I have always liked Don Norman’s ideas and attitude. A couple of weeks ago at Core 77 he questioned the feasibility of human-centered design – [Link]

In today’s connected world and global market, he argues, culture matters little to design. Designers should center their effort less on establishing people’s needs and more on understanding activities:

A few decades ago, I believed that cultural differences were fundamental. Moreover, they were exciting and interesting. Today, I believe that cultural differences are still just as fundamental and exciting but they primarily exist in governing social interaction, the types of foods that are eaten and stylistic preferences. Modern products are designed to support particular activities, so that it is the activity itself that controls how they should be designed and used. Traditional activities are heavily determined by culture, but modern office practices, manufacturing, communication, financial accounts and transportation are dominated by the technology used to accomplish them, or in the cases of financial accounts, by world-wide standards intended to make transactions and accounting uniform. As a result, many of our activities are determined by the technologies we use, such as the automobile, computer, cellphone, train or airplane, or by the need to interact smoothly with other countries and cultures across the world. Once the technology determines the activity, the influence of culture dissipates.

These observations have important implications for design. Modern products are driven by technology, which in turn dictates the activity. Designers talk a lot about Human-Centered Design where it is important to design for the needs of the person. Well, this doesn’t work when the goal is millions of people all across the world. Computers and software, phones and applications, automobiles, kitchen appliances and housewares are intended for consumption by millions. Human-Centered Design can no longer apply: what does it mean to discover the precise needs of millions of people? Instead, I have argued for Activity-Centered Design, where the activity dictates the design.

Don is assuming, as many do, that culture accounts for human difference and individuality and can be radically separated from function, activity and technology. (see also his piece on activity-centered design a while back – [Link])

But what happens if we deny this separation of culture and technology? What happens if we question this model of what it is to be human? (See my previous comments on the nature of humanity – [Link])

As an archaeologist I work on the material remains of things, places, people and their activities in attempts to understand what was going on. For a long while many archaeologists have felt considerable guilt over their focus on things. Mortimer Wheeler, an influential archaeological character back in the 1950s and 60s and Director of the Institute of Archaeology in London, famously declared in his book Archaeology from the Earth that the whole purpose of archaeology was to find out about the people behind things – societies and cultures are the true object of archaeology. This was archaeology’s higher purpose – to move beyond material goods and technologies to human-centered accounts of the past.

Many of my colleagues who are cultural anthropologists share such an embarrassment about things, holding that it is the world of cultural values and meanings that makes us truly human. Too much focus on material goods can be a symptom of commodity fetishism, of a reductionist materialism, or even of our consumerist modernity.

In contrast, my colleagues in design and engineering schools are rightly looking beyond their focus on materials and processes, beyond artifacts and things, to embrace human factors, interactions with things, experiences and emotions, putting people before technology, as Don says.

But while I usually play the role of an archaeological humanist and argue that engineers and designers do indeed need to understand how people get on with things, I also find myself making the opposite case to my archaeological and anthropological colleagues, arguing that they need to take artifacts and materialities more seriously and not put them in second place to cultural values and structures of meaning (see my new book about all this – [Link]).

This is a curious academic schizophrenia, and, of course, another manifestation of C.P.Snow’s old notion of two cultures – Science versus the Arts and Humanities. I believe we are still bedeviled by such a separation in our schools and colleges. In spite of all the calls to be inter-, multi-, trans-disciplinary, the norm is segregation. But I don’t want to elaborate on this here. I explore it enough elsewhere in this blog.

I suggest that design, as practiced and taught in the likes of our d.school, offers a modest resolution of the separation of humans and things, culture and technology, and also entails a quite radical redefinition of what it is to be human/inhuman.

The modest resolution comes from centering learning and education on practice, projects, and iteration rather than academic disciplines and schooling – practical worldly mixtures.

The radical redefinition of the human?

What makes us human is engagements with and through things. And, crucially, these practical engagements precede our definitions of person and artifact. Distinctions, and they are very real, between the likes of culture and technology, are not absolute, a priori, but achievements – local, historical, provisional.

My friend Cliff Nass wrote a book about some of about with Byron Reeves – The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media like Real People and Places [Link]. People treat their machines like people, because the distinction between things and people, between technology and the social or cultural is local and provisional, rather than abstract and absolute.

If being human is all about making and getting on with things, then human-centered design is simultaneously about activities and technologies, materials and processes, values and experiences, the tangible and intangible, individuals dispersed through networks of material flows, human being flowing through cultural assemblages of artifacts, people, values, architectures, landscapes, emotions …

So human-centered design is not about people and cultural differences, in contrast to other kinds of design that deal with materials and mechanics, activities and technologies.

Human centered design is as much inhuman as human, because for as long as we’ve been human we’ve been cyborgs!

“All is full of love” – video by Chris Cunningham for Björk – from Homegenic (1999) [Link]

[Link] [Link] [Link]

Ben Cullen thought beyond conventional distinctions under a fresh evolutionary notion of humanity as deeply hybrid – material and immaterial, personhood and artifact, species and thing. Humanity: an undecidable, in Derrida’s sense. The lens through which he approached such questions – viral phenomena, beyond the biological.

This is such a refreshing and vital perspective for those interested in the future of the (academic) Humanities, when a growing crisis about their scope and character is centered precisely upon how we conceive of human being and its study – see my recent entry on declining numbers of students in the Humanities – [Link] also, more generally – [Link]. Too many want to retrench the Humanities in letters and the arts, in (high) culture, emphasizing the old distinctions between the Humanities and Sciences, worlds of people versus nature, culture versus technology. Repeated is the old and simple exhortation: read books, because they delve the depths of the human condition. OK, but so limiting.

This year I finished, with Bjørnar Olsen, Tim Webmoor and Christopher Witmore, our book Archaeology: the Discipline of Things (University of California Press), and my own The Archaeological Imagination (Left Coast Press). Both follow Ben’s suspicion of Cartesian dualisms and treat human being as distributed through rich and indeterminate networks of people-and-things. This doesn’t square with our current disciplines and questions the very validity of the Humanities, but in a positive way – because a new Humanities focused upon hybrid human being will be central to any address to real-world issues that includes people, which means just about any issue that matters. I have commented much about human-centered design thinking, as practiced in our d.school, as a manifestation of such a new Humanities [Link]. Ironically perhaps, and as we point out in our book, the corollary of human-centered engineering is thing-centered Humanities that understands our materiality.

The Archaeological Imagination explores the world of eighteenth-century antiquarians in the Borders between England and Scotland before radical distinctions set in between disciplines in the Humanities and Sciences – mélanges of memories and material remains, human landscapes and physical geologies, natural histories of local plants and animals, family genealogies, collections of manuscripts and artifacts, itineraries through pasts-in-presents. Even in what became something of homage to Walter Scott, the antiquarian inventor of the historical novel, I couldn’t help but think of Ben, and the book is dedicated to him.

Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and other Pieces of our earlier Poets, (Chiefly of the Lyric kind.) Together with some few of later Date. London: Printed for J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall. First Edition, 1765. Ex Libris Michael Shanks.

The title page: “the work of poets endures”. It is, ironically, the voice and music’s notes that carry history; buildings fall into ruin and our writings disperse on the wind. And when the poet is vates, prophet and visionary, reading signs, past and present, of what is to come.

A great antiquarian debate in the eighteenth century concerned the essential role of poetic conjecture in what we now call scientific modeling – and this included historical reconstruction.

The quarter opens next week and Stanford is stressing the value of the Humanities – when fewer and fewer are opting for classes in the liberal arts.

Why study philosophy or literature? Because they are good for you? How? Why?

In the d.school at Stanford I emphasize the importance of the Humanities to any human perspective on making, creating, experiencing in the contemporary world, with history and archaeology offering crucial time depth, connecting past and present, when we are so often focused on the immediate future.

Human-centered design.

As I just unpacked in a recent post [Link] – real issues are messy and don’t fit into disciplines. And every issue that matters today is about people. This isn’t a call for “relevance” – it’s a call to articulate specialist expertise (yes in the likes of seventeenth century French theatre) with mindfulness of the current state of affairs, and through thoughtful practice. Because attention to the qualities of human living is at the heart of any viable future.

[Link] – Artereality – on the arts in the University – from Steven Madoff’s collection.

This year we are launching classes in our Revs Program [Link] – bridging the arts, humanities, social sciences and engineering, using automobility – car design – as a lens on human experience over the last century. Just this kind of articulation.

My own offering begins next week – Ten Things – an archaeology of design – a roller-coaster ride through 500 thousand years of the human experience of things. Archaeology meets human-centered design [Link]

A remarkable culinary experience in Rotterdam [Link]

The kind of exploration of qualities of experience I keep going on about.

This is the Humanities (or should be!!)

Eddie Hall’s Bentley in Naples, Florida

The aim of our Program is to create a new transdisciplinary field connecting the past, present and future of the automobile, bridging the Humanities, Social Sciences, Design, and Engineering, centered upon the human experiences of designing, making, driving, being driven, living with, dreaming of the automobile.

The Revs Institute of Naples Florida, one of the world’s finest car collections, library and archive of automotive history and design is our partner. Stanford Revs Program nestles within CARS – the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford.

The ultimate goal is to create a new kind of museum of the car, working closely with Stanford Libraries to build cutting edge digital collections management and delivery systems.

Automotive Archaeology

With me fronting the Program are Chris Gerdes (Engineer), Cliff Nass (Psychologist and Cognitive Scientist), and Sven Beiker (Executive Director and liaison with the car industry).

After introductions from Provost John Etchemendy, Cliff Nass, and Miles Collier (Business Executive, Artist and Philanthropist), whose generous multi-million dollar gift is starting up the Program, came vignettes from the car’s life. Bianca Carpeneti, Gary Devore and Chris Lowman (Archaeology, Heritage Management and Design Research, my Metamedia Lab) dealt with cultures of speed and performance in the 1930s, engineering in the run up to WWII, and choices faced when the car retired from racing and became a collector’s item. Michelle Mederos (Product Design Program and Cliff’s CHIMe Lab – Communications between Humans and Interactive Media) and Lassi “Al” Likkanen (Cognitive Science and CHIMe Lab) showed how we might instrument and quantify experiences of driving. John Kegelman (Mechanical Engineering and Chris’s Dynamic Design Lab) focused on the car itself and how we can instrument and quantify our experience of its performance.

Doug Nye (Motor Racing Journalist and Historian) took us back to the 1930s with some remarkable restored film footage – racing at mad speeds along the country lanes and through the towns of the Northern Ireland Ards circuit for the RAC Tourist Trophy.

In a session on the human interface with machines, Joy Taylor (Clinical Psychiatrist, Associate Clinical Professor (Affiliated), Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science) and Cliff Nass unpacked some of the emotional and cognitive interfaces with artifacts. Chris Gerdes took us into the future with intelligent and autonomous vehicles, and a movie showing Shelley, Stanford’s autonomous vehicle, going through its paces. David Kelley (Mechanical Engineering, Stanford d.school, and founder of IDEO, the design consultancy) is one of our key supporters, but had to miss his presentation.

Julia Landauer (Stanford Freshman and Auto Racer) and Duncan Dayton (Auto Racer and American Le Mans Series Team Owner), interviewed by Murray Smith (Bibliophile, Sporting Motorist, Automotive Archaeologist), shared with us their first-hand experience of extreme human-machine interactions.

This theme of the cyborg driver came up again with presentations on how we can deal with the cultural history of automobility from Fred Turner (incoming Director of our Program in Science, Technology and Society) and Ursula Heise (Professor of English and Director of the Program in Modern Thought & Literature). Fred flagged up a crucial issue we wish to tackle – the mediation of experience – how experiences are documented, represented, visualized.

Chris (Gerdes) wired up for driving the Bentley

Lawyer Dan Siciliano (Senior Lecturer in Law and Associate Dean for Executive Education and Special Program) raised the question of when a car is not a car – when it’s treated by the law as a horse (or horse-less carriage) – and now the car is increasingly a platform or system. Sven covered the different institutional connections across the history of the car. Miles Collier talked about the intellectual world of the car collector – issues of authenticity, conservation and restoration, connoisseurship and authority.

The Library involvement in the Program was explored by Stu Snydman (Libraries Manager, Digital Production/Web Application Development) – outlining the development of open source systems for organizing, searching, and sharing collections, of books, papers, cars!

Archaeology of the recent and contemporary past

Let me say a little more about the archaeological agenda in the Program.

We’re developing and expanding the anthropological archaeology of Material Culture Studies. We’re taking up again what Bill Rathje called “the archaeology of us”, and taking seriously what, ironically, has been overlooked – the car as popular culture, as icon of modernity, as a key moment in twentieth century engineering and industrial design.

The expanded scope is a design perspective – a focus on human-centered design. Design – informed by history, archaeology, ethnography, as well as engineering, science, technology, psychology, cognitive science – starting and ending with human experiences in the richest sense.

And the legacy of the material past – where the museum becomes a design studio.

What will a discipline of things, encompassing this Program centered on the car, look like?

I see three components:

All three rooted in the histories, genealogies and archaeologies of what we’re calling Archive 3.0 – the animated archive of digitally enabled interactive stores of sources, knowledge and collaborative exchange. We’ll be sharing everything we can and inviting contribution, reaching out to that community fascinated by this major part of our contemporary heritage.

Revs at Stanford – a project in human-centered design – where archaeology and history inform design, where the museum and the archive combine with the design studio.

Press and publicity links -

New York Times

Automotive News

KQED – PBS News

Stanford Report

Press and publicity links -

New York Times

Automotive News

KQED – PBS News

Stanford Report

Extraordinary pieces. Extraordinary presence.

It was the first time we had come across them first hand. Here the monumental heads, zoomorphic basalt thrones, engobe ceramics, jadeite celts, are gently spotlit in that subdued ambient lighting and minimalist staging typical of the art museum.

So what are they about? This is the pressing question that comes out of encountering these manifestations of a largely forgotten Mesoamerican society that starts contemporary with New Kingdom Egypt and lasts through to Classical Athens and Republican Rome a thousand years later. The exhibition doesn’t try hard to give an answer. The organizing principle is “discovery”: there are evocative photographs of archaeologists standing by colossal statues lying in the mud. A few information panels tell you that this was a hierarchical society with deep religious beliefs and a divine cosmology, as if it wasn’t obvious. The descriptions of the artifacts are similarly in that curiously tautological prose of the connoisseur, describing precisely what you are looking at:

The crouching figure with his hands resting on his knee is has the cleft head, almond-shaped eyes, and snarling mouth that define both monumental and small-scale composite creatures in Olmec art. Flanking the face are the pleated ear ornament’s that Coe and Peter Joralemon associate with the Olmec water deity. Ann Cyphers suggests, however, that the figure’s features, which are both human and zoomorphic, imply it is undergoing transformation. The headdress is marked with a pair of the scalloped designs also seen on the Cleveland Museum of Art axe, and the figure wears a pendant with the X motif. The back of the monument is hollowed out into a U shape, similar to one of the trough stones of the drain line …

So much for iconography. The catalogue, from which this description is taken, adds an account of the provenience of the piece, San Lorenzo, and possible connections with the water management of the site (what was quite clearly a fabulous system of drains!). This does not appear in the exhibition which stops short of offering anything in the way of a narrative or explanatory account of what these artifacts historically witness. We are simply confronted with the artifacts themselves and their considerable power.

Of course this is the purpose of the Art Museum – to display art objects – “masterworks” of human creativity. The context is that of the scholarship of the art connoisseur and a story of human achievement.

I have criticized many times before this transformation of manufacture and making into aesthetic value, this displacement of the work of makers millennia old into a one-dimensional story-for-all-time (great artists have produced great works of expression since time immemorial).

EG – [Link] – here I argue that this turns art into cultural property.
EG – [Link] [Link] – here against the way that this notion of art fuels a certain kind of art market.

But both Helen and I left with something more positive than this disappointment that the curators had failed to take us into the world of the Olmec, preferring instead their own scholasticism. It was that a lot of this was indeed familiar. We have seen before those polished greenstone celts in the villages of early European farmers (the exhibition calls them axes, but I’m not convinced). We know well the wide currency of slip-coated pottery with this kind of incised decoration. We know these sneering lips and thick necks.

No – we’re not about to propose that Egyptians brought their pyramid building to the Americas across the Atlantic in reed boats. But there are patterns in prehistory – wide-ranging and long-term connections and processes. Alois Riegl dealt, in his nineteenth-century way, with the migration of decorative forms – arabesque, lotus and palmette, across vast distances and time, from ancient tomb painting to medieval carpet (I am fascinated with his book Stillfragen, 1893). City life, including that of the Olmec, has really only a short history of five thousand years. Is it surprising to see similar cultural forms that connect with similar experiences of the appropriation and control of surplus goods, similar techniques of power, ascendency and subjugation, similar experiences of everyday life and subsistence?

The exhibition catalogue does offer a richer picture than the exhibition. But I cannot help feel that the project of this archaeology is indeed a universal art history devoid of local context: the catalogue, very scholarly in its way, can’t even get the broad chronology right and states that the Olmec were contemporary with Middle Kingdom Egypt!

The discovery of the past

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

How to improve the design of things -

• take people seriously – be human-centered
• look beyond the artifact – design systems, scenarios, stories, experiences, interactions
• don’t assume the designer knows it all – find out, pursue research and conduct fieldwork

Ethnography, anthropological fieldwork aimed at understanding a culture and society, offers a suite of research practices to achieve precisely these ends. Intel, among a growing number of companies, has invested heavily in this design research, contextual research, design anthropology, as it also gets called.

[Link - Ken Anderson from Intel in Harvard Business Review]
[Link - Genevieve Bell from Intel]
[Link - Business Week 2006]

Have a look at Xerox’s PARC Forum, here in Palo Alto -
[Link] – a special series this year on ethnography – [Link]

The theme this year is the nature of this ethnographic practice -

My line – if we are serious about human-centered we need to consider what we mean by “human”, and the Humanities are a good place to start doing just that.

As an archaeologist I naturally take a long term view, and one that sees things (artifacts, places, ecologies) as an integral part of being human – maybe human-centered isn’t quite what many people take it to be.

This evening – a group of friends and colleagues discussing education and schooling with Tony Wagner. Our warm and welcoming hosts were Joan Lonergan and John Merrow at Castilleja School.

Topics: skills needed for life today – creativity, problem solving – the challenge of overcoming disciplinary divisions – entrepreneurial skills and business in a globalist 21st century – are US schools and the academy failing to prepare students?

Tony has made a strong case for schooling to shift from teaching to tests to teaching skills – have a look at his great books [The Global Achievement Gap] and [Making the Grade: Reinventing America's Schools].

Tony Wagner’s Seven Surivival Skills for Careers, College, and Citizenship in the 21st Century

1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

2. Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence

3. Agility and Adaptability

4. Initiative and Entrepreneurship

5. Effective Oral and Written Communication

6. Accessing and Analyzing Information

7. Curiosity and Imagination

We talked about innovation. Entrepreneurial skills look to be an instinctive human trait, reckoned Paul (Holland).

My response – creativity may well indeed be a human trait. Another way of putting this is that it’s not creativity that we need to explain in human history, but why there isn’t more. Of necessity, people remake their worlds constantly in every smallest act. We are born into a world that makes us what we are – tangible environments, intangible values – yet we also constantly (re)make that world through living it.

So what hinders innovation and change?

Sometimes it’s schooling.

Design thinking encompasses many of Tony’s skills. As Bernie (Roth) says – “design is living” [Link]

I shared a concern of mine expressed a few times recently in this blog – [Link] – that design, as one field that emphasizes innovation and creativity, can be too focused on behavior, on what people do and how they perform. And Tony’s list of crucial life skills is quite abstract: it similarly makes little reference to culture, human values, history and the qualities of human life.

Human centered design, for that is what design thinking is, should be critically asking – just what is the human? Living is more than what people do.

Tim (Brown), of design consultancy IDEO, asked what difference such questioning would make to design practice. He posed a great question – aren’t designers just the stone masons of the modern world?

Absolutely! There’s a double edge to this observation. On the one hand masons may indeed get on with the job, apply their skills to stone and build, leaving questions of life and cosmos to philosophers, theologians, academics. On the other hand, the masons responsible for the cathedrals of mediaeval Europe embodied human vision and divine utopia in their work in stone. Richard Sennett has captured the deeply human character of work in his book The Craftsman – hand, heart and mind combined.

Isn’t every act of making an argument, better or worse, for a world immanent or transcendent, an argument for “the good life”?

To understand creativity, problem solving, innovation, collaboration, I argue we should look as much to culture. Culture – processes of making and building worlds, the core of human creativity.

To our list of crucial human skills should be added

cultural literacy

Of course, this then begs the question of just what cultural literacy is! Linda (Yates), instantly connected it with the way language carries culture, identity and experience (see the image below).

And how can human-centered design encompass such expanded and often contentious notions of what it means to be human?

Our work in Stanford Strategy Studio aims to bring Humanities insight into what it is to be human to bear on matters of common pressing concern, such as environmental change, education, globalism.