.

Rumor has it that Latour has developed quite an interest in design lately, however at a panel discussion last summer when a group of designers tried to present their designs based on ANTing, He told them that they didn't understand it at all. This doesn't surprise me much -- as an STS person in design, the subtleties and seriousness of Actor Network Theory don't translate well into the five-minute architecture presentation.

In fact, the text of the talk is online.

There were some moments in industrial design areas -- related to Xerox PARC in the 90s, as well as the Participatory Design conference. I seem to remember that I saw a simplified how-to article in an MIT Press book on "design research" some time in the last few years.

Come to think of it, the best example of what it could be in design is not from an STS person -- Galen Cranz's "The Chair." But I think that, for a designer, the richness and ambiguity of sociological space can be as much of an impediment to clear design as not. For the ethnographer, the time frame of design work is one in which "thick description" would be impossible. Let me try and explain why.

In a talk he gave at SAIC two years ago, Bernard Tschumi began with an argument that addresses why architecture so rarely takes the "user" into consideration. He observed that for even the most hotly sought architects, in a competition to design, say, the new Museum of Ancient Art in Athens, the architect will get a call offering something like 10,000 dollars and three weeks to make the design proposal.

That's just about enough time and money to put your best project architect and two interns on the project for a three day site visit, and, assuming they had a relatively open schedule, perhaps fourteen solid sleepless days of hard work. You need a licensed architect on the project – otherwise you just might find yourself contractually obligated to build a 200 million dollar building that won't actually stand up.

So, if you could find a qualified ethnographer who would work at the wages of a typical intern architect (40k a year in NYC) who was both remotely qualified and willing to try and do some "user design" in twelve days, you'd end up at the competition with great information and no drawings. Ergo, you wouldn't stand a chance. So it's not really much of a question of doing user centered design in anything remotely resembling what an ethnographer might consider appropriate – let alone the average academic anthropologist.

I think, in fact, that if we really examined the kinds of projects that have involved ethnographers, they don't include many projects that aren't extremely high-tech. And while there are some nice adjuncts to architecture that are high-tech, the ones that are really architectural – like the Milwaukee Museum by Calatrava – don't exactly take much user involvement.

Unfortunately, the reality doesn't stop there. The average architect has six years of education, and in those six years if they have a single semester where they aren't entirely preoccupied by studio work, they have to overcome the fact that when they do meet the rare instructor who is inclined to teach them something about the social world, they have to confront the fact that they never acquired basic intellectual skills. The ethnographer, by contrast, spent something like 15 years in school, and if they learned any kind of representation skills, they are very unlikely to be up to the demands of a professional workplace.

mespellwrong, I'm very interested in your post on user study and the dilemna of design without social science. What is an STS person (I've searched it without meaningful results)?

wrote too soon - http://web.mit.edu/STS/info/index-css.html

when in doubt, include MIT in the searchword - it's hasn't failed yet

"they have to confront the fact that they never acquired basic intellectual skills."

How do you define basic intellectual skills? Took some philosophy classes in college? Minored or majored in one of the social sciences? A master's degree in social sciences?

Antoine Picon assembled a book on the matter - Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors

Have a look for a book called Things that Talk

There's some architectural discussion in Latour's Making Thing Public.

Peter Gallisson's writing are interesting. They don't directly discuss architecture, but can be related.

Well, if you google the phrase "Basic intellectual skills," this thread comes up fourth.

Seriously though, I'd include the ability to read and write at a college level, idea-based and textual reasoning (as opposed to visual-spatial reasoning), critical thinking, and participation in a community of practice. These are the core principles of a general liberal education, and are generally shortchanged in a design curriculum.

In fact, I just learned that the demand for students who could exhibit them was the reason that many schools of architecture exchanged their NAAB accredited BArch for an architectural studies undergraduate degree in the late 80s.