that design is about “anticipating the future” (Ingold 2013: 71), which is perhaps another way of saying that “problems” to be solved are often speculative rather than set in response to present actualities; we think more about practices of speculation in the following section. “Conceptual design” has been the primary formulation of the resistance to industry-directed design, substituting design documents (drawings, models, visualizations) as the end goal of a design process as opposed to manufacturing objects of use (products, buildings, cities). Radical Italian and Austrian

Practices for an Ethnography by Design

architects, such as Superstudio, followed this mold using architectural renderings as a means of exploring dystopian or alternate futures. The form was articulated further by practitioners and theorists like Dunne and Raby who undertook what they termed “critical design” as part of their Design Interactions program at the Royal College of Art London (2008). They suggest that design, in their case industrial design, architecture and user experience/user interface design (UX/UI), could turn away from industry and towards society by acting as mode of critique (2014). Making use of design’s ability to negotiate multivariable discourses (beyond just the tension of aesthetics and usevalue), critical design becomes a general purpose strategy for social dreaming. Manifesting objects is still paramount, but these objects function primarily on the symbolic plane as means to explore values and concepts. For scenographers, the “problems” to be solved are traditionally contained in the play. How to represent both the practical and the metaphorical elements embedded in the text? How to reveal unspoken tensions and desires while also manifesting a very particular world—a Russian country house, a Manhattan lawyer’s office, a church basement in Texas—that the characters inhabit? Highly conceptual scenic design engages more heavily with problem-setting than naturalistic design; stripping away the reliable features of an environment that are otherwise vehicles for expressing individual and collective histories, values, and status of the characters means generating a new problem of evoking a sensibility or a feeling rather than a recognizable place or period. Although problem-setting may be internal or external to design fields, design is relationally propelled. It is inevitably a motor without a starter, a negotiated practice that navigates realms of concern to engage in a kind of worldmaking. Design is “always accountable to particular social, economic and ideological flows that lap against and surge beyond the designed objects themselves” (Murphy and Marcus 2013: 254). Design offers a mode of synthesizing values and behaviors in material forms comparable to the way ethnographic texts might traditionally present social scenes to construct concepts of culture. Art-making, derived from the Greek myth of muses making artists conduits of the divine, is dependent on moments of inspiration. Design, on the other hand, maintains a low allegiance to individual expression or the creative self. At the same time, design is certainly a creative endeavor, and designers are solving problems in ways that respond to aesthetic values and material or other constraints. A useful metaphor for creativity in design might be found in playing a game of chess. There are twenty possible opening moves in a game of chess (sixteen pawn moves and four knight moves). A player may make a choice but has no claim to originality. As game play begins, the opponents are in fact recreating a previously played game of chess well-documented in the numerous chess books on opening theory. However, at a certain moment, one player will make a deviation and the game is said to move “out of book.” Creativity occurs here at this moment in the process; the game becomes a unique occurrence of human expression. The players may be too concerned about winning to even notice the shift. Designing an object such as a chair has a similar quality of making moves. Most of the delimiting factors in creating a chair are fixed by the basic anatomy of the human body and the typical materials for chairs (wood, steel, plastic) that have well-understood methods of fabrication (joinery, welding, etc.). Yet despite these constraints the chair has often been considered a kind of ultimate design

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object—“a microcosm of the designed environment” (Cranz 1998). A designer may begin with simple choices (three or four legs, soft or hard surfaces) that lead to more specific ones (cabriole or tapered leg, leather or tufted fabric upholstery). Somewhere in the process of drawing, modeling, and prototyping the chair, the design goes “out of book.” A kind of knowledge production occurs in relation to the design object itself and the cluster of problems (social, cultural, and physical) to which it is responding. How do we build a design-inflected approach to problem-setting and problem-solving into ethnography? One way to do this is to take anthropological questions and reframe them in the terms of design. The “social” questions are refracted through the lens of a design brief that reformulates a problem of conceptualizing or interpreting a social phenomenon as a problem of designing an environment, object, or process that embodies some specific aspect of that social phenomenon. In conjunction with developing collaborative models to do ethnography by design, we will need to consider new ways to frame the questions that animate our work to infuse anthropological problemsolving with design imperatives. A typical anthropological research proposal contains research questions, a literature review that demonstrates how they relate to existing research, a description of the research methods that will be used to answer the questions, and the anticipated findings and contributions to the discipline. A typical design brief sets a problem succinctly: “Design a communication device that allows people to communicate across linguistic barriers” or “Design a cup that keeps liquids warm and embodies the feeling of a rustic natural environment.” A scenographer’s design brief might be something like: “Design a preschool classroom that embodies ideas of an innocent and privileged childhood in white, suburban America.” By setting anthropological problems as design problems, we incorporate processes of speculation, materialization, and iteration into social inquiry (Figure 25).

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Speculation

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Speculation is a particular mode of ideation in design practice. Due to the centrality of utility and problem-solving in design, it is distinct from unbounded inspiration or free thought. At the same time, it suggests a form of problem-solving that eschews constraints, including material or logistical constraints and the given conditions of the present. Speculation is often future-oriented and sometimes utopian. The speculative mode reaches away from the actual toward the fantastical. But in order to move away from the actual it forces us to think deeply about what we believe to be true and real in the world; we cannot imagine the impossible without first imagining what is currently possible. Design speculation works in an affirmative mode. In this way, speculation relies on something akin to the improv comedy rule “Yes, and . . .” which asserts that any idea presented during the course of an improvization must be accepted as a possible definitive solution and then extended to its logical conclusions. The aim is to fulfill the potential of any proposition without critical intervention. Because the “Yes, and . . .” sensibility limits immediate evaluation, speculation permits a kind of generous and free imagining, as a temporary mode for ideation.

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Speculative design also has the misleading double-meaning of design proposals completed in order to secure a job; a designer may submit a proposal “on spec.”

Practices for an Ethnography by Design

Speculation is triggered by prompts and constrained by manufactured or fictional conditions of the design scenario. In scenography the prompt for speculation is traditionally a work of dramatic literature and the constraints of the physical boundaries of the performance space. A scenographer begins imagining the central dramatic action in a scene and then proposing, in the form of sketches, how that action could be represented. In this sense, dramaturgy or poetics underlies the form in which a story can be enacted above concerns about space or style. A speculative“pre-visualization”phase is typical in the beginning of most design processes. Speculation as a generalized activity entails proposition (that should be accepted) and extension (which tests the proposition by propelling it forward). But speculative design1 is also a distinct conceptual practice for designers unmoored from clients whose final goal is to create commodities or plans/systems for the market. In this model, most notably developed in the Design Interactions program at the Royal College of Art in London (2005–2015), speculative forms are the final goal of a design process. The forms, sometimes referred to as design fictions, elucidate ideas through material objects, but crucially they are not transitioned into objects of use. Their uselessness makes them akin to art objects (distinct from productive encounters) or like a concept car at an auto show that creates ideas about potential futures. We admire particular strategies arising from this, such as Dunne and Raby’s constraint of the “alternate now,” designing objects and systems that are technologically feasible today but expressive of radically alternate cultural, ethical, or political values. These alternates tease out, through the rigors of engineering and the biological sciences, improbable scenarios, objects, and spaces in which participants might engage with one another and/or with questions of contemporary life on novel terms. Speculation embedded in an infrastructure for ethnography by design could allow for ways of thinking that ethnographers often avoid, rooted as we are in the case before us, the empirical nature of our observations, and the disciplinary expectation to do concept work that illuminates what is “really” going on. The speculative mode offers a new analytic space for ethnographers. In our work, productive encounters are the realization of highly speculative design processes that free us from what we may believe to be empirically true and allow us to consider alternate nows or fictions that may, in fact, be less fictional than we had assumed. It is generative to listen for and build in constraints to a working process in order to focus this kind of imaginative undertaking. For instance, in the early stages of Trade is Sublime, it became clear from conversations with our contacts at the Centre William Rappard that any kind of installation piece we designed would need to align with the aesthetic of the building. This introduced the constraint of creating a productive encounter that would be “art-like” in form. Within that constraint, we began to speculate alternate versions of the WTO that would ultimately be presented in a recognizable form—in this case, as “proposals”for a filmic-monument to the WTO. While workshopping Yes, We’re Open we constrained the design interface to take the form of a storefront or commercial space, in part because Snajdr and Trinch’s original research had focused on commercial signage and in part because there were many empty storefronts available in the neighborhood for possibly staging the encounter. Within that constraint, we invited our collaborators to put aside the logic and

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normative order of actual commercial spaces and imagine alternate possible worlds that could exist inside such a space. What does speculation look like? What actual working processes does it entail? As suggested above, speculation might simply entail pre-visualization but can also suggest a shift towards fantastical, unmediated imagining. Pushing this further towards the field of speculative design, it might entail designing fictions that deviate from the ethnographic present but unearth some layer of understanding, hope, or intuition. But in order for speculation to be part of a collaborative process and the development of actual things, spaces, or systems in the world, it has to shift from a mental operation to forms that make thought legible. Designers co-speculate through discourse, using language to evoke the odd and impossible. But practices like drawing, sketching, computermodelling, or rough prototyping articulate the speculative more concretely and enable collaborators to collectively gaze at what is in the mind’s eye (Figure 26). Speculation as a working process via thought-experiments becomes generative and developable when coupled with materialization practices.

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Materialization

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Language is certainly a vehicle for externalizing our imaginings, but language often entails imperfect renderings and slippages in reception. A listener interprets in a way that goes unchecked; an idea conveyed in language has to travel an uncertain road towards reception. Materialization (or making, or fabrication), on the other hand, externalizes what we envision in concrete form. At various points in their process, designers move language aside and rely on materialization to communicate ideas as forms, literally putting ideas on the table. A viewer can behold an idea from multiple angles, up close or from a distance, as a multi-sensory thing, and over time. Designers achieve this by rendering ideas as drawings, sketches, maquettes, and prototypes. For a scenographer, building a model (usually quarter-inch scale) is a critical juncture in the design process. The model manifests a version of a design in miniature to be apprehended outside the mind’s eye. It opens up a critical distance abetted by physical distance: one can stand in front of it, look down into it or observe it from the side. Objects can be considered in scalar relation, and their juxtapositions in concrete form offer new information about how they should be rendered at full scale. Because scenographers send completed models to the theatre at the start of a rehearsal process, they have effects on how a play begins to take shape in the rehearsal room; the model makes suggestions and indicates possibilities to others involved in the process. Materialization is critical to design work not only because it makes possible the apprehension of concepts as concrete objects, spaces, or sensory fields, but also because it conjoins ideation with the constraints and possibilities of materials. If one wants to make a warm, comforting object, wool might facilitate the making more easily than steel. Materials “push back,” in the sense of having some affordances and qualities and not others, which insert themselves into the process of making. Ingold, in Making (2013) pushes this even further by citing Deleuze and Guattari, who have observed that when we encounter materials, or matter, “‘it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation’, with the

Figure 26 Maiju Strömmer presenting a speculative caring tool (2016).

Practices for an Ethnography by Design

consequence that ‘this matter-flow can only be followed’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 450–1, cited in Ingold 2013: 25). Materials, according to Ingold, are not inert or “raw” but rather “always and already on their ways to becoming something else” (Ingold 2013: 31). Materalization, then, is not simply a practice of acting on and with materials but a practice of following, or of listening and responding to, matter. Answering the questions of material form (not just what something might be but how it is actually rendered) entails specificity. Let’s consider the use of metaphors as an example. Metaphors as linguistic devices are commonly used in ethnographic writing. For example, ethnography has been compared to trapping; here, the literal image of a trap (perhaps a mousetrap, or a net for trapping fish) evokes the sense of ethnographic inquiry as capturing things that exist in the world (Jimenez 2016). The ontological assertion of metaphor (this is that) operates on poetic grounds (one does not assume that Juliet is literally the sun). The literary metaphor creates the echo of an image (traps as a category of thing) in the reader’s mind’s eye but limits its description. In fact, overly described or strained metaphors are considered poetically dubious. Fabrication is rooted in metaphoric operations yet requires greater specificity. Traps as a linguistic symbol can operate categorically (all possible traps); trap as a drawn representation can operate iconographically (any number of traps); trap as an object operates in the actual (one specific trap). To create the trap as a designed object, a cascading series of choices must be made that force the speaker to clarify what kind, how big, made of what, operating how, and the like. This is really the heart of design-based operation—delimiting moves from general categories of things to specific

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actual things. Each of these choices is driven by intentions, but also reveal tacit knowledge, habits of mind, and shared subjectivities. With these linguistic analytics as well, we hold that they are made more evident and exposed in material forms. The values we have stressed thus far are primarily related to the way materialization can make ideas visible and specific. This makes ideas available to different kinds of publics or audiences and is therefore why it is critical for collaborative work. it is even more valuable, perhaps, as a means of thinking through the affordances and obduracies of matter. Solving problems in ways that engage visual, tactile, aural, and other senses is known to trigger different processing centers in the human brain, promoting a parallel processing to the process of encoding and decoding language; materialization engages alternate modes of cognition. In art forms like dance or singing, embodiment is integral to expression and taps into haptic, kinesic, and proxemic knowledge that can not be reached through other means. But even with minimal forms of materialization, knowing is embodied to some degree; a designer makes contact with and manipulates materials, and multiple senses are simultaneously engaged. Doing ethnography by design is inextricable from practices of making. Enfolding and structuring materialization processes into ethnographic projects is a strategy by which ethnographers can behold anthropological ideas in a multisensory fashion. We stress non-linguistic modalities of representing ethnographic knowledge as a central tenet of creating productive encounters. But how can practices of making become more than momentary experiments that are useful for ethnographers to think with, or simply to expand the possibilities for discovery of the unexpected? We posit that materialization can be a framework for setting and solving problems of social inquiry and analysis. In other words, as a way to focus materialization practices on ethnographic questions, we envision a model in which the design of things, spaces, or systems is ultimately about producing encounters among and with particular publics. Ethnographers study social phenomena enacted in the space between and among people and the material world, and this is where we want to situate the design impulse. This means that an ethnography by design, in which we collaboratively speculate and materialize productive encounters, needs to prioritize design that is legible to a public. Many Western design and performance traditions have conventionally celebrated these constraints as a sign of their democratic, egalitarian, or rational values. In different design discourses, legibility masquerades as affordance, best and highest use, or accessibility. Our model is concerned with materialization that results in things that are legible to the specific communities of interest, that provoke curiosity, embrace rejection, and in so doing generate moments of shared inquiry. But materialization is not a one-off practice. Rather, designers refine ideas in an iterative fashion, creating and revising prototypes and models repeatedly. Materialization merely exposes concepts to a shared understanding and investigation with collaborators so that an iterative process of codevelopment can occur.

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Iteration An iterative design process works in a circular, rather than linear, fashion, much like ethnographic method in contrast to the traditional scientific method. We associate iteration with materialization

Practices for an Ethnography by Design

practices like sketching, drafting, roughing, rehearsing, testing, trial, modeling, and prototyping. Through iteration, a design idea is drafted, assayed, and then revised. Design development is dependent on evaluation at key inflection points that rely on practices of mocking-up and prototyping. A first iteration may be purely speculative (a thought experiment); quick or partial understandings lead to rough sketches that give rise to feasible design concepts. But through revision (as a material practice) incremental knowledge emerges; one is informed by a design’s micro-evolution, each modification stimulating other modifications. Scenographers may develop multiple versions of a design through sketching or even model-building, and then narrow the design to one concept, followed by an extensive iterative process that refines the idea over the course of months until the blueprints are sent to a scene shop for building. Given budget shortfalls, construction errors, unanticipated space constraints, or creative input from others on the team, they may continue to make revisions until the play opens. Users, or imagined users, are key to an iterative design process. For the English philosopher R.G. Collingswood, something akin to iteration is what separates art from craft. Collingswood suggests that crafts are pre-conceived, planned and executed. A craftsperson knows the effect that the work will have on the audience. Whereas the artist (or designer in our case), borrowing from Denis Dutton’s explanation of Collingwood, has a matching relationship to outcomes as their audience (Collingwood 1938, Dutton 1990). At the inflection point of analysis, the designer must adopt the role of audience or user to test out the effectiveness of the idea and make changes based on what she observes. There is a kinship here with a creative ethnographic practice. In both design and ethnography, the path forward is not predictable or predetermined. This stands in contrast with other modes of empirical research that depend on fixed research protocols for replicability. Substituting design propositions for conceptual ones and then testing those propositions through iteration submits ethnographic inquiry to a unique kind of rigor. Normally, we test out our ethnographic propositions more subjectively by conducting our own assessments as we ask questions and make observations. We revise our questions and concerns in the field as we gain clarity. At a later stage, we test out our findings by presenting our finished work to others through publication or conference presentations. But we rarely test out an interpretation or analytic proposition in a way that requests others (be they collaborators or informants from our field site) to participate in a modification process. Because the iterative process opens up the work to multiple points of assessment and correction, it also allows space for collaboration. It brings not only anthropologists and designers together in the process, but also, ideally, end-users, informants, publics, audiences and interpretative communities and gives their input real gravitational pull. In an infrastructure for ethnography by design, building in practices of material, collaborative iteration can be key because it offers a way to actively engage in analytic and representational practices with fellow travelers, be they anthropologists, designers, or interlocutors. Productive encounters are a kind of prototype. They are materialized propositions of social questions and concerns. The productive encounter is a prototype because it gives us something upon which to gaze, to hold in our hands or use, to feel and experience, that is not meant to represent some ultimate finding but rather a provisional argument or version seeking modification. A

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productive encounter is ideally neither set in stone nor authoritative but rather a proposal of sorts that can instigate a process of response and reformulation. These five working principles form a kind of scaffolding upon which we might begin to re-envision how a young practice may be built as more work in this vein is created. We see tremendous value in pushing ethnographic research in a direction that borrows and adapts the practices and tools of scenography and other design mediums towards an epistemological shift in how we come to know things about the world. Collaboration, a focus on problem-solving, speculation, materialization, and iteration are not only ways of thinking but entail specific practices that we want to enfold into the doing of ethnography in a systematic way.

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Part Two

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5 Unfolding a Process

In Part One, we examined the potentials of scenography as a design tradition that resonates with and offers tools for undertaking social inquiry, illustrated a series of experiments in designing productive encounters, and presented a proposal for developing infrastructures that facilitate speculation, collaboration, iteration, materialization, and problem-setting and problem-solving. In Part Two, we shift away from this kind of broad thinking towards a more practical aim: to persuade anthropologists and designers alike to experiment with designing and implementing productive encounters, or other forms of design experiments alongside and in the field, by offering examples, guidance, tools, games, and models to facilitate this type of work. In so doing, we recognize that incorporating new research and analysis tools drawn from design fields into anthropological pursuits may be daunting. We hope to create inroads by sharing a dialogue that traces the development of Trade is Sublime (Chapter  5), a model for organizing and implementing studio-based workshops (Chapter  6), a selected list of examples of interventionist, aesthetically informed projects that have inspired our own projects (Chapter 7), and an Appendix that offers specific design “moves” or strategies for use in workshops and in developing design-ethnography projects generally. Trade is Sublime, a “second act” project to the 2008–2010 multi-investigator study of the organizational culture among the Secretariat, Missions, and Committees of the World Trade Organization (WTO), offers an interesting model for the process and politics of productive encounters. This chapter assembles a series of documents, images, and notes that annotate a transcript of our reflections on the process of creating Trade is Sublime and highlight both methodological challenges and discoveries. The dialogues (lightly edited for clarity) have been organized into themes that reflect our working process.

The prompt By declaring a “second act”—a return to the site of previous fieldwork—George created the prompt for this project. In this case, the prompt was not an opening toward particular questions pointed towards but unavailable during the initial fieldwork, but instead defined the site (WTO) and the form, an object of aesthetic contemplation. Unlike 214 Sq. Ft., in which we framed the encounter as a non-art (a work of advocacy or education), the art at the WTO was the soft entry point, because it was seen as being relatively low-status and unimportant within the priorities of the site.

Figure 27 Still from “No Decision is Taken Until Everyone Agrees” (2013); Jesse Zaritt. 71

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George Marcus: We [Jae Chung and George Marcus] noticed that the Director-General, Pascal Lamy, and Victor do Prado [the Head of Cabinet] . . . were interested in art. This wasn’t something fully articulated initially, but there was clearly a desire for difference at the WTO that was being articulated through art acquisition and major renovation projects. They wanted to create a different space by building a new wing filled with windows and light, renovating the atrium, revealing and restoring historic murals that had been covered over, and acquiring new works of art. All of this seemed to be part of deflecting criticism about the WTO as an opaque institution that neither grasped nor reflected the realities of its member states. You could not get them to talk about it or explain fully but there was some sort of critique going on at the highest level. Or desire for difference at the WTO. Through art, there could be some kind of articulation or critique of the WTO and the perception that it didn’t speak to the people. This was different from the usual diplomatic mode of having conferences and discourse. Perhaps they felt that the spaces themselves could express things differently. I caught this idea and wanted to move it forward in some way as part of my idea for building cultural critiques from critiques that already exist within an institution. Luke Cantarella: From what I gathered, the completing of the extension building was essential to what Lamy and do Prado were trying to achieve. A major new infrastructure project at the WTO might be meaningful to their legacy. The artworks, on the other hand, were more extramural, like another company might have softball games. Do Prado seemed deeply engaged in the mural restorations (Figure 28), but almost as a hobby as opposed to a central responsibility. In addition, there was anxiety about the money being allocated towards something non-functional during that particularly constrained economic situation.

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A side note, in my role as manager of the building project (which includes the renovation of the old building and the construction of a new building) I have made it a point to spare some resources to commission works of art from local artists. Following the tradition of the ILO, which had labor-related works of art donated to it (or commissioned), I have asked an artist from Lausanne to do a series of fiberglass panels inspired on trade (the new identity of the building, a new layer in the archeology of this place!). I gave her full liberty to do whatever she wanted, as long as it was trade-related. I was pleasantly surprised to see the result. Catherine Bolle (that’s the name of the artist) came up with a series of panels which are displayed in some alcoves in the new Conference Centre. The panels are inspired by products that were important to the history of trade, so that they either created a certain culture around them or were key to the interaction between different societies, through trade routes. Each panel reflects, in a more or less abstract manner, products such as salt (one of the first products traded by humans—and extremely important since ancient times, to the extent that it was used, as you know, as a currency to pay Roman soldiers), cotton, coffee, mica, cocoa, seashells, lapis lazuli, amber . . . The panels are very discrete (Swiss), and yet expressive, abstract and yet descriptive. I do hope to have the occasion to show them to you soon. VICTOR DO PRADO (E-MAIL), April 11, 2013

Unfolding a Process

Figure 28 Maurice Denis, The Dignity of Labor (detail) (1931). Photo: WTO/Pierre-Yves Dhinaut.

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Figure 29 Catherine Bolle, Outre Terre (2012).

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Speculation

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Christine Hegel: Our design process began when you (George) came to us to talk through ideas for a second act intervention at the WTO. Some proposals from a different group of articles from Basel had already been vetted and rejected. But there was the idea of mime or dance as a medium in one of the proposals. The image of dance at the WTO got something circulating in our brains about a way to enliven the idea of trade. Even though it seemed fantastical to bring performers into the Center William Rappard, the image of bodies moving and interacting was very evocative and from this, we started to develop the kernel of the piece. LC: Generally, we find this useful when establishing a collaboration to let impulses and half articulated thoughts coalesce towards something. Indulging in potentials is very helpful in starting to compile a language through which an intervention could happen. Although we quickly moved away from the idea of live performance into something mediated. GM: Why was that? LC: There were practical reasons involving assembling collaborators and costs, but moreover we felt that live performance was too demanding. This particular space was not going to respond to the demands of the performance. The no-nonsense quality of the WTO meant that we were

better off trying to lure people into moments of contemplation as opposed to requiring their attention. A subtle shift was more important than a dramatic rupture.

Numerous ideas were batted around in this phase. One idea involved creating small light boxes into which visitors would insert their hands and photographs of classic currency objects—like cowries or brass rods—would be projected onto their palm, as if they were holding them; the effect would be to create an experience that made trade objects less abstract and more intimate (Figure 30). Another was to take audio recordings from the WTO negotiation sessions, or re-create versions of such sessions, occurring in multiple languages, and make “audio puddles” that visitors would pass through. The audio would only be discernible in that precise spot and each audio puddle would focus on a different topic of negotiation. These concepts began to play around with multiple truths of the organization: the idea of transparency, the “hashing out” that is strongly embedded in diplomatic discourse, and the principle of equal voices.

Unfolding a Process

Figure 30 Proposal showing commodity streams (2013).

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We also heard very clearly that the aggressiveness of the murals proposal [from which actors would “emerge” as the people depicted in the murals and interact with visitors and employees] was rejected. That was definitely beyond the scope of the institution. Rejections can actually be a great tell. It is a kind of litmus test through which to assess the way the interlocutors might be willing to engage in a co-design process. I might propose ideas subject to the response of my direct collaborators, which could then become subject to the approval of our interlocutors at the WTO. These chains of approval are ways in which we assess whether the terms of the project are terms on which the audience can engage. And while it was crucial to establish trust with the gatekeepers at the WTO, we did this not to establish any authority as designers (or artists), but rather to allow us to defer as much as possible to them. We started thinking about film as a medium that could both capture a language of movement and use it to work through bodies to reveal something latent. By depicting negotiation and dispute, order and disorder, pure movement might unlock something normally unsaid or unsayable about the nature of multilateral trade and the quality and complexity of trade relations. We were engaging with a realm of textual expertise, but asking them to translate their ideas into a medium that resists linguistic modes of interpretation We began this translational process by establishing an overdetermined title, Trade is (something). At first, it was Trade is Beautiful but that later changed to Trade is Sublime. We quickly realized the potential of the word sublime to raise questions and overflow with possible casual connections. It kept unfolding for us as we worked on the project. At first, we were worried that people at the WTO might think we were making fun of them. But actually, they embraced the idea very strongly. We should have used the classical meaning of sublime from Keats. It’s not just the ecstatic and beautiful but also the terrible. The sublime creates narrative impossibility. We might not have pushed that far enough. Once we settled on a medium and were developing the idea further, there came a point at which we needed to get provisional approval, to take the nascent idea and solidify it into a form. We created a proposal that included a short narrative, glossy images, reference material, and logistics that could then be submitted to the WTO for approval. It helped legitimize the project to our gatekeepers and it was actually very clarifying for us as well.

Trade is Sublime is designed to evoke an idealized version of trade as effortless, equitable, homogenous, and beautiful in order to encourage viewers to consider contrary or relative actualities. The video component of the installation is comprised of edited footage of performers silently performing simple repetitive tasks. Two small groups of performers, of different genders and ethnicities, dressed in business attire, stand opposite one another in a space that is empty except for two piles of wood blocks and dunnage bags (representing ‘commodities’). Their piles of commodities are identical except that they are different colors (i.e. one pile red, the other blue). Throughout the video, each group incrementally and gracefully stacks, lifts, carries and offers their commodities for those of the other group until their original pile is depleted and replaced entirely by the commodities gained in the trade. The process repeats. EXCERPT FROM PROPOSAL TO OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR GENERAL, HEGEL AND CANTARELLA, MARCH 2013

Unfolding a Process

Figure 31 Proposal for Trade is Sublime (2013).

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Prototyping GM: LC:

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At this point, we began developing the prototype for the project. We might make a technical distinction in how we use terminology like models and prototypes. A model is a three-dimensional representation of an object or system often at a radically different scale. It realizes a spatial design in three dimensions but often not in the same materials and it doesn’t actually function. I often build models of sets I design in ¼ʺ or ½ʺ scale as visualization tools for myself and my collaborators. The prototype, on the other hand, would be something that works. It is a functional “one-off ” in a rough state but finished enough to reveal something about core operations and often at full-size. It is a way of sketching or rehearsing an encounter. In the theater, this might be like a workshop production, where actors present without sets or much direction to put the script “on its feet” to be assessed by an audience. It is a conditional state of performance that leaves more room for a kind of shared imagining of what the performance is becoming. In fact, certain theatrical traditions, (Brecht’s epic theater comes to mind), assert that the conditional form is the strongest aesthetic mode for theater, one in which the prototypes of a social life are always presented in a rough or thin fashion as counterfactuals to history. By exposing the facture, the marks of construction and assembly, the work opens itself up to debate and evaluation. We didn’t prototype Trade is Sublime in the sense of trying it out with end-users, assessing its effectiveness and then refining, although this might have been quite useful. Instead, we attempted to use the collaborative process of filming the dance improvisation as a form of prototyping, so that the making of the work would inform its construction. In fact, filming the performance as a kind of rehearsal made the work conditional. There may have been a tension here between a desire to show seams in the means of production and the desire to create an aesthetically seductive product that could seduce a reluctant viewer. There is probably a tension here that might be explored further in future projects. Working within the realm of the highly symbolic was playing directly into the expertise of that community, one that had built up complex codes about acceptable means of symbolic representations of power relations. It was clear from Jae’s observations that the actual work of the organization in articulating trade regimes especially after the failure of the Doha round was highly constrained, but that organization still functioned as a place where global politics could be enacted as performance. As we continued to develop a frame for the filming, the idea of monumentality became a key idea. We had done some image research on existing monuments to trade—around Wall Street, Europe, and the former Soviet Union (Figure 32). The statue “Man Controlling Trade” in front of the Federal Trade Commission [in Washington, DC] was particularly fascinating because it embodied these two forces so physically. Man, the government regulator as a halfnaked Hercules, is shown bridling a massive stallion of free trade (Figure 33).

Unfolding a Process

Figure 32 W. and T. Willis, Statue of Richard Cobden (1868). Photo: Rept0n1x.

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Figure 33 Michael Lantz, Man Controlling Trade (1942). Washington, DC.

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And then the idea of monumentality really took hold as part of the design after my visit to Geneva for the site survey. And then it further developed in our conversations with Jae Chung. She had written several long emails that prompted us to think about how we might present the films not as something to look at, or just about trade, but as a proposition for what a monument to trade might look like. Part of the experience of walking around the old villa at the CWR was to be surrounded by allegorical representations of justice, peace, dignity, and labor. There was clear notion that allegory was acceptable means in which ideas could be represented. However, when crossing the thin glass bridge over to the new annex building, there was no attempt to embodies ideas in recognizable forms. Everything had become highly abstract. Because there was a lack of visual language for allegorical artistic representation, we hoped to bring it back.

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Don’t forget that the WTO is working in a legacy space. All those murals and sculptures [in the older part of the CWR] were symbols of past occupations. The interesting question was: were they interested in any sense of monumentality? Updating the previous uses [of the CWR]? That’s ambiguous. They were a very spare people who often preferred trade (or the governing rules of the trade regime) to be invisible. It was a provocation to call it sublime or monumental . . . to call it anything other than the natural or something next to the laws of nature which to them are the laws of neoliberal economics. The idea of monumentality . . . I’m not saying it was a wrong turn, but it was provocative . . . Well, it played on this well-determined artistic strategy to take a form that is outmoded and seems vaguely impossible and try to utilize it. How would it look if you chose to do an allegorical representation in a contemporary sense? Where could we find a viable allegorical language? That is another reason the work became a performance (as opposed to sculpture) because of their ability to monumentalize.

Unfolding a Process

Figure 34 Detail from “10 Common Misunderstandings About the WTO” (1999). © WTO.

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Annual performance rituals (feast day parades, pageant plays, running of the bulls) serve as cultural anchors to reify community values. George and Jae had pointed out that the WTO seemed to lack distinct cultural community practices. Grand scale multi-media performances, such as the halftime show at the Superbowl or opening ceremonies of the Olympic games, were among our reference points as rituals that operate at the national and supra-national level to monumentalize both an event and an entity. George was also forwarding us exchanges with Jae about the project during this prototyping phase. In retrospect, we saw that this was a process by which Jae was working through her analysis by thinking through the design process with us. She was offering up particular images and ideas for us to work from, and then we were all engaged in a process of interpretation that revolved around what the installation should look like, what it should say, how it should operate. But we weren’t just ruminating in the abstract because we needed her input to solve design problems. As a text for the performance, we latched onto material from a pamphlet that the WTO had published entitled “10 Common Misunderstandings about the WTO. (Figure 34)” We were trying to think about how we could create three [reduced from our original five] distinct segments that grappled with different aspects of the WTO—what it was and what it might become. In the pamphlets we found these very succinct phrases: “No Decision is Taken Unless Everyone Agrees” . . . “Everyone Must Follow the Same Rules” and “Allow Trade to Flow More Freely.”

I like the idea of multiples. It seems like one of the things that came out in my plane conversation was the idea of the potentiality of massive amounts of commodities (he was referring specifically to petroleum and IRAN) but I hadn’t thought of the economic risk involved with these transactions . . . or the sense in which these exchanges “want” to happen and get funneled through the rule systems . . . I think that would make the multiples/reserves very interesting and the kraft paper boxes are nice—a simple, sculptural, basic (no sanding involved).

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Could the commodities enter the negotiation space and be arranged and then removed? Like one actor places five or six and then they are removed and replaced by another and then the third . . . no mutual touching rule? Or maybe we should just say exchange and let the “rule” be the confined space and objects. I wonder if we should just wait on that until later in the iteration. We could make craft boxes work at many scales which is really effective . . . I can imagine a quite large one at some point . . . or opening one up and it is filled with soil and plants or flowers . . . LUKE CANTARELLA (E-MAIL), MAY 5, 2013

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Those phrases in and of themselves were very evocative. They spoke to us as organizing principles for the dance segments. And although they were written to be complementary, it was clear that they pointed to internal conflicts within the institution. This directly informed our concern with activating the spectator/subject relationship through the use of multiples that might borrow a technique common to designing for social change

that involves voting processes (whether literal or symbolic). In the versions, we attempted an articulation of three futures for the WTO each articulated upon its own aesthetic terms. Not just one vision, one dance piece, but multiples. Once we started articulating this, we developed a chart with three columns: one for the musical language, one for the visual language, and the last for the quality of movement. At that point, we had a document that was defined enough that I could work in my mode as a set designer to create specifications for an appropriate space. Knowing that we had three distinct aesthetic languages to define also meant that they could relate to each other. It became clear that we should build a set that could be altered or torn apart. So the first set determined what came afterward. It was a procedure from one to the next. But actually the third was quite different.

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While designers can work from generalized or categorical information, dancers rely on more detailed instructions often organized in a score, a form of dance writing relating to movement concepts rather than being based in story-telling or interior psychological states (Millard 2015). The score articulated a series of discrete prompts, with rules and action statements typical in improvisation to build phrase work. We had structured much of the action around the physical exchanges of commodities—in our case the movement of boxes filled with sand between and among dancers. The prompts outlined the specific conditions for these exchanges intended to structure the way each segment would evolve. Prompts looked like this: Objective: Establish order. Rule #1: Only two traders in the Interior space at one time. Rule #2: Everyone must follow. Objective: Exchange commodities one at a time. Rules #1 & #2 still apply. Rule #3: Sand must remain in the box (avoid spilling). Rule #4: One gesture is established to be used consistently (throughout all segments) to indicate that an exchange is complete.

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We hadn’t fully decided on the content before the shooting and then we radically changed our ideas during the filming itself. Where did the ideas initially come from? It arose from email from Jae where she was reflecting on her research and the nature of trade. She referenced Moby Dick as a source of metaphor and images and sent us the passage describing the open seas in which there are no rules. Trade happens according to the current (nature) and is inflected by normalized trade routes that have been in existence since people began to trade with one another over the seas. She seemed to propose that there might be some way in which the WTO was hoping to make itself redundant.

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In this ideal future, trade between countries would flow without the intervention of politics . . . And be based on “natural forces.” It was right around the same time that a shipping container spilled hundreds of thousands of rubber duckies out into the ocean. They were traveling the world on ocean currents. We were fascinated by this image/idea that a very emblematic commodity made in China was being distributed efficiently around the world on a global network of the tides. So in the final section, commodities were set free. We initially thought this would be filmed on the soundstage, but changed our mind and decided to shoot it on the water and let the props actually drift away. There were no humans at all in that section.

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One of the givens we set in the piece was the transformation of the performance set. During the first section it was enclosed—a “neutral” white box made from felt-covered flats—and filled with white “commodity” boxes filled with different colored sand. In the second section the box split open to and was intersected with a mound of organic material—made from shredded rubber tires. In the third section, we left the “studio” environment completely and filmed our commodity boxes flowing in natural bodies of water.

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It was interesting and useful along the way having to describe and translate this project into something recognizable by our design team. We had decided that we needed a cinematographer (DP), a lighting designer, a sound designer, dancers, and an editor. As we brought each of those people onboard we had to talk about our impetus for the project, our vision, the format that it might play out in, and how we hoped that people at the WTO would interact within. Each time was an opportunity to work and rework those ideas. When you engage in collaborative processes, they naturally give rise to distinct forms of communication (documents, images, sketches, scores, texts, etc.). One has to reformulate concepts again and again, like cooking a dish over and over with iterations for each step of translation from one zone of expertise to another. First, a language amongst ourselves and then another to talk to Victor and Maria and yet a different way of explaining the project with Jukka Piitulainen, the facilities manager. Then all our individual designers who had different ways of hearing and non-verbal languages in which they were cognizant. These translations are often construed as barriers to collaboration, but we found that all of these barriers became extremely productive parts of the process. In overcoming them we were learning more about the kind of project we were doing. So you worked from a leftover from an ethnographic project, a loose-end. And with some reference and sensitivity to the ethnography (that these collaborators could not access unless you were coaching them) made the work. But the central point here is to just bring in collaborators with the needed expertise and allow the project to develop—to give over control. Yes. Give over control and see what happens.

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Figure 35 Sketches for Trade is Sublime (2013).

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Figure 37 Still from “Everyone Has to Follow the Same Rules” (2013); Jesse Zaritt.

Figure 38 Still from “Everyone Has to Follow the Same Rules” (2013); Kristen Schnittker and Jesse Zaritt.

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Figure 36 Still from “Everyone Has to Follow the Same Rules” (2013); Nami Yamamoto and Kirsten Schnittker.

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Inner publics LC:

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It can be tempting to look at the art object and say “Oh, that is the intervention,” but with these encounters, the object is actually not that important. It’s the whole field of things that happen surrounding the object, what the object does in relation to the people there and the way it radiates out; sometimes directly, in the ways that we could witness and sometimes in a more indirect fashion. Finding engagement through a radiating field of effects . . . Something we’ve talked about before as needing incentives. Yes. It relies on making our informants co-collaborators in the piece and giving them control in editing and approvals. As an artwork, we hope that the work can be instrumentalized by the institutions that we are engaging with—even if those are institutions of power. These works rely on situated expertise and alignment with those concerns as opposed to attempting to maintain a critical remove based on the expertise of an artist. At least an artist in the avant-garde tradition who tells us more than we can tell ourselves about our cultural values and psychology. Wodiczko, the Polish artist who works in large-scale video projections (Figure 39), calls this the inner public who mediate the work. In his context, there is usually a secondary public in mind as well, perhaps some intangible like “the art world” that becomes an additional receiver. He relies on the inner public to provide meaningful approvals of his work as well as help him co-create it in a very real sense since they become the performers. In his case, the form (video) seems relatively stable. It is the content and way it is deployed in the urban landscape that is co-constituted with his inner public. If there is a tension between the needs of his inner public and his legitimacy with the larger art market, he clearly preferences the local and direct effects. Placing allegiance towards an inner public means that the work must be legible to them.

Dear Luke,

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Apologies for getting back to you only today, we have been overwhelmed with the visit of the Indonesians and the preparations for MC9 this week. Thanks for sharing the video you have prepared, I have reviewed it and it is okay.

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Attached you will find the Spanish and French translations of the Trade is Sublime cards. On Monday morning we will be sending a message to all staff with the text of the Trade is Sublime Card in all 3 languages and placing the box in the atrium. I will send the additional paragraph for translation today. Hopefully, they will be ready soon. Please let me know if there is anything else that you need from us at this stage. Wishing you a lovely weekend! Maria Pérez-Esteve, July 6, 2013

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Do you see this same tension existing in ethnography between a populist strain that has obligations to its informants and the legitimization that comes from the “write-up” of the project and the aesthetics of professional craft? All research relies on permissions and trust, but a project like this tends to explode that process and make it highly visible like what we faced with the signage. We submitted the text to Maria [Esteve-Perez] that we wanted to include as didactics alongside with the installation. There was kind of explanatory element of the piece. She required that all signage be translated into the three official languages of the WTO (or the two others besides English). For us, that revealed the bureaucratic system in place that highlighted the value of transparency, which was one of the issues that early on we had talked about trying to grapple with. They had a strong commitment transparency. It was one of their mandates. Making something linguistically available to speakers of other languages is part of that transparency. That was made very concrete to us in that process.

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Figure 39 Krzysztof Wodiczko, The Tijuana Project (1999), Centro Cultural de Tijuana, Mexico.

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Not only did we need to present it in three languages, we needed to have officially sanctioned WTO translators do the translation for us. So that could be clear that it met their standards. It doesn’t seem that there was much resistance there. No. Maria was more concerned about how we communicated the event to the community. Although they had granted permission for us to operate in that space, they didn’t want the installation (or invitations to a reception) to seem to be under the auspices of the Secretariat. “Views expressed are not necessarily the opinions of . . .” Exactly. It had to appear independent and clearly externally funded. But at the same time, we wanted to keep them on the hook for approving the content by showing them rough cuts of the films. This position seems interesting to me. When describing the project, I found myself struggling with expressing under whose authority I operated. We certainly weren’t creating work about the WTO from the outside (as critique), nor was I really comfortable thinking of the project as a commission by the WTO. Which it certainly wasn’t . . . Perhaps that is the best way to express the goal—getting them to adopt the piece as their own. At the same time, they had a whole support system in place like any big institution or organization to address facilities issues. That put us in direct contact with the facilities manager Jukka, who for whatever reason was charmed to participate. Did you know Jukka during your first time in the WTO?

Our primary gatekeepers for the work were a deputy in the D-G’s Office, Victor do Prado, who has been closely involved with the art acquisition and restoration projects in the CWR, his associate, Maria Perez-Esteve, who handled the majority of the e-mail communications, and our macher in the organization, Jukka Piitulainen, a Finnish facilities manager would eventually join in creation of the installation by fabricating titles for the propositions using the same style of name plates used for official delegates.

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No. And Jukka presents this classic portrait of the low-status guy who actually has a lot of power . . . . . . who knows everybody and has an incredible amount of agency within the organization. The guy who knows how to change your copier toner. The guy who is down in the basement making everything run and hum. He was very game to help us figure out solutions about the best place to position the installation. During my first visit to the site, he was the best guide to the spaces. Unlike Maria or Victor—who actually spent most of the time in their offices or meetings, Jukka knew the life of the building. He knew what spaces people congregated in at what times and for how long. We wanted to install somewhere that was a common

Figure 40 Installing Trade is Sublime at the WTO (2013); Christine Hegel and Jukka Piitulainen.

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thoroughfare for visibility, but not so highly trafficked that people would be disinclined to linger. He was the main person that I had to be able to explain the work to in order to capitalize on his expertise. When we were installing the printed titles cards for each of “proposals” that derived from the WTO pamphlet, it was his suggestion to re-create those signs in the exact format that each member’s country name and title is displayed in the general assembly meetings using his acrylic engraving tool. He went down in the basement to produce those pieces for us. He contributed to the aesthetics of the work by coming up with this idea that there would be a nice unity there (Figure 40). That became how we titled the pieces. One of the things we were concerned with early on in the design process was how to create a durational relationship with people at WTO with the installation. We didn’t want to feel like something that just showed up one day and then disappeared the next. We wanted to prepare the ground for receiving the work. We went through many versions of this. At one point we thought we’d show the videos in a three-day rotation—so that each day the proposal would change. One of the techniques we used also related to translation. We created cards that asked different country mission representatives to translate the phrase “Trade is Sublime” into their native

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Figure 41 Trade is Sublime, translation cards (2013).

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language. Tagalog, Urdu, etc. . . . Although there are three languages of the WTO that are official and privileged, there are hundreds of languages that are used in the building, because each country carries at least one and sometimes very many languages into the organization. We made small cards that we distributed and that could then be dropped back off in a box that Jukka crafted for us like a mail slot (Figure 41). This was a kind of participatory ruse. We didn’t necessarily need those translations for any reason. We just wanted to put people in the position of having to do the work of thinking hard about the phrase. What we do mean by “Trade is Sublime”? Of course, that’s what you do when you translate. You evaluate. Is this particularly what they mean by that or something else?

Installation Trade is Sublime was posited as a “proposal for a monument to trade” in the vein of an architectural design competition. Viewers were invited to consider which of the three proposals was, in their opinion, the most accurate depiction of an idealized trade regime—as framed in the obscure and aesthetic terms of dance circumventing a kind of rational futurescaping. We see this as one way of designing an intervention that is embedded with an open incompleteness that lures our interlocutors into a process of co-design.

Figure 42 Detail of Trade is Sublime (2013).

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Figure 43 Detail of Trade is Sublime (2013).

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Figure 44 Didactic panel from Trade is Sublime (2013).

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Figure 45 Detail of Trade is Sublime (2013).

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Reception LC:

Since I had to return home after the first few days of the exhibition, do you two want to talk about what occurred after I left? What kind of impact did Trade is Sublime have? What other kinds of encounters, besides those with the intermediaries we worked with during the installation, did it provoke? There were some unresolved questions about what to do next once the installation was in. Essentially, we struggled to conceptualize how to capture the effect of the project. This is something that Victor actually anticipated in one of his emails approving the project. It’s not necessarily self-critique, but an admission that sometimes it is hard to anticipate what we might need or find valuable from an encounter. What are its potentials and how might the piece pose new questions, frameworks or imaginaries to us as researchers that we could then try and work with?

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. . . of course, I leave aside the type of reaction you, as anthropologists, will be able (or not) to gather from those who will watch the video. —Victor (via email), March 4, 2013

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Do you think some kind of “capture” was necessary, or was it enough just to extend the project to an outer public? Perhaps, but this does not necessarily happen in a direct manner. For Jae, the project opened this window of return for her at the organization in which she could leverage her pre-existing relationships in a new way. The project helped destabilize their perception of the present state of play at WTO by asking them to respond to possible futures. She had a series of meetings with delegates that Christine and I attended. She also received emails back from some delegates who had seen the installation. One was fascinating; let me read it: “I was confused that WTO as a topic has anything to do with art. Unfortunately we are technicians, even at the ambassador level. We are not even looking at leaves but holes in leaves. I hope you respect the code of discretion in not reporting my name or [his country]. It is tricky, opinions.” Each of those sentences speaks volumes about the complicated relationship between delegates and the WTO. So Jae was able to tap into what the installation percolated through these kinds of exchanges. Our other strategy to look at these aftereffects was a series of invited “coffees” that brought together different constituencies from the organization to discuss the project. These coffees evolved from an initial idea of a reception that Jae would facilitate in a very formal way by sending invitations to each of the missions. Would that be normal for social events at the WTO? Are there wine and cheese receptions? I don’t think the WTO has many social events. The old WTO actually had no space for social events. There was a cafeteria and those endless hallways all with markedly open doors, but it had no social space. There were transit spaces, but no tradition of having receptions that we

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could easily fit into. And Victor had strong feelings that the newly enclosed atrium should remain a neutral space. But what was revealed through Jae’s effort to hold a reception for the installation was that the Secretariat was not in a position to host a formal event like this. Maria was not allowed to send out invitations on behalf of the WTO. Doing so would override their mandate; the Secretariat is supposed to work in service of the WTO members, not assert any kind of independent agenda. So, in the end, we were unable to host a big reception, only to contact smaller units within the Secretariat and invite them to have coffee with us. The reception-that-wasn’t was a reassertion or rediscovery of the relationship between the WTO Secretariat and the missions. We were able to see this clearly because it facilitated our failure! The coffee meetings were tepid; those who came were largely young and short-term employees. When we asked them to reflect on the installation, they tended to express the idea that the “principles” that the films took up—No Decision is Taken Until Everyone Agrees, etc.— were good, were admirable. They were not particularly interested in a kind of critical engagement. They were true believers in a sense. One thing the coffee meetings revealed is that the WTO very much lacked normal forms of sociality that one might find in almost any other organization. This was so evident in our meeting with a man in the publications department—let’s call him Julien. He reached out to us directly and asked to meet. He found Trade is Sublime intriguing. So we spent about an hour talking with him on the patio of the cafeteria and he told us a story that was quite affecting. He had been working at the WTO for a few months perhaps and was slated to attend a meeting with others in his department one morning. In an effort to be gracious, maybe to cultivate those relationships that were still new, he brought a large tray of pastries to the meeting to share with everyone. No one ate a single pastry. He expressed such a sense of dismay, of embarrassment, like he had entirely misjudged how that would be interpreted. The way he told the story to us, the fact that he even shared it with us, suggested that the formality of the institution and its actors were in some ways suffocating. Yes, like his humanity was not well-suited for such a sterile, austere place, with its formal procedures. It is not a place of relationships but of rules and roles. And why did he tell us? Did TiS provoke this confession directly? Hard to say. Maybe he sensed that we were insinuating something about the institution that he experienced directly in a moment like the rejected pastry incident.

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6 A Workshop Model

In this chapter, we explicate a studio-workshop model for facilitating collaboration between designers and anthropologists. Although it makes intuitive sense to many scholars to experiment with non-logocentric strategies in their field research, analysis, and teaching, there is not currently an established set of practices for thinking through making as part of inquiry in anthropology. In our studio, we have relied on workshopping both as a method to develop full-scale projects, but also as a stand-alone tool to bring together scholars, designers, and artists into a collaborative practice. As scholars, we reciprocally exchange written work for critique during symposia and seminars and through the peer review process; this is our version of workshopping a text, and, while useful, puts engagement with works in progress at a remove. What if, on the other hand, our habit was to inhabit one another’s propositions deeply, in real time? Could we engage experientially and experimentally with another’s data and emergent interpretations, rather than just ruminate upon them at a safe distance? Could this be undertaken in a spirit of true collaboration rather than positioning? Could workshopping provide a feasible alternative to peer review as a way of testing the validity and rigor of anthropological research? We are interested in how the studio-workshop might be an alternate frame for engaging with the research of other scholars outside the established structures of roundtables, symposia, and formal conference talks. Workshops that are “studio-based” and take cues from design and art production move us closer to a more original and invigorating sense of the workshop as a place for storing tools and materials and undertaking projects that are too messy for other environments. A workshop is a designated space for fixing, inventing, forging, and crafting; where materials are wrought into objects or, in our case, where ideas can become things and in which these things can be altered or refined and retranslated back into more generative ideas. Mette Kjaersgaard (2013), who has worked in design anthropology in both industrial and academic contexts, argues that design-based workshops rely on the transformation of what she calls “knowledge pieces.” She analyzes workshops for a project entitled Body Games, which was focused on transforming ethnographic data on Danish children’s free play into designs for a digital playground that would promote physical activity, during which teams of designers presented initial sketches of ideas to one another. These posters, she argues, were “transitional objects facilitating the move from individual—and predominantly intangible—research knowledge to tangible and collective design material . . . they were like liminal objects mediating between knowledge and design, present and future, as well as between different knowledge traditions” (Kjaersgaard 2013: 58). The idea of

Figure 46 Speculative Object (2017) Photo: Sari Pietikäinen.

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producing “knowledge pieces” that initially magnetize heterogeneous ideas and begin to take on a life of their own is a useful way to imagine how workshopping can generate new forms of localized knowledge; they externalize ideas in order to allow multiple people to reckon with and refine them. The fact that workshops are themselves liminal spaces in which participants take on temporary roles in relation to one another for a temporary undertaking is part of how they foment liminal “knowledge pieces.” We have implemented design-based workshops with the general aim of undertaking collaborative materialization as a lateral analytic process, but also with a more dedicated aim: to develop productive encounters that can be implemented in the field as part of ongoing research. Our subterranean aim, perhaps, is to remake the normative modality for scholarly engagement (highly discursive, textual, critical) into engagements that are cross-disciplinary, creative, iterative, and material. The workshop does not entail vested collaboration in the field, but in an intermediary space in which fellow travelers can worry alongside one another in a shared analytic process, either early in a project or long after the research has published results. The suggestions below are based on the insights we have gained through five formal workshops with anthropologists and designers, each of which focused on current work by anthropologists that also participated in the workshop. The first of these, hosted at the ArtCenter College of Design (ArtCenter) by Elizabeth Chin of the Media Design Practices (MDP) program in July of 2014, focused on an emerging project being undertaken by anthropologist Justin Richland of the University of Chicago. We refer to this workshop as The Stern v. Marshall Archive (SvMA). The second workshop was hosted at the University of California, Irvine, with support from the Center for Ethnography and the Department of Drama in March of 2015 and focused on Doug Holmes’ work in Economy of Words. This workshop was titled Central Banks, Central Bankers and the Idea of a Public Currency (Central Banks). The third workshop was a two-part workshop in the spring of 2016 sponsored by the Center for Ethnography at UCI and held in Brooklyn, NY, for developing Yes, We’re Open (YWO) (discussed in Chapter  3). The fourth workshop was at the invitation of Lindsay Bell and Sari Pietikäinen at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), focusing on data collected by Pietikäinen and her co-researchers for a local municipality to investigate communication issues among staff and Alzheimer’s patients in public nursing homes. This workshop was entitled Human-Centered Language and Good Aging (HCLGA). The fifth workshop, also by invitation at the University of Jyväskylä, took up emerging questions in a multi-faceted, multi-investigator project called Cold Rush focused on Arctic economies, identity, and language. We address six aspects of planning and implementing a studio-workshop:

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2 setting up a studio to facilitate materialization; 3 preparing a design brief that sets out the overarching goals; 4 planning and implementing warm-up exercises; 5 developing prompts and constraints that allow for iteration; and 6 facilitating and documenting the workshop.

One obvious strategy, but worth articulating, is to create a schedule to share with participants so they know what to expect throughout the day or over the course of several days. In general, we start with introductions and warm-ups, move into the presentation of the design brief, followed by a series of directed activities by smaller teams (2–4 people) of collaborators, and conclude with sharing sketches, models, or prototypes. This basic structure may be repeated multiple times as part of an iterative approach, depending on time constraints and aims, and could include field trips or observational tasks.

Participants and expectations

1 Richland had completed a very successful first project on tribal courts in Arizona; this research is the focus of his book Arguing with Tradition: The Language of Law in Hopi Tribal Court (University of Chicago, 2008) and additional articles.

A Workshop Model

Our first workshop, the Stern v. Marshall Archive, grew out of a request by linguistic anthropologist Justin Richland to experiment with design strategies to help him determine whether to pursue a new project.1 He was interested in the complex legal and social issues surrounding landmark 2011 Stern v. Marshall decision in which the Supreme Court voided certain powers of the US bankruptcy courts. The decision, with wide-ranging implications for wealthy estates in the US, arose from extensive and contentious litigation over the estate of J. Howard Marshall III between his son, E. Pierce Marshall, and his third wife, Anna Nicole Smith. Although a linguistic anthropologist, Justin felt that discourse analysis was insufficient for grappling with the enormity of the case and for making broader socio-legal connections. In other instances, we have reached out to scholars whose work intrigued us and proposed to design a workshop focused on their research under the auspices of the UCI Center for Ethnography. In all cases, the first step is to identify a time and place for the workshop and begin to identify possible participants who are interested in and available for this kind of collaborative undertaking. Elizabeth Chin, in her Lab for Speculative Ethnology, was hosting graduate students during the summer and was willing to allow us to both use the Media Design studio spaces and invite the students to participate in the workshop. The students would bring with them into the workshop design training and technical skills (in UX design, urban planning, and other fields), as well as an interest in applying design thinking to social issues (Figure 47). Why would designers allocate time away from their own projects to collaborate with anthropologists? In the case of Chin’s visiting graduate students, our workshop was an opportunity to put their skills to work as part of a team, and preparation for the collaborative work they were preparing to do post-graduation at non-profits and design firms. But we have also worked with professional designers who were much more advanced in their fields. It is not insignificant that ethnography has become a curiosity for designers in the past twenty years or so. Many designers want to know how to do ethnography and think like ethnographers. Designers are often working with other designers and may be intrigued by the opportunity to work with social scientists, and can have a stake in cultivating relationships with ethnographers that might be useful at some point down the line. Designers who have participated in workshops with us have certainly expressed that

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Figure 47 Stern v. Marshall Archive workshop (2014).

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collaborating in this way feeds back into their own practice, and designers always need “wicked problems” to which they can apply their skills. We have drafted as few as one designer (for an initial mini-workshop for YWO ) and as many as six designers and artists and six anthropologists (for CBCB ) to collaborate in a workshop setting. We have tended to tap our networks for participants, and their incentives for joining us have varied—the opportunity to work with people they would not normally get a chance to work with, the potential to have their own work similarly “workshopped” in the future, or a sense of curiosity about or commitment to multi-modal, experimental, or cross-disciplinary processes. We have not offered honoraria for participation, but do not rule it out as an incentive. Yet for scholars and graduate students who work too often in isolation, opportunities to connect, intellectually and creatively are often incentive enough. And unlike symposia that gather scholars whose research relates in geographical, topical, or historical ways, it can be generative to gather with others whose work is quite different than one’s own. Workshops offer one way to address the long-standing interest in inter- or transdisciplinary collaboration in the academy that often gets hobbled by epistemological or methodological barriers. We have put out a call for participants to anthropology departments and design programs and by posting on design and scholarly listservs, and even through Facebook. Figure 48 is a sample “Call for Participants,” which we used to recruit designers for one of our workshops.

Figure 48 Call for designers, Central Bankers workshop (2015). A Workshop Model

Although our workshop attendees have primarily been academics and designers of various stripes, we believe it is critical to the work to include inner publics—interlocutors, members of the community, stakeholders—into the workshop process, in ways that are already routine amongst entities involved in participatory design (c.f. Brandt and Messeter 2004; Chin 2017; Le Dantec and

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DiSalvio 2013; Smith et  al. 2017). Just as anthropologists have increasingly experimented with bringing interlocutors into the design of research, data collection, and even writing, they can tap the creative energies and motivations of interlocutors to involve them in materialization, speculation, and other design practices. If the ideal is to include non-academics and people with radically different kinds of expertise in workshops, questions of legibility of language and of process arise. The structure of a workshop should engage heterogeneous participants on their terms without requiring a specialized (scholarly) language. Finding participants and assessing what their roles in a workshop might be is simultaneously a way of thinking about how to deconstruct the hierarchies that remain baked into producing anthropological knowledge. Anthropologists already working in design fields are often mediating between design experts and publics in workshop settings, and their experiences suggest generative forms of friction that can arise among participants with different kinds of expertise. In their project Digital Natives, anthropologists Smith and Otto sought to explore “‘the digital’ as an emergent cultural and social phenomenon” (Smith and Otto 2016: 23) in conjunction with research on interaction design in the context of developing and curating a new exhibit for museums. They brought teenagers into the project both as field researchers/ curators, and to collaborate with interaction designers in a studio environment to develop ideas for the exhibit. As they point out, these two groups were sometimes quite at odds with each other as prototypes were developed, and Smith’s role as anthropological facilitator entailed identifying points of friction and insisting on dialogic engagement between collaborators. In other words, the dissonance between these groups that occurred in the materialization process was a lens into different interpretations of the digital lives that could feed back into the design process.

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Figure 49 List of Knots and Dos, Central Bankers workshop (2015).

It is often a good idea to give collaborators some general guidance or ground rules upon which to operate. For example, we created a “dos and don’ts” list, which we sent to Central Banks participants a few days before the workshop commenced to articulate the rules of engagement (Figure  49). These guidelines point to the idea that workshopping in this mode is a form of collaborative analysis that relies on an unusual toolbox of strategies to provoke new insights. We wanted to encourage collaborators to focus on listening and discovery rather than argumentation. The kind of debate that scholars often engage in precludes the lateral thinking or teleportation that is central value of the workshop. In some cases, participants may need to be reminded to allow space for improvisational play in which planning does not need to precede action and evaluation focuses on the interim subject.

Preparing the studio

A Workshop Model

Due to the open frameworks of ethnography by design, there are many forms that the ideal workshop space could take. Unlike a science lab that is outfitted to meet the precise needs of an experiment, a design workshop requires a makerspace where there is an array of tools and materials for more spontaneous experimentation. Ideally, a space should be geared around the design disciplines of the maker-participants of your workshop. Graphic designers may want large rolls of paper and Sharpie markers, scenographers need model-making materials, computers, and printers, etc. We have outfitted our workshops with materials sourced from dollar stores alongside more specialized materials such as soldering equipment, sewing machines, clay, and matte knives. Hosting a workshop in a space that is relatively large (or has multiple adjacent rooms) and has worktables is ideal for shifting back and forth between small group and large group interactions. We held the initial session of HCLGA workshop in the former gardener’s residence at the University of Jyväskylä. The house had both a larger dining room where we could gather for general discussion and the presentation of design ideas and prototypes, and a number of smaller sitting rooms where teams could work privately. These rooms, where participants gathered on old sofas or on the floor, was akin to the domestic-institutional setting of the pensionärhusen, elder-care homes, on which the workshop was focused. The research questions they grappled with—how were these elder care residences like homes, and how were they like institutions, and how might interior design ameliorate the tension between these two types of spaces?—were relatable to workshop participants in this temporary studio space. Although finding a workshop space that relates to the research in focus is not always possible, it is useful to consider the way space might help participants feel alert and sensitive to the ethnographic material. Numerous universities and communities have established makerspaces, fabrication labs (fablabs), or collaboration spaces, such as Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK), which could be well-suited for workshopping. Rarer are the examples of purpose-built labs for ethnographic collaboration such as as Chin’s lab at ArtCenter, which “brings together designers and anthropologists to engage in serious play.” (Chin 2015). The lab is equipped with large work tables, sewing machines and small electronics. The goals of the workshop and the design mediums that best suit both the

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goals and the skills of the participants, will shape the tools and materials to have available. The challenge in a nascent project can be discovering what the interface might be. Ideally, a workshop results in design proposals or prototypes with some level detail and nuance, even if workshop participants are not experienced makers. Our design speculations have often begun with simple phrases, titles or punning wordplay that attempt, clumsily, to form the image of object. When workshopping SvMA, for instance, we generated a series of thirty succinct proposals, including: the Supreme Court of the Block (a very local court of parallel justice that would readjudicate cases heard in front of SCOTUS), Justice Blinders (a set of nine personalized VR visors are designed for each Supreme Court Justice that present gender and race neutral avatars of court advocates), and so forth. On their own, the concepts can be trite. However, having the tools and materials available to carry through ideas to the model or prototype stage involves resolving numerous technical challenges in order to achieve material specificity in the design. What would Justice Blinders actually look like? What would they be made of? What would the wearer see? How would they fit securely to the head? Would they be identical or personalized for each Justice? etc.

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Figure 50 Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology, Suits of Inquiry (2015). Photo: Elizabeth Chin.

Creating a design brief Because an ethnography by design approach is problem-generating and problem-solving, we have framed our workshops around design briefs, which set out a problem or problems to be solved. Traditionally, when designers meet with clients, the client presents them with a brief that serves as a reference point. It lays out specification, timelines, and deliverables.2 Designers are used to working in an information-poor environment; a design brief may be relatively general on some aspects of the design and specific on others (like a topographic map provides detailed information about land formations but will leave out information found on political maps). In the more open space of ethnography by design, the brief is not a map but a method of wayfinding. It guides the participants in the workshop in drawing the map as they follow it and in setting the problem to be solved. The brief is the “what” without the “why.” To stimulate collaborative analysis in a workshop, a researcher has to frame their research in a way that creates openings for others. A design brief for a workshop should generate opportunities for participants to offer lateral interpretations or to propose alternate questions that reveal nascent or unrecognized possibilities in a project. While it is clear that collaborators need a closeness to the

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A design brief for a new brand logo, for instance, might include key bits of information about brand identity and values and target audience. These specifications are typically minimally described; a designer’s value comes in clarifying what the client wants based on the brief.

A Workshop Model

Figure 51 Design Prompt, Stern v. Marshall Archive workshop (2014).

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ethnography for ideation to be successful, how to achieve that intimacy is an open question. The workshop space is an experiment with closeness across disciplinary boundaries. In what manner does one become sufficiently informed by an ethnography to start a design process? What is required for sufficiency? A workshop like this is not the place for an anthropologist to explain everything about their research. We have found it most generative if the researcher presents a very short background on their material, exposing a question or nagging tension, and a “core sample” of raw data that can serve as a springboard for collaborators: an intriguing anecdote, a set of images, a document, part of an interview transcript, and so forth. A good brief often includes both the raw and the cooked—“raw” facets of the data that are compelling to the ethnographer, and some “cooked” aspects of their analysis that establish the frameworks for problem-setting. This gives workshop participants a way to see into the research while circumventing the detailed analysis typical in research presentations that might over-determine or shut down the design process. For our Central Banks workshop, we suggested several strategies for generating a design brief to scholar Doug Holmes. For the first, we asked him to describe three significant “scenes” from his fieldwork that were key to how his analysis developed. We asked him not to connect these scenes or offer an explanation. The second strategy was to describe and trace the origin story of one metaphor that had become a focal point in his analysis. When did he start using the metaphor; what sparked it? The third focused on future-oriented propositions in his book; we asked him to imagine a tool that would be ideal for studying the future of central banks and describe to us what such a tool would need to expose or accomplish. Lastly, we suggested diagramming a system, including portals and obstructions, that represented his trajectory as a field researcher at a particular point in time. Our aim was to give Doug a series of options that offered him a way to see something new or hidden in his research that we could explore during the workshop. For other strategies for developing design briefs, see the Appendix.

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Warm-ups

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New collaborations, even with people you know well, are often fraught with the anticipation of miscommunication and disconnect. Different understandings of what counts as expertise and how to measure success, failure, or contribution can all be exacerbated by a working model that is atypical. In a sense, collaborators not only need to build a basic level of trust in and rapport with one another but also need to become amenable to unfamiliar thinking and making processes. In our experience, and drawing on theatre-making and classroom teaching strategies, warm-up exercises help cultivate rapport at the start of a workshop. We have experimented with a number of games that entail playful, spontaneous decision-making and have found that they generally disarm, lower the stakes of collaboration, and create a sense of shared purpose. For this reason, the warm-up games we suggest do not ask people to share anything personal or display expertise. For example, at the start of the Yes, We’re Open workshop, we played a warm-up game that used some of the photographs Shonna Trinch and Ed Snajdr had collected in the course of their research

on storefront signage in Brooklyn. We printed out multiple copies of fifty discrete photos and gave each team of collaborators (each team was comprised of three to four people, with a mix of designers and anthropologists) a set. Their instructions were simply to look through the photos together and make piles of similar photos, based on criteria that they determined as a group. Once they had grouped their photos, we instructed each team to sub-group their photos using a taxonomic logic. As a team, they talked through which similarities were broader than others, and how they might subdivide further. Although every team had been given the same photos to classify, each team classified in radically different ways and had a chance to explain their internal logic to the other teams. It works well as a warm-up because it is simple, generates conversation, and cultivates a sense of shared experience. An exercise like this can in some ways be identity forming (in a temporary sense); the team begins to operate as an autonomous unit among other groups and to have a shared stake in the game. This pile-sorting and taxonomy game is one of a number that might work. During Central Banks and HCLGA workshops, we opened with a game called “Build a Trap,” inspired by Sean Donahue from ArtCenter. In this game, groups are given a collection of random objects from a dollar store and asked to design a device to capture an object, a creature, or an intangible thing (like love or memories). Simplified versions of the design collaboration exercises presented in the section below can also be used as warmups. See the Appendix for additional games and as a source of inspiration for developing warm-up exercises.

Prompts and constraints

A Workshop Model

Formulating and working on design prompts has typically been the next phase in our workshop process. Design thinking relies on tangible objectives in order to activate ingenuity. The prompt is a way of delimiting one’s design objectives that can then be materialized in a session of collaborative making. The framing of the prompt will vary depending on the workshop environment and goals. The prompt might ask participants to solve problems through the design of environments or spaces, objects, tools, processes, or services. During our Central Banks workshop, designers and anthropologists worked directly from the brief materials to develop their own prompts, to which they responded with a designed solution. Artists Jesse Jackson and Simon Penny and anthropologists Lindsay Bell and Colin Ford wrote a prompt that required their team to design a device that would make the predictive and retrospective temporalities of central bankers visible. A central bank like the US Federal Reserve has a two-year predictive window when forecasting the economy. During their quarterly announcements, they also update and revise the economic data from the prior two years. As a way to make these predictive temporalities visible, the team responded to their prompt by designing a nine-channel video display that would simultaneously show declarations past and future. One screen would air forecasts of the present made two years in the past, adjacent to a screen showing forecasts one year old, next to a screen showing current predictions, and so forth. They presented their design concept in form of sketches and a rough mock-up in paper.

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Self-generating the prompt can be overwhelming for collaborators unsure as to what is expected of them and what it means to design responses to social questions. For the Yes, We’re Open workshop, we decided it would be better to provide a basic prompt because many of our participants were designers who were not familiar with the anthropological literature on “place-making” and gentrification. Based on a prior workshop and conversations with Snajdr and Trinch, it was clear that the prompt would focus on designing a storefront that would interpolate and bring together different communities of residents. We generated six sub-prompts (see Figure 52 for examples) that narrowed down what the designers should focus on in terms of product or exchange model. Teams could choose two to begin brainstorming and eventually generated design ideas in response to one prompt. At their most basic, prompts structure a dynamic collaborative process in a workshop setting. At their most fully realized, they are the building blocks to design a kind of provocation or intervention in the field. The prompts frame sessions of critical making that are followed by sharing and discussion. Ideas that seem to generate interest could be further prototyped or tried out in subsequent work sessions.

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Figure 52 Design Briefs, Yes, We’re Open workshop (2014).

During a workshop, we often ask participants to think in a highly imaginative manner; “to use fiction to explore social facts” (Chin 2015). And while the objects, spaces, tools, and devices being created are often speculative, imaginary things that do not exist in the world as we know it, it is useful to consider under what kind of technological or material constraints they could potentially operate. Design in the real world is always operating within economic, conceptual, or practical constraints that limit and shape the possibilities. Numerous design disciplines frame success around achieving optimizations within these constraints such as the concept of highest and best use (HBU) in urban planning. In zones of speculative design, performance, and art production such constraints may not naturally exist. They must be invented. Genres such as speculative fiction specialize around the rewriting or alteration of constraints through the alteration of natural laws. While the variety of fictional conditions are limitless, there is a distinction between saying anything is possible and everything is possible. When working in a speculative mode, it is crucial to invent new sets of rules, laws, or norms that constrain design choices. We have found it useful to introduce constraints related to materials or technologies as a way to spur creativity. For instance, one might ask participants to think through a commonly deployed term such a sustainability, not as a slogan or concept but rather as an operational rule for design. The result might resemble a project such as Marti Guixe’s The Solar Kitchen Restaurant for Lapin Kulta, a restaurant based entirely around solar cooking technologies (Lapin Kulta Solar 2011). This speculative project re-conceives the norms of a “good” restaurant, in which efficiency and consistency prevail, in order to abide by the imposed constraint of solar power. The process of designing a solar-powered restaurant would include designing a suitable menu, food storage and preparation processes, dishwashing and sanitation practices and devices, and all facets of customer service. The solar-only constraint provokes a detailed reckoning with existing restaurant norms and the implications of a commitment to sustainability.

Facilitators

A Workshop Model

Most workshops will need a facilitator who does not directly participate in workshop activities and can oversee and guide the workshop activities. They should be prepared to nudge or intervene over the course of the day/s to help produce what Keith Murphy calls collective hunchwork by listening for “a particular species of phrasing, which include ‘what if we try . . .’ and ‘how about . . .’ and ‘maybe we can . . .’ that hunches generate” (Murphy et al. 2017). Facilitators can help keep participants working within time constraints (and setting timers to avoid losing track), which tend to raise the stakes, increase focus, and override self-censorship or evaluation. Time pressure need not be extreme (as on reality-television baking and cooking competitions!), but quickness is an often employed design modality that preferences impulses, partial ideas, and unexpected notions over “careful” thinking. Once you have set time limits, commit to them. Facilitators can also decide if and when to introduce new constraints into a design process by being attuned to when progress has stagnated or a team has lost focus. Modifiers limit the participants’ ability to control a situation and lessen their concerns over demonstrating skill or expertise. Like time

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Figure 53 Term-Setting (2017); Luke Cantarella.

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constraints, this technique has also been popularized through reality television. For example, when contestants on Project Runway are asked to make a dress out of candy, they can no longer rely on or worry about their traditional dressmaking skills. They are freed from technique and forced to rely on their intuition and creativity. Additionally, since failure in these scenarios is almost assured, most outcomes appear like versions of success. Facilitators are also crucial in documenting the process. Because groups are often working simultaneously, it is not possible to be privy to every working process at once. By photographing, video-recording, collecting sketches, prototypes, and notes that are generated during the workshop, an archive of material can be assembled that—even if it conveys merely the genesis or a very rough version of an idea—gives the teams something to consider at a later point. These artifacts and recordings can shape the next steps in the development of a project. We began organizing workshops in 2014 as a way to test out whether productive encounters might be a useful medium through which to think through data and research questions. We have found that they create opportunities to engage with scholarship and nascent research in ways that allow for generosity, curiosity, and playfulness. Our hope is that these workshops lead to designs that have a life outside of the studio and the further development of interventionist and participatory modes of ethnographic research.

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7 Operations and Micro-strategies

As noted earlier, productive encounters converge in sensibility and technique with many other kinds of projects such as participatory, relational, or socially engaged art, applied theatre, speculative and critical design, and other types of expanded scenography. In our own projects, we have routinely turned to these kinds of projects for inspiration and examples of aesthetic research practices that reveal deep and nuanced thinking about how to employ creative strategies as critical tools. In the following chapter, we provide examples of key operations found within a series of projects that have emerged from these fields, each of which is to varying degrees experiential, symbolic, playful, disruptive, dialogic, situated, and interpretive. It is these operations, more than the specific aims of the projects described that influence our own method. Because the approach we outline in this book is an emergent practice at the intersection of design and ethnography, we wanted to highlight exeperiments by anthropologists as well as experimental works from art, theater, and design that resonate with the aims of anthropology. They are hermeneutic provocations and aesthetic exercises that bring what is hidden into view. Most of the examples discussed below were not primarily ethnographic but rather hermeneutic provocations, formal aesthetic exercises, political calls to action, or manifestations of social awareness. Additionally, in line with our earlier argument on the uses of scenography, we would posit that many of the projects are particularly scenographic in sensibility. As we find the theatrical in many places beyond the confines of the theater, likewise the scenographic exists in many places beyond scenery (Hann 2018). The operations we examine can be understood as logics that projects utilize, shaping their form and producing effects. Keeping in mind that many forces may be operating simultaneously in the creation of a creative work, we do not suggest that the operations we have identified are necessarily central or exclusive. The reader is simply encouraged to imagine how the operations described might be borrowed and adapted in the service of their own research trajectory. The aim here is to provoke ethnographers to imagine, and possibly construct, field experiments that harness creative impulses, allow for counterfactuals, intuition, speculation, and fantastical thinking. As will become clear, each of the operations identified creates a problem to be solved. Problems in the vernacular of design are typically failures of usability, efficiency, beauty, and the like. Because they reveal missing information, gaps in understanding, or technical challenges, setting problems generates novel thinking as a form of achieving criticality (Somerson and Hermano 2013). This action is among the practices of an ethnography by design—in this case, problem-setting and problemsolving—that we outlined in Chapter  4. Likewise, the projects we draw on for inspiration and

Figure 54 Speculations, Stern v. Marshall Archive workshop (2014).

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technique are generally collaborative, oriented to publics, and explicitly interventionist. While they do not employ every practice described in Chapter 4, and are not focused on social inquiry per se, these projects tend to be productive in ways that are useful in our approach to ethnography; they stimulate reflection and dialogue among researchers and other collaborators and with and among publics to generate new understandings of the contemporary.

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Scale modeling

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Creating doubles is a general class of operations that uses representational technologies to produce knowledge about phenomena through a process of reproduction. In representational painting, for instance, the painter develops a visual understanding of an object or scene by inscribing a three-dimensional image onto a two-dimensional surface. In ethnography, the process of making a double creates moments of reflexivity that reposition the stance of researcher-subject into a position of mutual reliance. Eric Dishman and Bonnie Johnston’s informance technique (2003), for instance, creates doubles by using ethnographic data as text to be re-performed by an informant like a theater script. Scale modeling is a particular subset of these operations that uses a shift in scale to create representations of very large or very small phenomena. This shift in scale is essential when one-toone representation would be unwieldy. These models are often not literal miniaturizations of the world as we know it—this would be a mapping operation—but rather they use the shift in scale to isolate or emphasize some essential quality for study and inspection. Take for instance Chris Burden’s kinetic sculpture Metropolis II (2010), a scaled expression of a complex urban setting animated by 1100 moving toy cars. Burden describes the project as “modeling something that’s on the twilight of extinction—the era of the free car” (Pavlus 2011: n.p.). The sculpture uses a reduction in scale (and in this case an association with the iconic) to create a materialization of the logic of the movement and speed embedded within the post-war United States superhighway system. Adapting this example into the realm of ethnography requires a slight shift in medium from kinetic sculpture to social life. One might think of examples where institutional miniatures are created within the context of education, such as the model United Nations (UN). The model UN scales down a complex multinational organization by creating limited role-playing scenarios for students. This, however, has limited use as a tool for understanding a multinational bureaucracy largely because the participants, mostly US-based high school students, have no special understanding of the institutional norms and bureaucratic processes that are so integral to its operation (although one might learn a lot about high school). Instead, we would need to look for an institution that engages similar subjects in a scaled down fashion, such as the Meridian 180 project. Under the direction of Annelise Riles and coordinated by the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture at the Cornell University Law School, Meridian 180 is a multidisciplinary international community of academics, practitioners, and policymakers engaged in debates about transpacific economic issues via an online forum. Select issues raised in the general online

forum may transfer to more intensive and focused online forums, resulting in live conferences that simultaneously relate back to online discussions, leading to publications intended to contribute to policy decisions. Some of the challenges of the Meridian 180 project are precisely the challenges of the large-scale transnational organizations they hope to inform and guide. Resolving issues relating to the administration of the online forums, the logistics of timely translation, bracketing unresolved debates, prioritizing policy issues for live conferences or publication, and the like mirror the challenges of resolving such issues at the UN (Riles 2013). In this instance, the operation of designing and implementing a scale model version of existing transnational organizations was simultaneously a way to undertake a deeper form of inquiry into the specific challenges that such forums entail.

Technological or material constraints

Operations and Micro-strategies

Willingly creating a barrier or imposing a restriction on a creative process is a common strategy for generating novel, thought-provoking scenarios. Improvisational comedy, for instance, often relies on constraints to produce comic moments—one person in the scene is only allowed to speak in rhyming couplets, or can only ask questions, or must avoid words that contain the letter m. A random constraint forces the artist or maker to reach beyond the frame of what is expected under normal circumstances. Dunne and Raby’s alternate now (discussed at length in Chapter 4) design modality generates objects rendered under existing technologies but different ideological conditions. As such, it entails speculation, but not to the extreme of speculating on utopian or alternative futures that might involve materials or technologies not yet available. An example from the world of conceptual design is a project entitled The Lapin Kulta Solar Kitchen Restaurant (Lapin Kulta Solar 2011). This speculative project reconceives a restaurant business entirely around solar cooking technologies. This technological constraint hypothetically produces unfamiliar experiences not normally associated with restaurant dining. As Dunne and Raby point out, “[c]ustomers need to be flexible, forgiving, and adventurous; if it rains, for instance, lunch might be canceled or a cloudy sky might delay dinner” (Dunne and Raby 2013: 19). This speculative restaurant subverts the norms of a “good” restaurant, in which efficiency and consistency prevail, in order to abide by the imposed constraint of solar power. The very process of rendering the design of a solar-powered restaurant, complete with working through the interrelated processes of menu development, food storage and preparation, dishwashing, and all facets of customer service provokes a reckoning with existing restaurant norms. Designers and members of the public who might participate in a prototyped version of the solar restaurant would navigate this dining experience and grapple with questions about our relationship to food and its preparation, to service, and to hunger and satiation. This conceptual project drew attention to normalized space and experience by constructing a counterfactual version of restaurant food preparation and dining developed under a single constraint. The project described above was prototyped in several locations (Helsinki, Milan) but never fully implemented as a business model; conceptual designers can rely on this space, delinked from all the

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Figure 55 Marti Guixe, Solar Restaurant for Lapin Kulta (2011), Helsinki, Finland.

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limitations of actual clients and end-users, unimpeded by any existing material or technological limitations, to free and invigorate a design process. Ethnographers, of course, rarely delink their work from actual people and places. But we could take this operation (a material/technological constraint as the framework for a speculative design process) and both embed it within ongoing research and link the operations to ethnographic imperatives (accountability to specific communities, humanistic aims, scholarly contribution, etc.). What might this look like? Consider how the anthropology of traditional and alternative energy (Gupta 2015) is concerned in part with questions of access and infrastructure in relation to the political economy. An ethnographer might take as a starting point an existing material constraint— lack of consistent access to power in a rural community—and engage locals in a collaborative speculative practice of re-imagining energy delivery as constrained by something other than existing political economic realities. She might work with interlocutors to design a decision-making process for determining how an alternative energy system might be implemented in their community. If the technological constraint was that it had to be solar-based, but there were no other constraints (material, logistical, political, social), what would locals imagine? Speculating solutions to energy access creates a dialogic encounter around materialization, such as sketching out how panels would deliver power to homes and businesses, or mocking up panels that are durable and also aesthetically pleasing. Such a speculative endeavor is inevitably rooted in what locals currently understand about energy, as well as emergent possibilities that become visible through a design practice; this is the ethnographic payoff.

Radical simplification In certain philosophical traditions, reductio ad absurdum is a rhetorical gesture that attempts to disprove a falsehood by embracing it as literal truth and then extending its underlying meaning to an absurd or untenable conclusion. In scenographic terms, this strategy can be taken up as a representation of space or events that strips away anything accidental, unintentional, or partial contained within a representational reality to create a perfect extreme of conditions or a radical simplification. Since conceptual conditions taken to their limits are then reified through these absurd physical conditions, this mode can result in extreme forms from the radiantly beautiful to the unnaturally grotesque. It is also a well-defined speculative design strategy for creating impossible objects (Dunne and Raby 2013). While this can be a blunt—almost child-like—narrative strategy, radical simplification as a strategy for materializing fictions creates complex, mischievous results that can be seen in the traditions of Surrealism and Dada that in turn refer back to satirists such as Voltaire. In Candide, Voltaire invokes

Operations and Micro-strategies

Figure 56 Still from Unified Estonia (2011), Theater No99.

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Dr. Pangloss’s famous mantra that we live in “the best of all possible worlds” (Voltaire 1918: 40), while carefully constructing a world that is a ridiculous and horrific inversion of that statement. Centered on a condition of duplicitousness (we are never sure whether to accept anything at face value), it is a useful mode with which to examine dangerous conditions such as political speech, as can be seen in the writings of Gogol, Václav Havel, and other dissident writers. This can be seen brilliantly in the project Unified Estonia (2010) by the theater collective No99. In this project, creators Tiit Ojasoo and Ene-Liis Semper created a fictional “hyper-populist” political party that adopted all of the rhetorical strategies of political power (anthems, logos, charismatic leaders, fear-mongering, and staged opposition) to create a party of pure power, free from ideology. Operating as tricksters within the context of the Estonian election cycle, the party operated as a critique of the right while simultaneously drawing massive support from that quarter, culminating in an elaborately staged general assembly meeting that drew over 7,000 people, shown in Figure 56. Unified Estonia plays out our fears that political rhetoric might be transformed into political reality.

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(Social) inversion

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As another form of mimesis, inversion upends an existing condition to play out the ramifications of its opposite as a proposition of an alternative social reality and/or critique of existing social conditions. Scenographically, it remains closely aligned to realistic modes of representation but simply inverts values like the negative exposure of a photograph. These inversions can demonstrate the utopian potential of the imagination by releasing us from certain requirements of power relations (as John Lennon’s Imagine suggests “it’s easy if you try”) or they can point towards the inability of dichotomies to truly address complex understandings of human conditions. Inversion occurs commonly as a trope within many narrative forms. As a form of power reversal in can be seen in the use of costumes to disguise the powerful as the weak from Prince Haroun Al-Rashid’s journeys through Baghdad dressed as a peasant in One Thousand and One Nights to the recent reality television program Undercover Boss. It is connected to the carnivalesque and festival days when periods of exception allow the poor to ridicule the powerful. In object form, the topsy-turvy doll presents an example of social inversion from the folk art tradition. These dolls, whose name derives from the oldEnglish word terve, to turn upside-down, stitch together a white and black girl at the waist. A doublesided skirt that hides the child who is upside-down allowing the possibility of inverting the role of dominance and visibility while problematically reinforcing notions of white supremacy. A social inversion reverses an existing social norm or rule. An example can be seen in Eleonore Pourriat’s recent film Je ne suis pas un homme facile (I Am Not an Easy Man) (2017), which neatly inverts gender relations in modern-day France by positioning women as sexual predators. Pourriat takes the normally unremarked-upon glances and gestures of male power and makes them objects of interest by scripting them in female bodies. In the film, Christophe, an attractive chauvinist, is accidentally knocked unconscious and awakes in a world where gender-dominance has been reversed. The film does not speak to a true alterity (i.e., how contemporary matriarchal society might actually function) but examines the power relations of contemporary French life through this

Figure 57 Still from Je ne suis pas un homme facile (I Am Not an Easy Man) (2017), Studio: Netflix.

simple reversal. Although we see the inversion, our mind works to construct its more “truthful” opposite. While the plotting and characterization of the film are compelling, we are particularly interested in the work of production designer Philippe Hezard and costume designer Alice Cambournac, and how the premise of the story provokes wry and powerful visual images. Hezard chooses to keep the films setting, Paris, mostly unchanged but populates it with striking visual anomalies such as sexualized images of the male body that dominate the billboards and street advertisements. The costume design works to reimagine how both the color and cut of clothes might be reimagined across gender lines. In the still above (Figure 57)., we see Cambournac’s design for Christophe as he leaves his apartment wearing a suit with high-cut shorts that showcases his legs as objects of desire. Later in the film we see a neat rectangle of chest hair left on his otherwise waxed torso showing a masculine version of the French bikini wax or “landing strip” style of female body grooming.

Frames can be thought of as culturally situated interpretative categories through which we organize and decode social phenomena. When we walk into a store we interpret the person behind the counter as a salesperson, the objects on shelves as commodities, and our own activity as consumption; we rarely mistake the salesperson for a holy priest or our shopping as a form of prayer. We can think of theatre or performance as another example of a frame. Within the frame of theatre, a scenographer does not design a living room for living (as an architect might) but rather as a space of performance with the implication that the room on the stage indexes social and psychological conditions relating

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Alternative frames

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to the themes of the play. Because the living room is designed as an element of a story nothing is random and there are no false signifiers; every element of the design is meaningful or at least made meaningful during in the process of watching the play. The frame of performance creates a powerful attentiveness around the seemingly minute or inconsequential details that comprise an environment. The operation of alternative frames changes the significance of an existing object or existing practice by altering the lens through which we are being asked to interpret it. This move has historically been identified with projects, such as Duchamp’s readymades, that reclassify objects by defining them as aesthetic propositions. Although there has been much debate in contemporary aesthetics about the role of the frame in interpretation (c.f., Thompson 2017; Ranciére 2009), we are more interested in how the simple act of placing an object or event under a radically different banner can re-contextualize its effects and operations. Rimini Protokoll’s Hauptversammlung (Meeting) (2009) is one example. Rimini Protokoll (RP) is a Swiss-German theater collective and for this project, they appropriated an existing annual event, the Daimler Annual Shareholders Meeting, at which shareholders meet to ratify and approve the board of management, as a performance. As described on the RP website:

Ethnography by Design

A huge, blue screen is erected in front of approx. 8,000 shareholders. In front of it, slightly elevated, sit one part of the ensemble: 6 members of the Board of Management and 20 members of the Supervisory Board. Behind the screen, dozens of back-office prompters work on providing whispered answers for every question put to the performers. The other part of the ensemble consists of the company’s shareholders: proud shareholders, dividend-hungry shareholders, predatory shareholders, tourist shareholders, critical shareholders. . . . The press and the Investor Relations staff also play along. The piece begins at 9 in the morning and only ends late in the evening with the ratification and approval of the Board of Management.1

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The tone of the description above illustrates how RP members reframed Daimler’s Investor Relations Team as a cast of actors in a play, and attendees were encouraged to experience the event not as a shareholders but rather as an audience for an extraordinary theatrical event. RP purchased shares in Daimler in order to secure seats at the shareholders meeting, sold tickets to the public as a performance, created a theater programme, and held discussions in the lobby. RP did not fundamentally change the event, but simply re-presented it under a different category in order to highlight and critique the fact that public companies perform kinds of accountability to shareholders. Working with alternative frames within the context of ethnographic research may involve much simpler moves, such as a heightened attention to the staging of interactions. Researchers often do this kind of work instinctively by changing their habits and compartment to appear more local in the course of participant observation. The longer one is embedded in a field site or collaborations fictions of sociability may become real as relationships between interlocutor and investigator blur.

1

https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project/hauptversammlung.

This movement to diminish the frame of research might also be reversed to heighten attention towards the formality or artificiality of interactions in the effort to make strange or create distanciation. In the course of our workshop collaboration with Justin Richland and his father Kent Richland on the legal cases surrounding Stern v. Marshall Archive (SvMA) (2014), we utilized a staged interview to achieve this effect (see Appendix: Games and Exercises). This decision was intended to disrupt and overcome two specific conditions; firstly, Richland and his father were overly familiar with each other and at times would leave unstated commonly understood or shared ideas; secondly, since they had told each other the story of the case many times before, the ways of recounting legal narratives had become habitual. The staging of the interview sought to formalize the relationship by using an elaborate multi-camera recording set-up to impose an obvious technological mediation. While this allowed us many angles with which to review the data, the mere act of recording creates a drama of heightened importance around the interview itself and affected the retelling (Cantarella et al. 2015).

Forced translation/sensory limitation

Operations and Micro-strategies

Linguistic or perceptual barriers to understanding often require translation services; specialized devices or actors that can shuttle between two communicative systems. In the case of language, we can often hold contradictory views of the translator’s agency depending on their working process. In the case of simultaneous interpretation, used in large meetings and multinational organizations, the interpreters are typically removed to sound-proof booths seeking anonymity while offering real-time translations of utterances. Consecutive interpretation, on the other hand, involves direct interaction with an interpreter who actively negotiates the pace of the conversation with the speakers at times adding clarifications or questions that seek to improve understanding. In all these models, it is clear that the effort to move understanding across linguistic or perceptual barriers creates rich opportunities for social exchange. Imposing artificial obstacles that require translation has been used by many artists as a way to call attention to perception and communication. Mexican theatre company Teatro Ojo’s project ~750 nm [espectro visible] (2009) used translation in condition with an exhibit by Argentinian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. The company assembled a group of blind actors and asked visitors to the exhibit to function as docents to translate their visual experiences for the actors. The exhibit titled Red Shift I: Impregnation was an installation of a room filled with banal objects unified only in their deep red color. Teatro Ojo’s intervention capitalized on Meireles’ work by forcing the viewer/docents to work through the problem of describing the effects of color (a distinctly visual phenomenon) to those who could not see. Other artists have reversed this equation by invoking sensory limitation, including Vancouverbased artist Carmen Papalio who started a blindfolded art tour series entitled See For Yourself (2013) after going blind. Here, it is the spectator whose awareness is altered by the loss of a sensory apparatus. Toronto-based curatorial collective Aisle Four staged similar blindfolded tour of exhibits at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Toronto), describing the events as follows:

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This tour will lead visitors through the gallery blindfolded, experiencing the exhibition through the remaining heightened senses, and exploring the differences in cultural consumption and artistic understanding when vision is omitted.2

All these projects worked on top of existent pieces of cultural production, playing with the sensory limitations to construct meaningful encounters.

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Proxemic play

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Within the staging of everyday life, relationships of power or agency are frequently embedded within the ways that people position and organize their bodies in space. Attention to proxemics as distinct culturally specific practices (Hall 1966) affords opportunities for creative engagement by drawing attention to informants’ expectations of spatial arrangements and how they reflect of social norms. Within built environments, proxemics plays a powerful role in the design of interiors. Think of an iconic scene like an American Thanksgiving dinner. A long, rectangular table of gleaming mahogany is heavily laid with food. The shape of the table defines two narrow sides (the heads of the table) as positions of power that are occupied by the father and mother, reinforcing the primacy of marriage as the central unifying factor in defining a family life. The table is oriented in the room so as to give a specific advantage to one end. Perhaps it is positioned by a window to create a backlit effect for the individual seated at the head of the table. This would traditionally be the father’s side. The chairs at the head and foot have arms providing a slight elevation and widening the zone of personal space around the sitter. The armless side chairs, seated with extended family, are narrower and compressed, shrinking their zones of intimacy. Finally crammed in the corner of the room, one finds a rickety card table with folding chairs that creates the lowest status space for the children. Familial hierarchies are thus rendered and reinforced around the Thanksgiving table. As a scenographic tool, proxemics was a central starting point in establishing dramatic action in the work of Brecht and Caspar Neher. In their collaborations, Neher would develop drawings called scene arrangements that suggested certain relationships between characters as Brecht wrote out scenes ( Willet 1986). These relationships were defined as much by symbolic gestures (gestus) as through the careful use of specific physical conditions, such as making the height of a chair slightly taller for the dominant character in a scene. This design trick is still frequently employed in the design of late night talk show sets where the host’s desk chair will have a taller seat than the guest’s cushioned chair or settee. Additionally, proxemic signs on stage help defined characters’ relationships to their environment and condition the emotional state of performers (McKinney and Butterworth 2009). Proxemic play can be seen explicitly in critical design projects such as LA Has Faults (2008). This multi-faceted design intervention focused on increasing awareness of emergency preparedness needs in the MacArthur Park neighborhood in Los Angeles. The project was constructed in two

2

https://museumofcontemporaryart.ca/calendar/blindfolds-tour/.

phases, an initial period of creating awareness around the issue followed by a phase-focused on communication. The awareness phase involved the creation of large-scale models in the park emblazoned with the words “Shake,” “Shift,” “Aware,” “Alerta,” and “Alto.” In the communication phase, a pop-up community center was created wherein discussions between community members and government officials were staged. These discussions were constrained by the lack of trust and differing communicative styles of the well-meaning bureaucrats and apprehensive residents, many of whom feared interactions with city officials due to their informal immigration status. In order to quietly subvert the power dynamics, designer Sean Donahue created squat cushioned cubes for the officials to sit which caused their trousers to ride high in a slightly comical fashion. The residents were seated in normal height chairs. This simple gesture helped reorient the proxemics of the room to open up more horizontal dialogic possibilities.

Aleatory devices The history of twentieth-century art movements has been marked by a use of aleatory devices, methods of creating randomized actions or chance procedures. These processes appear from the Surrealists’ collage and frottage techniques, to the Abstract Expressionists’ scraping, dripping, and spilling of paint, to the compositional techniques of contemporary music such as trombonist and jazz composer Michael Dessen’s algorithmically composed self-generating Scorestreams (2014). Randomization is already a strong marker of rigor in the social sciences, although the ethnographic tradition has relied more strongly on networking, snowball sampling, and serendipity than intentional randomizing techniques. The use of aleatory devices offer a way of creating moments of “engineered serendipity” and free the researcher or informants from prescriptive or over-determined narratives. Consider costume designer Carly Everaert’s Surfing the City (2015), a Situationist-inspired series of instructions for navigating an urban space created as part of the Between Realities project for the Prague Quadrennial 2015. In this intervention, Everaert choose an object marker for participants to follow to create a random journey through the heart of the city. The experience began by being handed a sealed envelope with the following instructions:

At this point, you open the sealed envelope and read the letter. The experience combines an aleatory device (random following) with a fixed text (the sealed letter) to inscribe a narrative experience on to the urban landscape. Although the scenography arises from discovering a found space through a chance procedure, she has designed constraints around the procedure (seven repetitions, walking

Operations and Micro-strategies

Choose an inhabitant of Prague, for example, someone wearing a red coat. Follow him or her through the city till you encounter someone else wearing a red coat. Do this seven times. Record the route you have taken on a map or app of Prague. Stop after you have followed your seventh subject. Find a good place to sit down. Take a photo of the location, i.e. café, bench, park or bus stop. Observe the people around you closely and imagine that at that moment you receive a letter from one of them.

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distance) that limit the possibilities to a certain geographic zone in which the intervention is deployed. Evereart’s detournément is situated within the context of the Prague 1, the central core of the city and an urban space whose rapid redevelopment in the post-communist era has been critiqued as an example of Disneyfication. In Evereart’s case, adding the combinatory of a text functions to complete a performance, injecting dramaturgy onto a discovered scene. While this intervention lacks the durational intensity one associates with rich ethnography, it does offer a number of useful techniques for an ethnographic project. In the context of an ethnographic project, a fixed text might provide an opportunity for testing out analytical frameworks against a randomized tracing of space. Additionally, the object marker when embedded in an ethnographic project might be chosen as both an aleatory device and way to point towards a particular curiosity in a field site. We might consider this a miniature version of the kind of follow-the-object ethnographies (c.f. Appadurai 1986; Tsing 2015) that use objects and commodities to trace networks. Literary aleatory devices could also prove useful as a means of analysis for the large data sets typical of an ethnographic research archive. Investigators often accumulate hours of recordings, copious field notes, and pages of documents over the course of a study. Various slicing techniques derived from Surrealist games like parallel collage or cubomania could be used to generate random “core samples” of data that are both legible to design collaborators and manageable for analysis. Slicing typically involves constructing some kind of “blade” to segment the work. This could be a literal blade as in the Dada cut-up technique, which starts with a hard copy of a “complete” text and then cuts it horizontally, shuffles the half-sheets and tapes them back together (Bjornson 1985). Other blades could be formed by choosing a short phrase or code with which to search digital documents and capture the surrounding text fragments. A random time code could be chosen to sample from audio recordings. Or one could identify a time of day or day of the week and go back through the field notes to see what observations this “slice” sets aside for consideration. Space could also work as a randomizing tool choosing rooftops, meeting rooms, shade, or a simple grid might be overlaid on a map of a field site as a way of sampling nodes for observation. Part of what these aleatory processes do is allow for and even promote discovery by creating unexpected stopping points or confusions that force collaborators to unwed themselves from particular ideas and think anew.

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Deferred authority

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Finally, we might examine the deferral of authority as a useful and common strategy seen often in projects of social practice and relational aesthetics. In these works, various forms of participation defer the authority for the creation of the artwork and put it in the hands of its audience or participants. In projects like the staged conversations of Tino Sehgal or the community meals of Rirkrit Tiravanija, the work is framed by the artist but its enactment is left in the hands of the participants who may choose to embrace, resist, or modify the situations. These works are markedly more participatory than tactics of audience interaction often seen in the theater where the audience remains clearly adjacent to the performance event.

In design fields, deemphasizing authority often is part of Human-Centered Design (HCD), a process that seeks to engage in co-design with end-users (Myerson 2001). As in the work of the architectural firm TILT, co-design is a strategy that attempts to create horizontal relationships between design experts (architects, product designer, etc.) and end-users during design development processes (Marlow and Egan 2013). In architecture this is often seen as a preparatory or research work to be “cleaned-up” in the design studio later; a more radical move involves subjecting the work completely to someone else’s approval, authority, or taste by allowing them to build on and revise throughout the process. This could be achieved by creating a lengthy series of approval phases in the project or by a design form in which one’s informants already possessed expertise. Deferral might also be a useful tool when working in multi-investigator studies. These types of collaborations often divide research into discrete sites handled by different team members who then coalesce to discuss results. Choreographer Susan Rethorst’s wrecking projects offer a different model (2000). In her wreckings, which began in 1995, Rethorst begins choreographing a dance piece and then stops in mid-rehearsal. The project is handed off to another choreographer to build upon with no obligation to fulfill Rethorst’s intentions or complete the work upon her terms. After the piece is wrecked by this new voice for several rehearsals, it is then handed back to Rethorst to continue working on. This simple yet powerful method for intervention could easily be integrated into a collaborative research protocol to provoke new forms of co-ethnography.

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Figure 58 Board game collection (2016).

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Appendix: Games and Exercises

These games and exercises have helped us ferment collaborative and imaginative design processes in workshops. Some offer strategies to deconstruct and reassemble ethnographic data, which can be particularly generative for developing ideas for productive encounters.

Magazine Based loosely on the logic game SET, Magazine is a game that explores how we recognize, organize, and map concepts to images. The Object: To identify a “set” of three images from cards on the table. The three images must share some quality mutually agreed upon by the group. The Materials: Forty to fifty cards made by clipping random pictures from hard-copy magazines or found online. Make sure all the cards are the same size (around 3” x 5”). The Play: The dealer lays outs a grid of eighteen cards face down on the table. Play begins by turning over five (5) cards. Players attempt to make a set of three (3) cards based on a material or abstract quality that the three cards share. Qualities might include color, style, origin, affect, meaning, feeling or any other definable attribute. Sets can be (and should be) challenged by any member of the group. If challenged, the player must convince a majority of the group to accept her or his definition. If it is ruled a valid set, the player takes the cards. If no set can be defined, the dealer slowly turns over additional cards until a set is declared. There should always be at least five (5) cards visible at all times. The winner has the most cards at the end of gameplay. The Variations: ●

Abstract Set: Only abstract or conceptual qualities may be declared.

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Material Set: Only tangible qualities (shape, pattern, or other visible characteristics) may be declared.

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Complementary Set: Other players may add additional cards to a given set if they can argue the same quality is present.

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Figure 59 Magazine, a design game (2014).

Kittens Purr Cutely on Fried Grit Salad The name of this game, Kittens Purr Cutely on Fried Grit Salad, is derived from a mnemonic device to remember the Linnaean system of taxonomy: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. In this game, players work collaboratively to create a taxonomy from an existing data set. The Object: To work in teams to organize a hierarchical taxonomy from an existing data set.

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The Materials: A discrete data set with twenty to eighty individual units depending on your number of teams.

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The Play: Divide into small groups (2–4 players) and divide your images or data units into equal amounts (approx. 20–30). Players will then create a hierarchical taxonomy of the images. Gameplay begins by defining the most significant shared quality or “Kingdom”. Linnaeus defined three (animal, vegetable, and mineral) although modern science now recognizes several more with an additional higher level of organization called Domain. Images or units are then sorted into those categories. Each Kingdom name and definition should be written on a 3” x 5” card. Each sub-category is then

Figure 60 Resent and Adore cards, Yes, We’re Open (2016).

sorted into a secondary significant shared quality, named and labeled. This procedure continues until there is only a single card in each category or you have reached the level of Species. The Variations: ●

Folksonomy: Create a folksonomy, a term coined by the information architect Thomas Vander Wal, to crowdsource a taxonomy by providing a method for a public indexing or tagging. For example, the RESENT/ADORE cards show in Figure 60 were created as part of our Yes, We’re Open project to allow respondents to tag photos of the neighborhood with positive or negative attributes.

99 cents In 99 cents, players work together to create a fantastical tool using items purchased from a dollar store or discount market. Using rough, cheap, or accidental materials keeps the gameplay lively and removes concerns about craftsmanship or artistic skill. This game was inspired by assignment called “Make a Trap” from the course People Knowing taught by Ben Hooker and Sean Donahue for the Media Design Practices program at the Art Center, Pasadena. As Vilém Flusser has pointed out (1999), trapping has a deep etymological connection to design from the Greeks. In Donahue and Hooker’s assignment participants create a device for capturing something either physical or metaphysical. Variations might include the creation of any device that can lean as easily toward the metaphorical as the literal, such as a transporter or seeing device. The Object: To create a tool for solving a conceptual, emotional, or immaterial problem using found materials.

The Play: Divide into even groups of three to five participants. Decide on a non-material problem to be solved. Examples might include fixing a broken heart, curing loneliness, or flagging microaggressions.

Games and Exercises

The Materials: Assemble a range of items from toys to household goods to foodstuffs from a local discount or “99-cent” store. It is also useful to provide a basic means of construction such as tape, string, glue, staples, or tacks.

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Set a timer for twenty (20) minutes during which time each group creates their tool. After the time is up, a spokesperson from each group explains the tool and how it works. Winners are chosen by consensus. The Variations: ●

Cross-Cultural Objects: Assemble only raw materials that have a specific relevance to your field site. Intermix groups of informants and researchers.

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Tailored Question: Customize your problem-card specifically towards issues or terms at hand within an existing research project. For example, the term “human-centered” was central to a Finnish research project on senior-citizen housing on which we consulted. In a workshop with these researchers, we framed the game as designing diagnostic, therapeutic, or communication devices that demonstrated human-centered values.

Paper telephone Variously called Draw-Around-the-Table or L’pupiqat, this game is a variation on the traditional childhood game of Whisper-Down-the-Lane, which is also variously called the Telephone Game, Pass-It-Along, or even Don’t Drink the Milk. This version relies on drawing and its limitations rather than speaking. The Object: To create interpretative failures. The Materials: Blank notebooks and drawing supplies. The Play: Gather around a table or circle with a blank notebook, the first player writes a descriptive sentence on the first page of the notebook. A healthy imagination and colorful language help here. She or he then passes the book to right. The second player reads the sentence, turns the page, illustrates the scene, and passes the book to the right again. The third player looks at the drawing, turns the page and writes down a description of the action and passes to the right again. The cycle continues alternating between drawing and writing until the circle is complete (or as long as the players wish).

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Object myths

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The American folk artist John Peto made his career at the turn of the twentieth century in the oceanside towns of central New Jersey creating exquisite trompe l’oeil canvases that fetishized everyday objects. Peto knew that objects are powerful reservoirs of memory and myth-making. The Object: To create a myth around an object that speaks to its origins or use-value. The Materials: Collect a set of curious objects; the more inscrutable the better. The Play: Divide into groups of two. Each group is given a mundane object and creates an elaborate object myth derived from the appearance of the object, its origins, exchange value, possible uses,

and other visible or contextual signs. The pairs then present their objects and myths to the group. The story that is simultaneously the most plausible and the most fantastical is the winner. The Variations: ●

Objects of Value: Ask players to bring an object of personal value to the game. This object should then be exchanged with other players. Compare the “life history” and mythology of their object of value with the fiction they created for their mundane object.

Strange bedfellows In the famous Surrealist party game, Exquisite Corpse, a drawing is assembled collectively. First, a player begins a sketch and then folds back her paper to reveal only a sliver. The next artist then adds on from what they can see, welding together two images with a thin strip of continuity. Strange Bedfellows builds off that game’s logic by combining unlike things to create objects of fascination, in this case, ones that illuminate some analytically intriguing aspect of a social phenomenon or research protocol.

Instructions: 1 Describe a tension or underlying question in the research with clarity and detail. Collaborators should jot down notes and reflect back on what they heard and what questions may have arisen. 2 In a short timed period (5 minutes) write up a list of four or five objects or materials (sandpaper, Figure 61 Exquisite Corpse Drawing (2012), CC 3.0 Erica Parrott feathers, raffia, e.g.) and an equal number of and Noah Ryan. qualities (degraded, pure, androgynous, e.g.) that relate in some way to the unresolved tensions or questions described above. When the time is up, share and discuss with the group.

Follow-up: Prototype the object (out of paper, cardboard, or real materials) and share with your informants or create these objects with your informants. What kind of conversation does this provoke?

Games and Exercises

3 Working from these lists, sketch new hybrids that combine objects or materials with qualities or characteristics. Create at least three mutant objects; spend only six or seven minutes on each.

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Timelining Timelining is a concept-mapping or tracing exercise that visualizes and organizes fieldwork data through a schematic drawing. Although this tracing can take many forms, starting with a timeline can be a straightforward data-visualization technique to start a collaboration or workshop. The timeline serves as a rudimentary chronological path and also makes a good design brief. Instructions: 1 On a large piece of paper, layout a large-scale timeline that allows you to chart significant events in your fieldwork or histories within your project. Keep the scale consistent so that the time-space and paper-space have a fixed relationship (e.g. one year equals one foot). You should cover the entire time of the project to visualize both chronologies as well as the spacing or clustering of events. 2 Working from your data archive, begin adding photographs, selections from field notes, historical data, and other recollections to the timeline. Variations: System Chart: Brainstorm a specific system, part of a system, or series of transactions that appear in your field site that you may or may not have explored ethnographically. This system may be virtual, material, or social. Draw a schematic or illustration of the system that maps how it moves through your field site or related para-sites. After completing the drawing, add annotations or links to your data archive. The illustration and your brief explanations can serve as a design brief to share with visually oriented collaborators.

Ethnography by Design

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Figure 62 Stern v. Marshall Archive workshop (2014); Kent Richland. 134

Three scenes Ethnographic writing has traditionally employed scenes of encounter, discovery, conflict, etc. as a way of focusing in on and making tangible observations about a place-in-time. The ethnographic scene rooted in specificity helps enclose the boundaries of the field and define the frame of a research project. However, since contemporary practice has exploded the boundaries of the ethnographic enclosure, this exercise uses the reconciliation of multiple ethnographic scenes to construct an imaginary for multi-sitedness. Instructions: 1 Recall, in brief, three significant scenes from your ethnographic work that suggest or relate to different modalities within your project or exist in different geographical locales. Select some sensory details you associate with the scene, as well as some details relating to the participants in the scene and their activities. Don’t attempt to articulate clear connections between the three scenes. Instead, allow the scenes to be discontinuous. 2 Create brief narrative descriptions of the three scenes. These descriptions can be in a written form or verbal recollections told to your collaborators. If using verbal descriptions, make sure to record these recollections so they can be revisited later. 3 Working from the descriptions, create visual representations of the three scenes using drawing or collage techniques. Think of this like storyboarding a film. Try to capture a sense of mood and movement. Don’t worry about accuracy but rather try to grasp the scene as you imagined it during the descriptions. If working with a large group, divide up the storyboarding task. 4 Share the drawings with your colleagues and reflect on how these scenes have been pictured. What power dynamics appear to be at play? What are the commonalities or differences between the three scenes? Can you conceptualize a space in which they plausibly might co-exist? Play around with the order in which they are presented. Does order affect the way you read them as sequence of collected experiences?

Origin stories Games and Exercises

Metaphors play a significant role in organizing research. Often used evocatively in ethnographic writing, metaphors expand our understanding of ethnographic data beyond the particularities of local knowledge and into a generalizable forms of understanding. They are a way of activating anthropology’s ability to think things through in their totality (Nelson 2016). In this exercise, you will create an origin story for the dominant metaphors that shape the imaginary of your research project. The metaphor “origin story” will create an evocative design brief to begin a collaborative project.

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Instructions: 1 Think about the prevailing metaphors in your analysis and select one that is central to your thinking, that troubles you, or that you’d simply like to develop further. When did you start using the metaphor? What sparked it? Was it brought to you by an informant? Did it arise your research proposals, grant applications, or other forms of bureaucratic writing? 2 Now, assemble a genealogy for the metaphor. Where else might it be used in anthropological writing? How does it connect to one of the analytical frameworks you subscribe to? What are its material realities? For instance, how could we picture the metaphor if taken literally? 3 Write or tell your “origin story” for this metaphor. Keep the story brief—less than two pages or five minutes of presentation. If working with a group of investigators, explore the different stories that arise. What variations or similarities become apparent? Follow-up: Artists often work by taking metaphors seriously—seeking to construct in reality what was framed linguistically. Working from your origin stories, attempt to construct your metaphor in material form. How could it be made real? What challenges might this pose? What kind of demands or opportunities would it place on your field site if it were it a physical object?

Reenact a history From its usage in popular culture from Civil War reenactments to true crime television, the reenactment is a powerful embodied form of thinking through history collectively. In this exercise, participants hack the reenactment form to restage events from an ethnographic dataset to gain a more nuanced understanding of the construction of historical memory. Because this exercise relies heavily on local subjectivities, it is useful in the building of inner publics in preparation for fieldwork interventions. Note that the reenactment does not require a high degree of verisimilitude to be effective. Instructions:

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1 Narrate in as much detail as possible a pivotal or evocative event recounted for you or experienced by you or your interlocutors in the course of the research. Participants should listen, take notes, and sketch out impressions as they listen.

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2 Divide into three groups. One group, on a large sheet of paper, draws a timeline that depicts the elements of the event in chronological order. The second group maps the spatial dimensions of the event. What were the space or spaces like? How could they be reconstructed in a studio environment? Drawing on the techniques of the theater rehearsal room can be useful here. A chair could stand in for a car, a rock, or judge’s bench. The third group identifies and lists all of the people that figure into the event. What were their roles and does any available text fragment of dialogue exist?

3 Reform the working groups so each includes one member of each of the prior groups. The researcher may participate in one of the groups or observe the events. Each group then develops and practices a short reenactment/portrayal of the event in a medium of their choice. These could take the form of an improvised scene with participants playing roles, a miniature reenactment with handheld objects, figurines or puppets, a silent enactment with voice over, etc.

Follow-up: While reenactments often transpose events to different spaces or compress their timeframes for logistical or aesthetic reasons, it can be possible to recreate an event where it originally took place or over the same precise amount of time it originally took. While this requires a high level of commitment from the design team, the results can yield a powerfully immersive experience for the participants.

Conversation objects The conversation object is a materialized form of speculation that can be inserted into an ethnographic encounter to provoke a response. In this exercise, participants imagine, design, and create an object that points towards a particular social phenomenon. In the development phase in the studio, the conversation object can be a way to work out metaphors and concepts related to ethnographic problems by funneling analysis through a materialization task. When introduced into an ethnographic context, its fantastical, counterfactual, or odd nature can generate dialogue, feedback, and critical thought. Instructions: 1 Working from field notes or an ethnographic design brief, identify problematics or processes that seem central to a research project or have captured the attention of the ethnographer. 2 Divide into small groups and develop designs through sketches and descriptions of an object that might embody the chosen phenomena. This may involve setting a problem based on the phenomena and then designing a functional solution. The design can be impractical, fantastical, or futuristic and need not rely on existing technologies.

Example—Barbed Wire Skirt: A dynamic example of the conversation object can be seen in the work of Barb Natali. In the course of her fieldwork in Kampala, Uganda, Natali became interested in the discourse surrounding the control of the female body specifically in response to a new set of modesty laws introduced in the Ugandan legislature in 2011, popularly known as the “anti-mini-skirt

Games and Exercises

3 Create a rough prototype of your object that can be introduced into your field site or in a venue for evaluation. Note that loose or rough visualizations afford more interpretive space for interlocutors to respond critically to the design concept.

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law.” Natali crafted a response in the form of a speculative object: a pair of shorts wrapped in barbed wire, which she proposed selling in the Owino market, the large marketplace in central Kampala. Created with local tailors, the prototype was then used to provoke conversations centering on the female body and sexual violence.

Design a store In this exercise, participants design a store that solves a problem or serves a need related to your research question or topic. For the purpose of this exercise, a good constraint is to limit speculation to commercial retail environments as opposed to public spaces dedicated governmental, religious, artistic, or community services. Design not only what the store looks like, but its business model. Marti Guixe’s aforementioned Lapin Kulta Solar Kitchen Restaurant is a great example. Instructions: 1 Frame a design prompt about a speculative retail environment that addresses some problem or touches on some sensitivity from your ethnographic research. Brainstorm the central criteria for this fictional store: what does the store sell and who are its customers? 2 Choose a business within your research site and spend between five and fifteen minutes inside experiencing the environment. When you are in the store, you will want to pay close attention to your own sensory experience of the place. Your task is just to be alive to whatever you are sensing and feeling. Some questions to guide you may include: How does it feel to be in this space? Do you enjoy the space? Does it feel good? Do you smell things? Hear things? What does it feel like to touch the merchandise? Do you feel free to pick things up and handle them? Can you find things, or do you feel confused about where things are? Do you feel tense or comfortable? If you feel strongly pulled to some product (or service), or repelled by it, purchase it. How does it feel to buy it and possess it?

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3 Create a proposal for your imagined store that incorporates the criteria defined in step one and the aesthetic norms experienced in step two. The proposal should name the store and describe what and how goods and services are exchanged within it. What kind of currency does it accept? Can anyone shop there, or is it exclusive in some way? Are goods displayed or stored behind a counter? What is the return policy? Drawings, mood boards, and scale models could be used to further articulate the store’s designed environment.

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Collaborative ranking Establishing hierarchies is often a hidden process encoded in subtle expressions of status and taste, acceptance and rejection. Exposing this process in public format allows participants to mete out and

evaluate their judgments. Designing a public interactive or display reveals value judgments and allows for comment and discussion. A simple display might ask a participant to choose between two different options. The more complex version might involve manipulatives that allow a public to compare facets or make value judgments on an issue or phenomenon based on a scale or hierarchy. Note that the simplification involved in assigning issues or phenomena to linear scale can be highly imprecise and risks comparing incomparables. Consider different forms of spatial representation using fields or volumes to complicate this. Instructions: 1 Identify a set of things to be compared and evaluated. The evaluation can use any criteria (beauty, efficiency, status, truth, power, want) and can address either a relatively inconsequential phenomenon that relates to your research (the appreciation for a particular television show) or a monumental issue of public debate (the relative oppression of different groups in a given social context). It can be useful to look for inconsequential things that correlate to things of deeper significance. 2 Create a forum for public evaluation. This should not be done virtually or in a digital space, but somewhere a public can directly collaborate on the ranking system. This might involve forming a line, arranging objects on a table or wall, or creating a sequence of images or words. 3 Assemble groups to create collaborative rankings. Prepare the group by discussing what the evaluative criteria might be and how they might be assessed. Make sure to document the process as well the result of the ranking.

Example: The Argentine theater artist Lola Arias incorporated a similar technique in the performance piece El Año en Que Naci (The Year I Was Born) (2011) created with both children of the Disappeared whose parents had been killed during the infamous dirty war (1974–1983) and children of military families responsible for the extra-judicial killings. In one memorable sequence, the performers were tasked with forming a line onstage organized from the children of the most oppressed to children of the worst oppressors.

Games and Exercises 139

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148

Index Note: Numbers in italic refer to figures. Abélès, Marc 36 abstraction 19 actions, meanings and 1 Adams, Barbara 57 Adamson, Glenn 20–1 aesthetics anthropology and 7 relational 126 scenography and 13, 21 Trade is Sublime and 40, 42 utility and 5 affective potential, of design 35 Age of Revolutions 18 Aisle Four 123 aleatory devices 125–6 alienation, revelatory 14 alignment 23 “Allow Trade to Flow More Freely” 41, 82 alternate futures 18 alternate now 63, 117 alternative frames 121–3 alternative spaces, use of 14–15 anthropology aesthetics and 7 anthropological research 1–2, 62 design and 2–3, 4, 29 scenography and 7, 8, 15 architecture architectural design 17, 56 deferred authority and 127 dramaturgical architecture 1 art participatory art 6, 7 social turn in 6, 8, 15 ArtCenter College of Design (ArtCenter) 100, 105–6 artists as instigators 53 role of 5–6 Artpologist Collective 47 audiences, outer publics as 37 authorship, scenography as 19

barter 48 Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn 46–7, 48, 49–50, 52 behavior, tradition and 1 Bell, Lindsay 100, 109 Between Realities 13, 125 Binder, T. 3 Bishop, Claire 7 Boal, Augusto 19 Body Games 99 Bolle, Catherine 72, 74 Bourriaud, Nicolas 15 Brecht, Bertolt 19, 24, 124 The Brighton Beach Memory Exchange 47–8 Bruguera, Tania 22 Bueno di Mesquita, Naomi 12, 13 Build a Trap game 109 Burden, Chris 116 California, University of 55, 100 Cambournac, Alice 121 Candide 119–20 Cantarella, Luke Term-Setting 112 Trade is Sublime and 37, 38, 40, 44, 72, 74–5, 78, 80–4, 88–92, 96 Yes, We’re Open and 46, 49, 50 Center for Codesign Research, Copenhagen 55 Center for Ethnography, University of California 55, 101 Central Banks, Central Bankers and the Idea of a Public Currency (Central Banks) 100, 103, 104, 105, 108, 109 Centre William Rappard (CWR) 38–9, 46, 80–1 Chekhov, Anton 1 Chicago, University of 100 Chin, Elizabeth 50–1, 55, 100, 101, 105, 106 Christo and Jean-Claude 46 Chung, Jae 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 80, 82, 83, 96–7 Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture, Cornell University Law School 116 co-ethnography 127

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Cobden, Richard (statue of ) 79 cognition, situated 56 Cold Rush 100 CoLED (Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design), University of California 55 collaboration 56–9 collaborative design approaches 24 collaborative imagining 56 Collaborative ranking game 138–9 collaborative research 58 collaborative work 9 communication and 84 community collaboration 59 productive encounters and 58 Trade is Sublime and 78 workshops and 58, 100, 101–5 collateral knowledge 37 Collingswood, R.G. 67 communication, collaborative work and 84 community collaboration 59 complexity, of the scenographic spectacle 18 conceptual design 60–1 conditional form, theater and the 78 connection, webs of 48 contact improvisation 40, 44–5 Conversation objects games 137–8 Conversation Pieces 6 Cornell University Law School, Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture 116 costume, use of 18 crafts 67 creativity, in design 61 critical design 15, 61 cultivation process 53 cultural anchors 82 cut-up techniques 126

150

dance Trade is Sublime and 83 wreckings 127 Debord, Guy 5 decision-making, collaboration and 57 deferred authority 126–7 Deleuze, Gilles 64–5 Denis, Maurice 73 Descent 14 design affective potential of 35

anthropology and 2–3, 4, 29 collaborative design approaches 24 conceptual design 60–1 creativity in 61 critical design 15, 61 design-based practices 9, 23–4, 53 design-based workshops 9–10 (see also workshops) design briefs 62, 107–8 design fictions 63 design thinking 9, 55, 58 designed interface 23–4 designed interventions 3 ethnographic research conditioned by 28 ethnography and 2, 10, 45 ethnography by design and design practices 53 human-centered design (HCD) 3, 22, 127 industry-directed 60 knowledge production and 62 naturalistic scenic design 30–1 participatory 3 problem-solving and 59–60 social inquiry in 8, 15 speculative design 62–4, 111 user-receivers and design-creators 37 as a way of knowing 2 Design a store game 138 Design Interactions program 61, 63 designers collaborating with anthropologists 58 ethnography and 101–2 outcomes and 67 Despoiled Shore Medeamaterial Landscape with Argonauts 20 Dessen, Michael 125 details, scenography and 23, 24 detournément 5, 53, 126 Digital Natives 104 The Dignity of Labor 73 discourse analysis 101 Dishman, Eric 116 disturbances, subtle or partial 53 do Prado, Victor 72, 90, 96, 97 Donahue, Sean 109, 125 dreamscapes 18, 19 Duchamp, Marcel 122 Dunne, Anthony 15, 55, 61, 63, 117

duration experiments with 15 scenography and 21 durational immersion 23 Economy of Words 100 El Lissitzky 18 encounters, ethnography and 4 (see also productive encounters) Enlightenment era scenography 17–18 EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) 5 Epic theater 19 epistemology 2 espectro visible [~750 nm] 123 ethical challenges 7 ethics of representation 29 Ethnocharette Series 55 ethnographers as participant observers 53 the task of 1, 23 ethnography co-ethnography 127 design and 2, 10, 45 designed environments and 35 designers and 101–2 ethnographic projects 126 ethnographic research 1–2, 28, 58 human-centered design (HCD) 3, 22, 127 participant observation 22 productive encounters and 6, 8 revelatory alienation and 14 scenography and 8, 22–4 speculation and 51 the utility of 5 ethnography by design, introduction to 3–6 Everaert, Carly 125–6 “Everyone Has to Follow the Same Rules” 41, 42, 82, 86, 87 expanded scenography 4–5, 7, 13–15, 20, 21 expression, discursive/sensory modes of 57 Exquisite Corpse Drawing 133

Gallegos, Daniel 47 games 99 cents game 131–2 board game collection 128 Build a Trap game 109 Collaborative ranking game 138–9 Conversation objects games 137–8 Design a store game 138 Kittens Purr Cutely on Fried Grit Salad 130–1 Magazine 129, 130 Object myths game 132–3 Origin stories game 135–6 Paper telephone game 132 pile-sorting and taxonomy game 109 Reenact a history game 136–7 Strange bedfellows game 133 Three scenes game 135 Timelining game 134 Geertz, C. 1 gentrification 48 Goldsmiths, University of London 56 Gonzaga, Vespasiano 16–17 Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, & Social Thought, New School for Social Research 55 Guattari, Felix 64–5 Guixe, Marti 111, 118 Gunn et al. 2 Handel, George Frideric 17–18 Harvard University, Sensory Ethnography Lab 55 Hauptversammlung (Meeting) 122 Hegel, Christine Trade is Sublime and 32, 37, 38, 40, 74–6, 78, 80, 82–4, 88–92, 96–7 Yes, We’re Open and 46, 49, 50, 57 Hezard, Philippe 121 highest and best use (HBU) 111 Hirschhorn, Thomas 22 Holmes, Doug 23, 100, 108

Index

fabrication 65 facilitators, workshops 111–12 Festspielhaus, Bayreuth 18 forced perspective 17 forced translation 123–4

Ford, Colin 109 Fracaro, Nick 20 frames, alternative 121–3 Friend, Jennifer 28, 29 Fuchs, Elinor 21 future-possible 3 futures, alternate 18

151

Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County 29, 31, 33 homelessness 28, 29, 33–4 housing, unstable 28 Howard, Pamela 16 Hudson River School 19 human-centered design (HCD) 3, 22, 127 Human-Centered Language and Good Aging (HCLGA) 100, 105, 109 human relations, as a medium 15, 19 Hutchins, E. 56 ideas, materialization and 66 IDEO 60 illumination 18 imagining, collaborative 57 Incubator for Critical Inquiry into Technology and Ethnography (INCITE) 56 industry-directed design 60 informance technique 116 Ingold, Tim 4, 15, 60, 64–5 inner publics 37, 49, 59, 88–92 installation art, expanded scenography and 21 inversion, social 120–1 Irvine, University of California 55, 100 iteration 66–8

Index

Jackson, Jesse 109 Je ne suis pas un homme facile (I Am Not an Easy Man) 120–1 Johnston, Bonnie 116 Jones, Adrian 50 Journal of Sociolinguistics 52 Jyväskylä, University of 100, 105

152

Kester, Grant 6, 19 Kittens Purr Cutely on Fried Grit Salad game 130–1 Kjaersgaard, Mette 99 knowledge collateral knowledge 37 ethnographic 14, 66 knowledge production collaborative design approaches and 24 design and 62 knowledge pieces 99–100 participatory 6, 13 scenography and 13, 15 Kögler, Hans-Herber 6

LA Has Faults 124–5 Laboratory for Speculative Ethnology, Pasadena 51, 55, 101, 106 Lafrance, Noemie 14 Lamy, Pascal 36, 72 language(s) interpretations/translations 123 World Trade Organization 89–90, 92 Lantz, Michael 80 legitimacy 7 lighting 18 literary aleatory devices 126 Living Theater 19 Lotker, Sonja 15 Louis-David, Jacques 18 Luke, Anguiano 30–1, 32 Magazine game 129, 130 Making 64–5 Man Controlling Trade 78, 80 mapping projects, performative 13 Marcus, George 214 Sq. Ft. and 35 Ethnocharette Series 55 ethnographic research and 7 the field and 3 people-centered design and ethnography and 23 research practice and 2 Trade is Sublime and 36, 37–8, 39, 40, 42, 43–4, 45, 71–2, 74, 75, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84, 88, 90–1, 96–7 Marshall, J. Howard III 101 materialization practices 4, 64–6 materials, scenographic 21 McKinney, Joslin 14 meaning-making, scenography and 13 meanings, actions and 1 Media Design Practices (MDP) program 100 Meireles, Cildo 123 memory boards 49–50 Mendelsohn, Emily 57 Meridian 180 116–17 metaphors 65, 135 Metropolis II 116 models 26, 64, 78, 116–17 moments of fascination 42, 43, 44 monumentality 78, 80, 81 More, Thomas 17

Müller, Heiner 20 multi-investigator studies 127 multiples 82 Murphy, Keith 23, 55, 111 Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo 123 Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto 123 narrative strategy 119 naturalism 24 naturalistic scenic design 30–1 Nauruzbayeva, Zhanara 47 Neher, Caspar 19, 124 Neue Sachlichkeit 19 New School for Social Research, Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, & Social Thought 55 99 cents game 131–2 “No Decision is Taken Until Everyone Agrees” 41, 42, 43, 44, 70, 82 Object myths game 132–3 Obrist, Hans-Ulrich 22 Ojasoo, Tiit 120 opera 17–18 Origin stories game 135–6 Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) 105 Osorio, Pepón 32 others, the homeless as 29 Otto, T. 104 outcomes, designers and 67 outer publics 37, 49, 59 Outre Terre 74

qualitative research 5 Rabinow, P. 3 Raby, Fiona 15, 55, 61, 63, 117 radical simplification 119–20 randomization 125 readymades 122 reciprocal elucidation 6 reciprocal exchange 48

Index

Palmer, Scott 14 Papalio, Carmen 123 Paper telephone game 132 Parrott, Erica 133 participant observation 22 participation, deferred authority and 126 participatory art 6, 7 participatory design 3 participatory knowledge 6, 13 past, the present and 1 peacocking 43 Pelosi, Alexandra 29, 31 Penny, Simon 109 Pérez-Esteve, Maria 88, 89, 90, 97 performance, scenography and 16

Performative Mapping 12 performative mapping projects 13 perspective, forced 17 Pietikäinen, Sari 98, 100 Piitulainen, Jukka 90–1, 92 pile-sorting and taxonomy game 109 Platform Scenography 13 politics ethnography by design and 9 of representation 29 scenography and 18 Pourazar, Kayvon 42, 43 Pourriat, Eleonore 120 power relations, symbolic representations of 78 Prague Quadrennial for Performance Design and Space (PQ) 13, 14, 15, 125 present, the past and 1 problem-setting/problem-solving 59–62, 107 productive encounters collaboration and 58 ethnography and 6, 8 explained 4 general approach to 45 as prototypes 67–8 term 27 Trade is Sublime and 71 workshops and 100, 112 Project Hope Alliance (PHA) 28, 29, 35 projects cross-disciplinary 53 ethnographic 126 Protokoll, Rimini 122 prototyping, Trade is Sublime and 78–85 provocation, 214 Sq. Ft. and 35 proxemic play 124–5 publics engagement of 4 inner/outer publics 37, 49, 59, 88–92

153

Index

Red Shift I: Impregnation 123 reductio ad absurdum 119 Reenact a history game 136–7 reflexive turn 5 relational aesthetics 126 relationships, collaborative 57 (see also collaboration) Renaissance theater 17 representation, politics and ethics of 29 representational technologies 116 research anthropological 1–2, 62 collaborative 58 ethnographic 1–2, 7, 28, 58 multi-investigator studies 127 qualitative 5 team-based 56 Research Network for Design Anthropology 55–6 Rethorst, Susan 127 revolutions, the staging of 18 Richland, Justin 100, 101, 123 Richland, Kent 123, 134 Riles, Annelise 116 Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (KADK) 55 Ryan, Noah 133

154

Sabbioneta 16–17 Scamozzi, Vincenzo 16–17 scenery 21 scenic design, naturalistic 30–1 scenographers collaborative imagining and 56–7 problem-solving/problem-setting and 61 scenography 13–24 aesthetics and 13, 21 anthropology and 7, 8, 15 as authorship 19 defined 16 design briefs 62 details and 23, 24 Enlightenment era 17–18 ethnography and 8, 22–4 expanded scenography 4–5, 7, 13–15, 20, 21 genealogy of 16–20 inversion and 120 investigating public space and 13 knowledge production and 13, 15

meaning-making and 13 performance and 16 politics and 18 proxemics 124 scenographic craft 1 scenographic gestures 21 scenographic thinking 20–2 social turn in 8, 15, 22 speculation and 63 supplemental nature of 20–1 term 20 theater and 16, 17 as a way of knowing 8 Schafer, Gabriele 20 Schechner, Richard 19 Schnittker, Kirsten 42, 86, 87 scientification, of the theater 19 Scorestreams 125 See For Yourself 123–4 Sehgal, Tino 22, 126 Semper, Ene-Liis 120 Sensory Ethnography Lab, Harvard University 55 sensory limitation 123–4 ~750 nm [espectro visible] 123 Short Organum 19 site-specific practices 14 situated cognition 56 situationalism 5 slicing techniques 126 Smith, R.C. 104 Snajdr, Ed 48–9, 50, 52–3, 57, 108 social contracts, collaboration and 59 social encounters, designed spaces for 35 social engagement, art and 6 social fictions/social facts 13 social goods 7 social inquiry 214 Sq. Ft. and 36 in art and design 8, 15 democratic collaboration in 6 productive encounters and 4 social inversion 120–1 social life, scenography and 22 social practice, deferral of authority and 126 social questions, provocation of 29 social science, theater as 19 social sciences 7 social, the turn towards the 8, 15, 22

Société Républicaine et Populaire des Arts 18 software phase 46 The Solar Kitchen Restaurant for Lapin Kulta 111, 117, 118 spaces naturalistic scenic design and 31 spatially engaged practices 14 third spaces 3 use of alternative 14–15 spectacle 5 spectators, outer publics as 37 speculation controlled 3 design practice and 62–4 ethnography and 51 speculative caring tool 65 speculative design 62–4, 111 speculative fiction 111 Speculative Object 98 speculative thinking and making 49 Trade is Sublime and 74–7 stages, proscenium-like 22 The Stern v. Marshall Archive (SvMA) 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 114, 123, 134 Strange bedfellows game 133 Strömmer, Maiju 65 studio-workshops 50 (see also workshops) subjectivity, in scenographic effects 19 sublime, the 19 Suchman, L. 2 Suits of Inquiry 106 Superstudio 61 Surfing the City 125–6 symbolic representations, of power relations 78

Uncle Vanya xiv, 1 Unified Estonia 119, 120

Index

team-based research 56 Teatro Ojo 123 “10 Common Misunderstandings About the WTO” 81, 82 Term-Setting 112 theater the conditional form and 78 off-site movement 19–20 scenography and 16, 17 scientification of 19 theater design 1 Theater am Schiffbauerdamm 19 Theater No99 119, 120

thick descriptions 1, 4 Thieves Theater 20 thinking design thinking 9, 55, 58 imaginative 111 with others 56 scenographic 20–2 speculative 49 third spaces 3 Three scenes game 135 Tiffany, Anguiano 32 The Tijuana Project 89 TILT 127 time constraints, workshops 111 time, scenography and 21 Timelining game 134 Tiravanija, Rirkrit 126 Trade is Sublime 36–45 aesthetics and 40, 42 capturing the effect of 96 design constraints and 63 details of 81, 93, 94, 95 developing and exhibiting 9 didactic panel from 94 filming of 86–7 inner publics 88–92 installation 91, 93–5 model-making for 26 productive encounters and 71 prompt for 71–3 proposal for 75, 77 prototyping and 78–85 reception 96–7 as a “second-act” project 8 sketches for 85 speculation and 74–7 translation cards 92 TRADERS (Training Art and Design Researchers for Participation in Public Space) projects, Netherlands 56 tradition, behavior and 1 traps, as a linguistic symbol/drawn representation 65–6 Trinch, Shonna 48–9, 50, 52–3, 108 214 Sq. Ft. 8, 28–36

155

United Nations (UN), model 116 United States expanded scenography 14 homelessness in California 28–9, 35 scenography and 21 unresolved emergents 1 user-receivers, design-creators and 37 users, human-centered design (HCD) 22 utility, aesthetics and 5 visualization tools 78 Voltaire 119–20

Index

Wagner, Richard 18–19 Wakeford, Nina 56 What is Scenography? 16 wicked problems 6, 102 Willis, W. and T. 79 WochenKlausur arts collective 6 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 37, 49, 88, 89 working softly 53 workshops aleatory devices 125–6 alternative frames 121–3 collaboration and 58, 100, 101–5 creating a design brief 107–8 deferred authority 126–7 design-based 9–10 documentation of 112 facilitators 111–12 forced translation/sensory limitation 123–4 HCLGA workshops 60

156

planning and implementing a studio-workshop 100 preparing the studio 105–6 productive encounters and 100, 112 prompts and constraints 109–11 proxemic play 124–5 radical simplification 119–20 recruiting participants and expectations for collaboration 101–5 social inversion 120–1 studio-based 99 technological/material constraints 117–18 time constraints 111 warm-ups 108–9 Yes, We’re Open 50–3, 57, 100, 108–9, 110 World Trade Organization, Geneva 36, 37, 38, 39–40, 43–4, 71, 72, 81–2, 83–4, 89–90, 92, 97 wreckings 127 Writing Culture 2, 14 writing, scenography as 15 Yamamoto, Nami 42, 43, 44, 86 Yes, We’re Open 45–54 design interface of 63–4 ethnography by design and 49 fictional store in model form from 52 productive encounters and 8 Resent and Adore cards 131 workshops 50–3, 57, 100, 108–9, 110 Yun, Diana 47 Zarritt, Jesse 43, 70, 86, 87

157

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159

160

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