Co-creation in both ethnographic research and design is engrained in much of the design research projects at the Strategic Creativity Readership at Design Academy Eindhoven. Our projects have brought us various collaborations with a wide range of people, from citizens to professionals, in health care, transport, crafts and manufacturing. The iterative approach we use alternates between making and thinking, more intuitive design interventions and joint reflection. This allows us to use ethnographic methods during the co-creation process. Our experiences regularly challenge, for instance, the separation of design research in lab, field and showroom approaches. Rather, they are combinations of these. New relations between anthropology and design are developed in much of our collaborations with many different stakeholders. We present some of our work here to explore and discuss how anthropology and design get connected, and sometimes even merge, in new ways.
author: Bas Raijmakers, Danielle Arets