Full Circle Associates

Day 2 afternoon – Cutting-Edge
Christina Wasson, Curator

Introduction to “Cutting-Edge”
What does the cutting edge mean? More than one answer. It has to do with innovation, with newness. The papers in this session showcase this kind of innovation. The domains vary widely, from the authors work practices, products, domains of applications and theoretical frameworks. I want to examine and celebrate this idea of the cutting-edge. It is a relevant ideal at a number of levels.

This conference itself is the first of its kind in our field. We can celebrate being together. It is about a lot of things, including building community. We are all doing that by talking to each other. The theme is sociality. Kind of interesting we are enacting sociality in building connections with each other.

I’m struggling with how to refer to this field. The phrase “design anthropology” but many of us are not anthropologists. Working on how to label and define ourselves. But there is something there. Something is happening. Critical mass. Coalescing. See it in the conference, in the growth of the anthro-design email list (600+ people). The Danish government is looking at creating a research institution around applied business anthropology with a focus on design and innovation issues. Faculty envisioned working in space with project driven by theoretical concerns and responsive to client needs.

Third way of looking at cutting-edge. We’re focus on the field of design. Design itself is about innovation. Develop new concepts for products and services. Looking at our field with an ethnographer’s eye. We have adopted this culture of innovation from design. Open to new ways. Experimenting with methodologies. Part of the time, struggling with the interdisciplinarity – I am trained as an anthropologist. I see design anthropologists really have a lot to offer the rest of applied anthropology. We’ve been inculcated with a disposition to try new things and we can give this to other branches of applied anthropology. We can also learn from older traditions. This applies to other fields.

This ethnographic praxis in industry field is young. I’m thinking it emerged in the early 90’s with the founding of E-Lab in 1994. We’re a young field. As a consequence, many people in the field are fairly young. I think that youth we have works for us in a lot of way… energy, momentum, excitement. At the same time there is a kind of wisdom that comes with experience. We can look at the more mature varieties of practicing anthropology and individuals further along in their career trajectories.

I recent developed a NAPA bulletin, (NAPA – applied anthropology organization). Sort of like a journal, comes out 2x year, focused on one topic like a little book. I developed the next one, working with 11 women and collected their life stories. Auto-ethnography. One of the themes that emerged across their stories, scholar practitioners. They had observed the widespread polarization between academia and industry and they had gone beyond that. They had managed to integrate both. Practitioners interested in scholarship. They had this identity. When Jackie came up with that phrase it articulated something many had felt implicitly and it proved to be a useful tool. I’d like to give that notion to our field of scholar-practitioner. Many already have that integrated, hybrid identity. There is a practical value in making that explicit. I want to relate that to the recent debate on the anthro-design list. What do they have to offer that is different? What is relationship to anthropologists and ethnography? Who can do ethnography? These are not new debates. They are important to us because they have practical consequences. Who gets hired? How to position in the marketplace? Complex debate. Want to highlight – commonly anthropologists give the answer that in the field of design, often ethnography is equated with data collection, but anthropologists do data analysis. It appears that part of the ongoing branding for design anthropologists that they are the analysis experts. Then there is a really good fit with scholar practitioner. If you are going to do analysis, you have to be aware of current theoretical trends and apply theory to solve problems.

The kinds of issues that Nina brought up early – aware of positionality, being reflexive, also relate to things we bring from our theoretical training.

Now I want to problematize the idea of scholar practitioner. Not saying everyone should take on that identity. Some already have it implicit and articulating it can be useful. I don’t think it is useful to build walls within our field – we are interdisciplinary. That is strength. I see this conference itself as an example of scholar practitioner. Scholarly aspect of giving papers at a conference. I see part as building community in a social sense, but also building intellectual community, get ideas from each other and share and move ourselves one step further along the cutting edge.

So what is the cutting edge. It implies a sense of time passing – leading, current practice. But time keeps moving on and it keeps moving at every point. Today’s cutting edge is tomorrow’s old hat. That is not to say old hat is bad. The concept of sociality itself is foundational from the past but still current and useful. So the question becomes, 10 years from now, looking back on 2005 what will they say was cutting edge that became foundational, carried forward.

The 8 quick case studies provide snapshots of areas of innovation, to spark ideas, build intellectual community. They are diverse, cross section of what the practice might look at.

4 papers then quick Q&A, then break, then another 4 papers.

Categories: EPIC2005