ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the historical entanglements between the development of digital technologies and the interdisciplinary field of design anthropology. Design anthropologists have played an important but often overlooked role in the design of digital artefacts like email and smartphones, which digital anthropologists frequently take as the focus of their research. Design anthropologists have participated in the process of designing these technologies, as well as being active in the reconceptualisation of design itself as a more collaborative, participatory and reflexive way of knowing. ‘Human-computer interaction’ (HCI) is generally speaking the broadest term for the research field which led, over some decades, to a self-aware ‘design anthropology’. The HCI field grew with the realisation that there was a need to include humans in the understanding of informational systems, a research interest initially called “human factors”. The intellectual work which underlay these shifts was both psychological and anthropological.
