ABSTRACT
Anthropology’s turn to the material in recent decades has problematized notions of knowledge as abstract, and engagements with design are confronting a reticence in anthropological understandings to engage with causality by adopting agendas over the material world. This chapter focuses on the material culture of design concepts, and rituals of creativity, in an EU-funded design program at TU/e Eindhoven, HP Labs, and Intel Digital Health Group. Anthropologists in corporate design environments, meanwhile, have been writing highly self-reflexively and critically about their own practices, purposes, and vocations, and arguably more reflexively than anthropologists in academia. Contemporary rubrics of “knowledge economies” or the need for “innovation” show how design work is often seen as emblematic of social progress. In design culture, concepts are characterized by a compulsion toward the material; are the product of groups; have reference to particular places; and are the product of strongly routinized, even ritualized work.
