ABSTRACT
Technology continues to be a major force that has contributed to the evolution of both anthropology and design. Designers are intervening in increasingly complex situations that are embedded in multidimensional contexts involving social, cultural, environmental, economic, political, and technological factors. Global and historical conditions have influenced the trajectories of design anthropology in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. In design anthropology practice, ethnography focuses on capturing the event as a field of unfolding potential and possibility rather than a description and interpretation of the "here and now". The challenge of design anthropology is to reimagine and extend theory and ethnographic practice to include what has been described as ethnographic inquiries into possible futures. As an evolving practice that aims for transdisciplinarity, design anthropologists continually experiment with new perspectives on field research, improvise new methods and frameworks, and extract theory as it emerges from data.
