Ethnography by Design: Scenographic Experiments in Fieldwork

by Christine Hegel (Author), Luke Cantarella (Author), George E. Marcus (Author)

• New

  Hardcover
  2019

  $116.60

  Book-length investigations into how ethnography can be done usually focus on pragmatic guidance on how to identify informants, conduct interviews, and write field notes. Ethnography by Design instead focuses on the benefits of sustained collaboration, across projects, to ethnographic enquiry, and the possibilities of experimental co-design as part of field research. The book translates specifically scenic design practices, which include processes like speculation, materialization, and iteration, and applies them to ethnographic inquiry, emphasizing both the value of design studio processes and designed field encounters. The authors make it clear that design studio practices allow ethnographers to ask and develop very different questions within their own and others' research and thus, design also offers a framework for shaping the conditions of encounter in ways that make anthropological suppositions tangible and visually apparent. Written by two anthropologists and a designer, and based on their experience of their collective endeavours during three projects, George Marcus, Christine Hegel and Luke Canterella examine their works as a way to continue a broader inquiry into what the practice of ethnography can be in the 21st century, and how any project distinctively moves beyond standard perspectives through its crafted modes of participation and engagement.