Anthropological research or design research?

Because design research is an iterative process, it's hard to predict how the service, product or experience will look when finished. Although the prototype serves as a guide for the finished product, the journey - understanding who should be involved, what their needs are, which spaces they inhabit and why we should be there offering our services - is just beginning.

I was particularly interested in the last challenge. As a discipline, anthropology has a self-awareness of its authority and intellectual and economic privilege. But "designers are by nature of their trainings and modes of practice, comfortable with the need to intervene into the context of what they are exploring.”[1] (Hunt, 2011, 35). For the next couple of months I struggled finding a balance between the anthropologist and the designer battling inside of me.

Something that helped me ease this feeling of wanting and not wanting to interfere was to go back to the field and interact with the community we had planned to engage. Laila, a very enthusiastic member of the group, contacted organizations working with youth in Harlem and opened a channel of connection. I volunteered to reach out to Thomas Edwards, who worked at Exodus Transitional Community, a grassroots organization dedicated to facilitating the re-entry of formerly incarcerated youth into mainstream society.

Although I'm normally comfortable conducting interviews, somehow this time I felt out of place. Perhaps it is the feeling that anthropologists have when they are immersing in a new territory. How could I create a bond with my interviewee, while being distanced as a white Brazilian woman?

[1] Hunt, J (2011), “Prototyping the Social: Temporality and Speculative Futures at the Intersection of Design and Culture,” in A. Clarke (ed.), Design Anthropology: Object Culture in 21st Century, Wien and New York: Springer, 33-44