ABSTRACT
This chapter persuades anthropologists and designers to experiment with designing and implementing productive encounters, or other forms of design experiments alongside and in the field, by offering examples, guidance, tools, games, and models to facilitate this type of work. It recognizes that incorporating new research and analysis tools drawn from design fields into anthropological pursuits may be daunting. The chapter assembles a series of documents, images, and notes that annotate a transcript of our reflections on the process of creating Trade is Sublime and highlight both methodological challenges and discoveries. The dialogues have been organized into themes that reflect the working process. Trade is Sublime was posited as a "proposal for a monument to trade" in the vein of an architectural design competition. Viewers were invited to consider which of the proposals was, in their opinion, the most accurate depiction of an idealized trade regime—as framed in the obscure and aesthetic terms of dance circumventing a kind of rational futurescaping.
