ABSTRACT
An anthropologist working with design should develop an idea of context. This chapter examines the idea of ethnographic information as ‘context’, the ‘stuff’ of context and the ways of knowing which characterise contextualisations and recontextualisations. Through the 20th century, the broad thrust of debates about context was towards treating context as a set of knowledge operations, specifically contextualisation, decontextualisation, and recontextualisation. In design anthropology, contextualisation, decontextualisation and recontextualisation constitute work processes of coalescence and focusing. As contexts, people and their lives are privileged in that they are explanatory of design, a slightly different relation than being the intention behind design. Contextual meaning happens not by building categories and signs but by the association of incomparable, but often interdependent, things which are experienced as co-present. The most singular move away from contextual meaning happened with the growth of semiotics, structuralism and structural Marxism, in which meaningfulness is epitomised by the sign.
