Associate professor in design anthropology
E-mail: brendon.clark@umu.se
Mobile: +46 070 460 4811
skype: brendon29
Background
I was raised in Carmel, California by a Danish mother and an
American father. Between a BA in social sciences (1995) and an MA
in anthropology (2002), I spent 3.5 years in Bolivia working in
community development projects focusing on basic sanitation &
health education (US Peace Corps). After an MA in
anthropology at Northern Arizona University, I stumbled upon the
Scandinavian tradition of Participatory Design in 2002 joining a
User-Centered Design group at the University of Southern Denmark. I
completed a PhD in the topic and have been working with design
anthropology ever since.
Before joining UID, I was studio director and senior researcher
at the Interactive
Institute, Stockholm studio. We worked very much with
experiential learning processes for collaborative change
projects.
What I do at
UID
I am involved in teaching on
both master programmes and the PhD programme, as well as working
with subject development in research as well as in
education.
Teaching
Over the last 11 years, I have been teaching design ethnography
and collaborative/participatory design here at UID, predominately
in the interaction design program. Developing radicle empathy with
users and even stakeholders in design processes has benefited
greatly from theory & methods of anthropology and the social
sciences. However, there is much more potential in the designers'
repertoire that, combined with social sciences theory &
practice, can create unique forms of inquiry and intervention. That
is part of what the emerging field of Design Anthropology explores.
My goal here is to support designers in developing their own unique
forms of engaging others in the world,
Talk to me about:
- design process, user studies & collaborative design
- performance & emergence
- improv theatre
- design anthropology
Research
Within the mixed worlds of design and anthropology, industry and
academia, my research interests lie in the exploration of
generative exchanges (in contrast to one-way knowledge transfers)
between various actors in the different types design
& change processes (stakeholders, researchers, designers,
users, etc.). Prototyping both processes and practices, and
working with speculative and emergent future(s).