Beneficial appropriation and corporate exploitation: Exploring the use of ethnographic methods in art, craft and design

Abstract

Recently there has been a move towards incorporating ethnographic practices into the research phase of the design process. Groundbreaking work has been done by design consultancies like IDEO (2001), and by trend-predictors such as The Future Laboratory. Large corporations (BMW, Philips and Mark & Spencer) employ ethnographic methods to gather data on the use of their products, their retail outlets, and their customer's relationship with their brand identity. Video diaries, ethnographic fieldwork, and co-design tool kits (Sanders, 2002) are rapidly becoming the new means for product and service development. Though there are many advantages to the incorporation of anthropological perspectives and working methods into the design environment, (e.g. providing the design team with a more holistic and more meaningful approach to problem formulation) there is also a need to look critically at this migration of practices. This paper will explore the re-contextualisation of these methods and will examine if this is merely a further refinement of strategy, employed by a corporate class, to maintain and stimulate the late-capitalist mode of consumption. These methods may thus be the latest addition to the array of marketing tools, co-existing with the traditional focus group, the market research questionnaire, concept testing, customer satisfaction studies, and so on. The paper will also seek to compare and contrast this migration into the design profession with the application of ethnographic approaches to identity and place as employed by arts and crafts practitioners. Both of which disciplines, unlike design, are much more aligned with the transparency of cultural production of pre-industrial settings. Ethnographic methods provide powerful means for designers, artists and craft people alike, to interpret and understand specific social networks and symbolic structures, and they are able to translate these into meaningful visual expressions of personal and community identity. The paper will use a few examples from design and art in order to illustrate the diverse uses of ethnography; including a large community arts project, completed by the author, at Ullapool, a small fishing village on the West coast of Scotland.