For the first time in a long time I felt a tingle of excitement when I read this book. Design ethnography contends that while we cannot predict the future, nor ensure it, we can imagine better possibilities, and work towards realising them. This takes ethnographic projects beyond traditional constraints (of time, discipline, subject/object distinctions, and theoretical stances) towards collaboration, flexibility, imagination, and long-term engagement. The authors convince us of the potential of design ethnography because they themselves have played in the future-oriented spaces of stakeholders.This exciting book is a stunning achievement of the emphasis on both practice and the practical. I will recommend it to the many professionals I teach who hope their research will contribute to better futures.- Karen O'Reilly, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Loughborough University, UK.
Design Ethnography: Research, Responsibility and Futures is a product of the collective design imagination at its best. It argues for a genuine encounter between ethnography and design that is experiential, collaborative, embodied, and engaged. Based on a sophisticated relational perspective, Design Ethnography bypasses the traditional object- and project-oriented epistemology and ontology of design, while advocating for situated and interdisciplinary research agendas that are at once critical, interventional, and pluralistic. Written by a highly accomplished all-women team associated with the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in Melbourne, this wonderfully innovative volume develops a design approach for skillfully navigating the perilous situations of the present to enable alternative worlds and futures. The book will be of great value to designers and those concerned with science and technology as much as to scholars and students in the emergent and vibrant communities at the interfaces of design, the social sciences, and policy-oriented fields. - Arturo Escobar, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA.
