ABSTRACT
Anthropology, architecture, and design have in common that they observe, describe, and propose. Their orientations, as Ingold argues, are as much towards human futures as towards human pasts: these are futures, however, that are not conjured from thin air but forged in the crucible of contemporary social lives. Here, it is important to challenge conventional thinking regarding the nature of design and creativity that acknowledges the improvisatory skills and perceptual acuity of people. Learning from the successes and failures of design processes and practices requires an understanding of how people are affected and effected by the outputs of design processes and practices. As an anthropologist, my research is concerned with the affects and effects that design processes have on people who engage with products, buildings, and urban landscapes. This has been underpinned by a longer-term aim to understand how people’s sensory experience and perceptual acuity can be involved during architectural and design engineering processes and future-making practices. Central to this inquiry, I argue it is necessary to make partial connections between the movements of designing and movements of ongoing intra-action. In the fields of architectural design and design engineering, I ask what kind of forms and material practices we could imagine being made in the future based on this proposition. One proposition, for example, might be to consider combining architectural design and design engineering while improving indoor air quality operating across the fields of energy, health, and environment. From this positioning, the principal research question to be addressed in the chapter is: How could patients’, staff’s and visitors’ sensorial experience and perceptual acuity be involved in collaborative design processes and future-making practices concerned with improving the indoor air quality of hospital settings?
