“Design Process”: On the Sharing of Social Experience

Abstract

Danish anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup has declared that if “We cannot experience the world from the perspective of others, we can still share their social experience.” My own perspective in the field of design – which involves sharing the social experience of anthropologists in a number of ways – encourages me to offer a phenomenological reflection on the “design process.” My position as an anthropologist and ethnographer combining her research with teaching at a design school has resulted in collaboration with designers in co-taught courses, research projects, exhibitions, and publications. The different pragmatics of ethnography and education have encouraged me to develop tools for a discursive rendering of the processes in which I partake: both for my own research purposes and for designers and design students to use in reflecting on their own activities while working on their projects. “Design process” is an emic, designerly expression, defined by the most prominent writers on the topic. I attempt to reflect on its non-hylemorphic understanding of creativity and its contextualisation within the Ingoldian sense of following the material.