So reminiscent of my childhood in a shipbuilding port in the north east of England. My history and childhood seems to be black and white and written now in silver crystals.

Some summary points from my keynote.

How could I not respond to Kenya Hara’s wonderful opening keynote and his emphasis on the dialectic of making and its deep connection with human being? [Link]

The range of research techniques and methods that I have seen gathered under the headings of design thinking, design research, design anthropology, ethnography in industry and similar terms is truly impressive (a neat introduction is the IDEO method cards – [Link] available as an iPhone App – [Link]). The expertise of so many practitioners is exemplary. Academic anthropology can look very narrow and complacent in comparison.

I followed Kenya in focusing less on these processes of research and more on the object of ethnographic research – people, things, places. After all, a most significant drive to research is to improve human-centered design.

I have set myself something of a mission over the last year or so to raise questions about just what the human in human-centered design is. And I suggest that there’s no better place to start than with the Humanities, that treasure house of study of human qualities, experiences and cultural achievement. Questions then of ontology – of human being.

Corinthian aryballos (7th century BCE) – a total social fact – the distribution of human being through things

Archaeology encompasses the Arts and Humanities, the Social, Human and Natural Sciences, and offers a long term perspective. I told a few archaeological stories about things like this little perfume jar (to be found also on my wiki web site – [Link])

Message – think of things as assemblages, bundles of materials, features, potentials, affordances, values, even different times – think of how they gather and connect people and possibility.

Message – think of the human as being distributed through these assemblies and gatherings.

(This is why it is so right to hold that better design will come from an emphasis not so much on a particular product as on what it may offer – focus more on experience, interaction, service, platform – the assemblages.)

A word that means “thing” and captures all this is the Latin RES.

And it is entirely right to think in a collective way – RES PUBLICA is the commonwealth, the state, the assembly of the people and their goods, cultural and political ecologies. Keep in mind the missing masses in these assemblies that are our human being – not just things, but other species too, plants, animals, bacteria, viruses.

Have a look at the range of meanings and usage of RES – [Link]

In such an ontology of distributed human being, the apparent substantiality of a person or artifact is simultaneously vacancy, emptiness, openness perhaps; and the past haunts, present in its absence. We are no longer faced with the problem of connecting, for example, tangible and intangible, materials and immaterial values, pasts and presents, functions and emotions, people and their goods: these are already connected. The task is to discover how.

Under such an ontology, how do we perform research? What is the way, the DŌ of ethnography, in the terms of the conference theme?

• look to the qualities of human being – the quiddities and haecceities, the qualities of sustainable human living, and tell their story, lest we forget

• methodology – don’t look for tight systematics – plunge IN MEDIAS RES, into the imbroglios – be pragmatic and opportunistic

• the challenge is one of re-presentation (in the political sense too), of giving voice, speaking-for, witnessing

• consider research (ethnographic, design, contextual, whatever) as intervention in the RES PUBLICA

• intervention in cycles of ideation/design/manufacture | exchange and distribution | consumption | reuse | discard – a political economy

I ended with an exhortation to keep in focus the human in human-centered design – a purpose, a care to enrich human being.

Vesalius (16th century) – inhabitation – dissection reveals the architecture of human life, set in the ruins of the past

Kenya Hara, Art Director of Muji, has opened the conference with a beautiful meditation on emptiness – “ku”.

For me, Kenya was talking about human being and how it implicates the world of things.

This Henckels knife fits the hand of the cook beautifully. It is designed that way, ergonomically.

In contrast, the Yanagiba knife fits not so much the hand of the cook as their skill.

As Kenya put it

A flat handle is not seen as raw or poorly crafted. On the contrary, its perfect plainness is meant to say, “You can use me whichever way suits your skills.” The Japanese knife adapts to the cook’s skill (not to the cook’s thumb).

[Link]

This simplicity is all about leaving a gap, precisely within the relationship between cook and knife, where the cook can be who they are. Just as typography, legibility, is about relationships between the figure and the white space, so too these gaps, voids, empty spaces are the condition of human identity. A figure stands out only against a background; a signal implies background noise, formless, empty.

Ku

Our Cartesian inheritance often has us forget this relational character of people and their things, as we focus upon fullness of being, substantive characteristics and attributes. Yet fullness only makes sense in terms of a fundamental, an ontological emptiness of things.

I found these notes of mine, grabbed from somewhere on the web – part of an ongoing project concerned with figure-ground relationships – [Link] [Link]

Just as “mu” (nothingness) is beyond existence and non-existence, we must be careful not to think that “ku” (emptiness) is a description of a condition where something that should exist does not …

It is the emptiness of emptiness, it is the emptiness of the circumstances of any situation, and it is the emptiness of yourself. “Ku” translates the Sanskrit “sunyata” meaning emptiness, void, fundamental insubstantiality. It refers to existence without enduring substance. Though all phenomenal things exist, they are empty of any enduring or inherent “self.” In other words, all the existences in the cosmos exist, but their essence cannot be apprehended because it is emptiness. This emptiness is the ultimate reality underlying all existences. Thus “Ku” in Buddhism is the Invisible, a concept of God. When Bodhidharma, the first patriarch of Zen in China, was asked by Emperor Wu (502-549 CE) about what was the ultimate and holiest principle of Buddhism, he replied, “Vast emptiness [ku], and nothing holy in it.”

Whether or not this is accurate on Buddhism, I certainly hold to this kind of relational thinking. It is not just that context is essential to understanding someone or something; those connections between people and things make them what they are.

I think of this emptiness in the following way. This conference is about the importance of ethnographic research in understanding how people live with things, so that we might design the world in a better way. As an archaeological ethnographer I interrogate the remains of human (and non-human) lives. I might ask – “Just what was going on?” And I may be able to substantiate my answers through an array of information and argument “They were up to this and that”. But however strong my argument, there is one consistent and simple answer to the question – “Nothing in particular was going on”. No one thing in particular.

It is not just that our understanding of the world depends upon the questions we ask. Nor is it that the world is multi-faceted. It is what Kenya maintains – emptiness actually makes things (and people) what they are. Put a different way, most of reality is background noise where nothing in particular is happening – that wonderful and creative richness that prompts our questions and efforts to form and forge meaning.

Staying with Christina (Unwin) and Richard (Hingley).

Newcastle-upon-Tyne