Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. A portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions.
In anthropology, folkloristics, and the social and behavioral sciences, emic and etic refer to two kinds of field research done and viewpoints obtained.
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behavior.
Industrial design is a process of design applied to physical products that are to be manufactured by mass production. It is the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features, which takes place in advance of the manufacture or production of the product. It consists purely of repeated, often automated, replication, while craft-based design is a process or approach in which the form of the product is determined by the product's creator largely concurrent with the act of its production.
Participatory design is an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders in the design process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is usable. Participatory design is an approach which is focused on processes and procedures of design and is not a design style. The term is used in a variety of fields e.g. software design, urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, sustainability, graphic design, planning, and health services development as a way of creating environments that are more responsive and appropriate to their inhabitants' and users' cultural, emotional, spiritual and practical needs. It is also one approach to placemaking.
Visual anthropology is a subfield of social anthropology that is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mid-1990s, new media. More recently it has been used by historians of science and visual culture. Although sometimes wrongly conflated with ethnographic film, visual anthropology encompasses much more, including the anthropological study of all visual representations such as dance and other kinds of performance, museums and archiving, all visual arts, and the production and reception of mass media. Histories and analyses of representations from many cultures are part of visual anthropology: research topics include sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings and photographs. Also within the province of the subfield are studies of human vision, properties of media, the relationship of visual form and function, and applied, collaborative uses of visual representations.
Service design is the activity of planning and arranging people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality, and the interaction between the service provider and its users. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.
Design management is a field of inquiry that uses design, strategy, project management and supply chain techniques to control a creative process, support a culture of creativity, and build a structure and organization for design. The objective of design management is to develop and maintain an efficient business environment in which an organization can achieve its strategic and mission goals through design. Design management is a comprehensive activity at all levels of business, from the discovery phase to the execution phase. "Simply put, design management is the business side of design. Design management encompasses the ongoing processes, business decisions, and strategies that enable innovation and create effectively-designed products, services, communications, environments, and brands that enhance our quality of life and provide organizational success." The discipline of design management overlaps with marketing management, operations management, and strategic management.
Lucy Suchman is Professor Emerita of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom, also known for her work at Xerox PARC in the 1980s and 90s.
Biocultural anthropology can be defined in numerous ways. It is the scientific exploration of the relationships between human biology and culture. "Instead of looking for the underlying biological roots of human behavior, biocultural anthropology attempts to understand how culture affects our biological capacities and limitations."
Cognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology and biological anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation, and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences often through close collaboration with historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists, and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge, in the sense of what they think subconsciously, changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them.
Education sciences, also known as education studies, education theory, and traditionally called pedagogy, seek to describe, understand, and prescribe education policy and practice. Education sciences include many topics, such as pedagogy, andragogy, curriculum, learning, and education policy, organization and leadership. Educational thought is informed by many disciplines, such as history, philosophy, sociology, and psychology.
Human-centered design is an approach to problem-solving commonly used in process, product, service and system design, management, and engineering frameworks that develops solutions to problems by involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process. Human involvement typically takes place in initially observing the problem within context, brainstorming, conceptualizing, developing of concepts and implementing the solution.
Living labs are open innovation ecosystems in real-life environments using iterative feedback processes throughout a lifecycle approach of an innovation to create sustainable impact. They focus on co-creation, rapid prototyping & testing and scaling-up innovations & businesses, providing joint-value to the involved stakeholders. In this context, living labs operate as intermediaries/orchestrators among citizens, research organisations, companies and government agencies/levels.
Design studies can refer to any design-oriented studies but is more formally an academic discipline or field of study that pursues, through both theoretical and practical modes of inquiry, a critical understanding of design practice and its effects in society.
Design culture is an organizational culture focused on approaches that improve customer experiences through design. In every firm, the design culture is of significance as it allows the company to understand users and their needs. Integration of design culture in any organisation aims at creating experiences that add value to their respective users. In general, design culture entails undertaking design as the forefront of every operation in the organisation, from strategy formulation to execution. Every organisation is responsible for ensuring a healthy design culture through the application of numerous strategies. For instance, an organisation should provide a platform that allows every stakeholder to engage in design recesses. Consequently, employees across the board need to incorporate design thinking, which is associated with innovation and critical thinking.
“The Art of Hosting” is a method of participatory leadership for facilitating group processes, as used by a loose-knit community of practitioners. In their method, people are invited into structured conversation about matters they are concerned about while facilitators act as hosts. This community group understands “hosting” as a certain way of facilitation that is supposed to have the capacity of making emerge the collective intelligence that people possess. As an approach to facilitation, The Art of Hosting is focused on “improved, conscious, and kind ways of growing a capacity to support a deliberate wisdom, unique to being together,” and also relies on a specific attitude to process organization. The practitioners see this methodology of engagement as a way to bring people in complex, social systems into convergence on collective actions, with the participants discovering and proposing their own solutions.
Charles A. Darrah is an emeritus professor of San Jose State University and an applied anthropologist who has done research on manufacturing and the service industry within Silicon Valley. Previously he was the chair of the Anthropology Department at San Jose State and a lecturer who supported students by understanding the value of their skills. He has authored and co-authored several books on the working lives of Americans and skills that can be applied to other types of work.
Sarah Pink is a British-born social scientist, ethnographer and social anthropologist, now based in Australia, known for her work using visual research methods such as photography, images, video and other media for ethnographic research in digital media and new technologies. She has an international reputation for her work in visual ethnography and her book Doing Visual Ethnography, first published in 2001 and now in its 4th edition, is used in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, photographic studies and media studies. She has designed or undertaken ethnographic research in UK, Spain, Australia, Sweden, Brazil and Indonesia.
