Anthropological Critique of the Design Project, from the User to the Citizen

The Design-anthropology relationship requires the clarification of three essential issues. First, that Design must be placed in the world of work as a necessary and legitimate profession in the construction of artificial life; second, in dialogue with the value of ethnography and qualitative methodologies in the world of social research; third, the value of cultural studies to understand the historical subjects toward which Design is oriented. The space-time coordinates coincide to collect safe, rigorous, and valid information on the potential improvement of processes, systems, and objects in use by communities, which we can call a convergent methodological need. Our thesis is that, although the last two fields of work have been widely developed in the social sciences, professional Design has insufficiently incorporated them in their innovation and creative processes. We propose and discuss that the understanding of anthropology within the limits of Design should lead to a metamorphosis of a key category in the field of Design: the user. This reflection has implications on three levels: subjects, methods, and Design positioning.