It struck me while reading Wendy Gunn’s Design Anthropology that I was taking two columns of notes: one for thoughts on anthropology and one for product management.
My academic background in anthropology led me to pick up Gunn’s book in the first place as a casual read, but I found many insights and ideas to apply at work. My organization serves a global market, which means we must be sensitive to cultural and socioeconomic contexts where we operate. Anthropology is good at this. Anthropology is specifically interested in culture, but design anthropology is an emergent subfield that can mean a few different things. It’s a strange conglomerate of “design” and “anthropology” with the modifier on either the first or latter term. Is design anthropology an anthropological way of doing design, a design-oriented way of doing anthropology, or an anthropological study of people doing design?
Whichever way one interprets or theorizes design anthropology, quite a few concepts stood out to me as helpful in how I could improve my approach to product management. In my organization, there has been some disagreement around the boundaries between and within the disciplines of “product”. To reduce any confusion, this is my position and understanding of these disciplines (and please appreciate the lack of nuance):
- Product managers solve for the future business promise
- Product owners solve for the present business promise
- Product developers solve for delivering the present business promise
- Product marketers solve for utilizing the business promise
Regardless of titles, different people may and will be involved in each of these problem solving pursuits. Small teams require members to “wear many hats.” Large teams may fumble, place, and displace ownership. If anything, my short-and-sweet definition above is about where decision making in these areas should be – not as a framework for excluding segments of a team from participating in the problem solving process.
The philosophy of design anthropology
What, then, does design anthropology have to offer the discipline of product management? I suspect quite a bit more than I’m able to capture here, so take this as a first iteration. An MVP, if you will.
Culture and design do not need to be seen as separate, especially where technology and change is concerned. Wendy Gunn describes culture and design as a complex entanglement that involves the formation and transformation of objects, histories, meaning, and space. Yet, though we readily identify culture as an important part of design practice, the reverse is sometimes less obvious. “By designing objects, technologies, and systems, we are in fact designing cultures of the future.” (Gunn 2020)
Meanwhile, anthropology’s gift to the world is the ethnography: a detailed documentation of a culture or community over a long period of participant observation. Ethnography is increasingly used in the enterprise to understand a product’s market, customers, or users in depth. But ethnography is not free from criticism. The anthropologist is not an objective scribe of culture and its goings-on; the anthropologist is a person with their own subjective and biased point of view. The quality of an ethnography may also be affected by the ways in which a community may alter their behavior in the presence of an outsider, leading to bad data. For example, did women in the community speak with the male anthropologist in complete transparency? Was the visiting anthropologist privy to community gossip about a leader, or their informant?
In addition to criticism of the ethnographic method there is also criticism of the ethnographic report as a product. From a temporal perspective, once complete the ethnography exists as a subjective (and possibly biased) description that is tied to the anthropologist’s experience of a community at a specific time, place, and mindset. Ethnography is retrospective, but design is about the present and future. So, design anthropology takes a fundamentally different approach to ethnography.
“Since the present includes both its past and its future potential, anthropologists have to develop ways to include the anticipation and creation of new forms in their ethnographic descriptions and theorizing.”
Wendy Gunn, Design Anthropology (2020)
Caroline Gatt and Tim Ingold argue that anthropology by ethnography must be replaced with anthropology by means of design. (Gunn 2020) This would rely on a practice of correspondence with a community as they move forward in pursuit of their dreams, goals, aspirations, and objectives as a group. The goal of the anthropologist, then, is less about a tidy, descriptive, detailed report upon completion of their fieldwork. Instead, the goal is to be part of transformative actions and facilitate positive change or progress toward a community’s goal. In this way, the ethnography is no longer a descriptive document. It becomes a tool to foster mutual understanding, challenge assumptions, and close the gap between observation and understanding. Possible questions that might spark a design anthropologist’s interest include:
How does a neighborhood come together to design a new community park?
How does a multinational corporation create a flagship product to break into a new country’s market?
How do farmers in Idaho organize and lobby the state and federal government?
As you can see, design anthropologists aren’t necessarily interested in long-term fieldwork with one particular social-cultural group. Design anthropologists seek out shorter field studies and interventions in different settings. “Designing and intervening in social and cultural contexts is in many ways a large leap for anthropologists. However, we consider this a necessary step in the face of contemporary local-global transformations and the corresponding academic requirement of developing responsive conceptual frameworks and interventionist practices.” (Gunn 2020)
A toolkit for the social researcher (or product manager)
Classic ethnographic methods include participant observation, qualitative interviews, photovoice, video recordings, and surveys. Gatt and Ingold call for “observant participation” in lieu of classic participant observation. Whatever the employed methods, both the product manager and social researcher are expected to develop expert knowledge about a given population, described respectively as a market segment or social group.
Kyle Kilbourn argues that design anthropology is a style of knowing, a style that I think could be applied to knowledge in both product and academia. The similarities are explicit and implicit. According to Kilbourn, knowledge is gathered through modes of intervention which include:
- Perceptual synthesis – a visual means of conceptual association and synthesis
- Experience juxtaposing – the comparing of experiences
- Potential relationing – performance as a way to explore possible futures
On a surface level, these methods have much in common with methods of product design. Perceptual synthesis is much like concept modeling or a research synthesis exercise; experience juxtaposing is much like a diary study; potential relationing is much like responding to a scenario or demoing a prototype. Where Kilbourn’s theory of design anthropology shines for product management is defining consecutive movements in discovery; “first into a specific collaboration and context of practice (‘moving in’), then to other contexts that relate to the first one (‘moving along’), and finally ‘moving out’ to the critical exploration of potentiality.” (Gunn 2020)
This is key. The product manager is confronted with many potentialities, often ready formed and advocated for by stakeholders. The design anthropologist approaches the problem of problem-solving in communities through consecutive movements of collaborative practice, relationship to different contexts, and finally exploring the agreed upon solution met by all. Design anthropology as a practice towards a way of knowing positions the discipline as an active generator and facilitator of future possibilities – much like the product manager should be for their team.
Design anthropology as a philosophy of product management
Product management is a cross functional role that combines business, technology, design, and (in my organization) content. Design anthropology when applied to product does not address all of these necessary skills. However, design ways of thinking are increasingly sought after in disciplines that aren’t explicitly design. From creative industries to non-profits, there is an increasing focus on the potential for design and innovation to address pressing issues. (Gunn 2020)
There are a few ways in which I’ve observed design anthropology to directly or philosophically relevant to my role as a product manager.
- Learning is Data Gathering
Much of product management is about applying one’s implicit understandings of a problem in the forming of a solution. Product managers are not necessarily idea-generators; they refine, perceive, create, and transform original and offered solutions. The problem arises when a product team responsible for executing on these solutions doesn’t have access to those implicit understandings of the market or process of thought. This can slow down development, cause misalignment in objectives, and erode at how shared an outcome is across a team.
Anthropology can inform product and service development through clearly framing one’s complex understanding of a social, cultural, or user market. Design anthropology is particularly helpful to product managers because of its concerns for the “institutionalization of insights, how they are made tangible and how to trace deliverables”, which create hard data that is often necessary to generate buy-in from development. (Gunn and Donovan 2012) “Underpinning our inquiry is the idea that meaningful relationships between people, things and the environment emerge within and through everyday activities.”
Both design anthropologists and product managers must engage with people where a problem is not always apparent or readily defined. Latent pain points or needs must be uncovered. Product managers learn through interacting with customers and can expand on this to include a conscious use of observant participation to improve their data collection, which in turn can better inform their recommendations. These forms of knowledge can be analyzed by the team and can act as an invitation for team members to share their questions that would merit further investigation.
Ethnographic data methods make a conscious effort to capture what is implicit or taken for granted. By bringing forward what was in the background, a commitment to developing transformative actions in the product can be resolutely aligned to a shared outcome by the product team.
- Design for Possible Futures
When the present is understood as emergent from the past, specialized and localized knowledge can be transformed into design strategies that can be iterated on in flow with the future.
Though design acts to solve present problems, it shares a future-oriented outlook with design anthropology and product management. Future design is collaborative. Anthropology borrowed many tools from design to fill gaps in its toolkit for engaging with people in their processes of future-making. Intervention and transformation of a social reality requires working in multidisciplinary teams as cocreator, facilitator, and innovator. (Gunn 2020) This is where both the anthropologist and product manager occupy space.
Both must analyze many possible futures against the common goal or vision held by a community, business, or persona. By incorporating an interest in historical/cultural context, social entanglements, and progress as a process, product managers can grow a skill for nuanced product sensitivity. For a product to be successful, one could argue that it must have a place in the future-making of its users and market ecosystem. Market fit means a natural fit based on shared goals.
“Designers have to address the people and situations at hand, and the desires and needs at hand.”
Erik Stolterman
- Intervention as Iteration
Design and innovation is not just about the generation of new things, it is a process of inspiring transformation and change. Our old human troubles will follow into new mediums, services, products, or telecommunications. We will continue to be dissatisfied in our pursuit of paradise.
Design anthropologists take part in the whole process of design, from data gathering, workshopping, and developing prototypes. Their contribution is to challenge the ways that data can be collected, analyzed, and transformed – moving from a sole focus on product specifications to actively addressing a corporate setting’s challenges of collaboration and power relations. (Gunn 2020) The product manager must also see through delivering a promise, idea, or vision from start to finish. When effective, they resist the pressure to be conduit for getting feature requests into the ears of developers and on the roadmap. They must also challenge their teams.
Ingold describes design as a process of people attuning themselves to their environments (physical and phenomenal); this sensitivity to the internal workings of the organization is required to make actionable roadmap plans. “Designing and making,” argue Gunn and Donovan, “are interwoven into everyday contexts of use.” Through observant participation within the organization, the product manager becomes a partner to specialists across the business. This is an opportunity to offer empathetic support and build relationships, but also to identify assumptions, patterns, opportunities, and new frameworks for the development of design ideas.
“New inventions do not release us from old troubles.”
John Durham Peters
- Tech for Good
This one’s a bit of a wildcard. I don’t believe that every product, design, or service needs to solve or should even attempt to solve societal problems. Design anthropology does strive for this, however it is less about solving systemic issues as it is about finding community-based solutions to problems of that community’s immediate concern.
Because design anthropologists accept that their very presence among a social group will have some effect on the social group’s behavior, they aim for their presence to invite or facilitate a positive change. To be an ethical disruptor requires a “unique sensitivity to the value orientations of the various groups affected by design projects – including disempowered groups, consumers, producers, and audiences.” (Gunn 2020) For product managers working in emerging markets across local or global contexts, promises to create “sustainable, innovative, and financially potent solutions to socioeconomic issues around the world” are “compelling and fraught.”
Product management isn’t easy. Yes, the best motivator in a difficult role can be a mission with a valuable societal impact. But product managers should also think about the ways a product or service design can perpetuate social problems – and halt those decisions when uncovered. Products seek market fit; this should be sensitive to the value context and socioeconomic context of that market or population. We can reconceptualize users as skilled practitioners of products and incorporate “different ways of conceiving of, designing and making things” driven by a desire to enrich rather than erode the user’s skillful experience of a product. “In so doing, a meaningful relation is made through use.” (Gunn and Donovan 2012)
Dismantling white supremacy, regardless of your race, means dismantling deep-rooted ideas and ideologies that have come to us through media, education and even technology. It means questioning every part of ourselves to see the world as it ought to be rather than how it was taught to be.
It is within the power of design to change some of the systems that have created our current reality. Designers can change products, experiences, as well as the world. When we can rethink the connotations we associate with color, reexamine the language we associate with people and destroy the imagery that has been used to control, we can finally start to create a design system that positions people of color as users of the great American experience instead of components within it.
JR Miller, Racism for Designers: Dismantling the Design System of White Supremacy, 2020
TLDR
There are things that design anthropology doesn’t offer product managers. As an academic discipline, it lacks the business orientation that product managers demand; there is no framework from design anthropology for creating success metrics, pivoting, or how to juggle conflicting needs on a roadmap. Where design anthropology shines is in the design element; from discovery, service design, product design, market research, and – in my opinion – how to be a useful member of a multidisciplinary product team.
“Making is always in a process of transformation, it is fluid and improvisational. Making thus gives way to using and designing as a process of carrying on whereby things are not actually finished. As he says: finishing is never finished.”
Wendy Gunn and Jared Donovan,
I suspect that human-centered product management has a lot to learn from design anthropology. There is a shared goal of being outcome-driven and making tangible the intangible. Above all, though, the interventionist ethics and methods of the design anthropologist struck me as qualities sought in product leaders and discovery facilitators.
References
Gunn, Wendy. Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice. Routledge; 1st edition, 2013. Ebook.
Gunn, Wendy and Jared Donovan. Design and Anthropology (Anthropological Studies of Creativity and Perception). Routledge; 1st edition, 2012. Ebook.
Miller, JR. “Racism for Designers: Dismantling the Design System of White Supremacy.” Print Magazine. July 28, 2020. Web.
Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. The University of Chicago Press, 2015. Print.
Stolterman, Erik. “The Nature of Design Practice and Implications for Interaction Design Research.” International Journal of Design, Vol 2, No 1. 2008. Web.
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