ABSTRACT
Design is on the march. Terms and practices that once circulated primarily within the fairly circumscribed worlds of professional designers-“charrettes,” “prototyping,” “brainstorming,” and so forth-have permeated worlds as diverse as business management, statecraft, and education reform. Ethnography has not been immune from this extension and, if anything, some of our most esteemed practitioners have helped to promote it. For Bruno Latour (2008), the spread of the word design attests to the collapse of faith in modernist narratives while also signaling more humble, democratic, and open-ended ways to make collective futures. For Paul Rabinow, George Marcus, James Faubion, and Tobias Rees (2008), the practices of professional designers offer promising ways for rethinking contemporary modes of anthropological inquiry and knowledge production, and the design studio represents an exciting model for teaching and learning ethnographic craft. For Alberto Corsín Jiménez (2013), “prototyping” is not only a term of art among select communities of practice; it is also a more general model for how a polity might mutually prefigure configurations of objects and sociality.
