Introduction

Ethnography by design is distinct from ethnography in design; in other words, uses of ethnography to serve the needs of design to access insights into “users” and consumers as can be seen in the development of design methodologies such as Human-Centered Design and service design, as well as in corporate design consultancies. Aesthetic valuation of ethnographic representation operates in tension with the valuation of ethnography in terms of its potential utility. Public-interest ethnography and applied anthropological projects in areas such as development, environmental policy, healthcare, prison reform, and the like are explicitly geared towards identifying problems and making change, and there are many ways in which ethnographic research can and should be useful. As an aspiration, productive encounters could be thought of as an alternate embodied form of ethnography that reflects ethnographic questions back to a localized audience of co-creators for whom the work has a special relevance or meaning.