The aim of this article is to indicate the benefits that ethnographic exploration of the design process can bring to social design studies. Drawing on the work of authors writing on the basis of pragmatic approaches, science and technology studies (STS), and actor–network theory (ANT), the text analyses design as a socio-technical and situated practice of “ordering things and people” and thus also of negotiating and shaping a common world. The text considers both ethnographic reports, in which researchers have tried to understand and describe how designers work, and a completely different research area – the anthropology of medical practices (in the spirit of ANT, as proposed by Annemarie Mol). The article tries to show that the findings from this field are quite similar to the reflections of ethnographic studies on the design process and offer promising insights for a relational ontology of design that can be studied empirically.
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