INTRODUCTION: DISCIPLINARY RENEWAL

A key aspect of renewal is disciplinary renewal, which takes at least two forms. In the first, practicing professionals engage in “continuous” and self-directed learning, building on their skills and knowledge through conferences such as EPIC and through the practice itself. A second renewal of our discipline is though the addition of new practitioners, who may initially lack knowledge and experience but also bring fresh perspectives and revitalization to our practice. These new practitioners have very different opportunities and challenges than those faced by their senior counterparts. As we wrote in 2011, today’s senior practitioners did not train to be ethnographic practitioners in industry. Rather, the majority came through “traditional” academic programs but, for various reasons, found jobs in industry and learned the skills of practice “on the job.” As we noted last year (Mack & Squires 2011) to successfully land their first job, today’s new practitioners are expected to come into that first jobs with some practical business or industry relevant background and basic ethnographic skills and knowledge, which they can acquire through a range of training programs that have emerged worldwide

In this paper, we reflect upon the significant methodological, interpretive, ethical implications of such training programs for “ethnographic praxis in industry” beyond the addition of new bodies doing the work. Educators have long held that teachers teach as they were taught. Following this maxim, those who teach new practitioners will have an important influence on how these new practitioners practice. While professional development influences our personal practices, what we collectively will become in the future is dependent on those yet to enter the field. How they evolve and change the work, how new knowledge is created in the field and what that may mean for the future renewal of our practice begins with how they are trained. We begin by reviewing the current ethnographic training programs for practitioners and why such programs are so important. Next we describe the Design Anthropology course currently offered by the Anthropology Department at the University of North Texas with its stress on theory-building in combination with hands-on learning. Finally we reflect on the trade-offs each of us has made to create and conduct the design anthropology course.

TRAINING ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTIONERS

In the last few years several academic programs have emerged to train practitioners in “ethnographic practice in industry” including institutions such as Savannah College of Art and Design, Swinburne University, Mads Clausen Institute, University of Dundee, and the Institute of Design. However, most of these programs are based in departments or schools of design. While all of these courses are multidisciplinary, their homes in design schools do influence the courses offered. Many members of the EPIC community, including the authors, were trained in anthropology and other social sciences and we believe that one of the strengths of our practice is the multidisciplinary nature of the practitioners. If we are to keep our multidisciplinary approach we must continue bringing new practitioners in from a variety of fields including anthropology. As a social science, anthropology brings theory (in particular social theory) to bear, and that is a particular analytic view that is distinct from other fields represented in this community of practice. From firsthand knowledge we admit that bring theory into practice is not always easy. It takes a little more time to develop theory-based insights and a tension can develop on a multidisciplinary team between those who want to ensure a solid theory-based model for action and those who are eager to implement ideas or are concerned about business needs and timelines.

Theory is core to “ethnographic praxis in industry,” in that the conference started to help bring theory into practice. As Rick Robinson noted at the first EPIC conference, “Application of methodology to an arena doesn’t make a domain, or a discipline. Theory debate does” (Robinson 2005:2). At the same conference, Stokes Jones meditated on the need to balance theory and observed “fact” (Jones 2005). Skill, we argue, can only be gained through an understanding of both. Using anthropological theory in combination with ethnographic methods can provide explanatory models that broaden and deepen the understanding of the context(s) in which events happen and people act (Crain & Tashima 2005: 42-47). Thus, anthropology should continue to be a core field for training industry practitioners based on its potential to prepare people who can practice in the context of theory, and further push our field to new places in the future. As practitioner-scholar and anthropologist Meta Baba reflects, “a praxis theory of practice which places the applied anthropologist in a collaborative role founded on the dynamic exchange between theory and action” will not only enhance the work of the multidisciplinary team but the field of anthropology as well (Baba 2000).

While as two anthropologists we are admittedly biased reporters, we strongly believe that anthropology departments should continue to be one of the key sources of new practitioners in our field. However, as the training of practitioners has become more formalized, anthropology departments have not followed the path of design departments in terms of this training. Of the few academic anthropology departments who have taken the reigns in training practitioners, only a handful of applied anthropology programs have a business focus—most notably at Wayne State and the University of North Texas (UNT).

We also acknowledge that this more industry-aimed training faces particular challenges within departments of anthropology. While traditional anthropology education includes a great deal of theory, and sometimes practice, often there is little that is applied practice. Much of this stems from a traditional distrust of private practice and industry.

Most academic departments do not teach their students about the history or anthropological practice, much less provide courses on practice for future professionals. While interviewing academic anthropologists Meta Baba found two widespread concerns: lack of theory in practice and ethics.

It is likely to be during a discussion of ethics, when practice may be disparaged as dangerous ethical ground. . . . If pressed to explain why practice is denied a place within the required curriculum or as a source of knowledge, some of our colleagues will contend that the reason is theoretical. Applied anthropology, they argue, has no theory of its own but only borrows superficially from other fields and dilutes what it borrows (Baba 1999:10).

Baba suspects that fundamentally academic anthropologists argue against practice because they are suspicions of large corporations and government and. by extension, those anthropologists who work with them. The relationship practitioners have to commercial interests does not allow them to maintain an objective orientation, the academics argue, and research conclusions are, thus, questionable (Baba 2006). Baba has written extensively about the tension between the academy and practice and we recommend her articles on this topic for further reading.

This distrust has meant that while we are not the first industry academic pair to collaborate in the goal of educating new practitioners, nor are we groundbreakers in academic and industry partnership, such collaborations are relatively rare in our academic discipline. While academic anthropology partnerships with industry are rare, in the design and engineering/technology fields academic partnerships are found with many industries. Likewise the renowned design programs mentioned above have successfully partnered with industry as part of training their students. In fact, Mack and her group at Pitney Bowes have collaborated with the Mads Clausen Institute for several years.