Technological Transformation and Organizational Design
Abstract
For a long time, design anthropology has been influenced by the interest of the product or the user. Most designers in the past made items based on the client’s description and not to fit the next generation’s desire. However, a great portion of the world, especially in the United States and Europe, changes from this norm to a new evolution. This paper seeks to compare and establish the relationship between the designers’ past methods and the implications of the new evolution and the role of the designer in these changes. It further researchers on the impact of the changes in design education and its relation to other disciplines. Areas, methods, principles, and practices that technical designers should focus on in an organization to maximize their role are equally subject to discussion in this paper. Finally, it dissects ways technical designers promote this transformation concerning the elements of design, i.e., organization design purpose, design approaches, and design practices.
Introduction
The constant change in technology has altered the normal production systems across many sectors over the past years. Organizations, therefore, have to adjust to cope with these changes if the production and the client’s expectations are something to go by. According to Lucy, over the years, designers would only make an item described by the user. Organizations would become the major in employing people who could listen to the user’s description and produce an output that meets the client’s expectations. The changing trends require creative and innovative employees who can technically design products that fit all consumers’ desires without their input for organizations to achieve the set goals.
The new evolution where the technical designers use their imagination to create new product would perfectly match the customers’ description is described as designer oriented as opposed to customer-oriented. Anthropologist plays a vital role in explaining how this new dispensation can be a reality by connecting the changes to societal influence[1]. The background of the community informs the designer on how best or effective the product can be relevant. While the previous designers depending on the users’ information, classified as design anthropology, the new evolution is greatly visual anthropology where the designers make perfection to lure clients by what they visualized. This paper, therefore, in a nutshell, explores the pathway to the full implementation of the new evolution via its connection to the past as well as organizational anthropology.
Methodology and Technical Design Anthropology
The thesis is built on a combination of sources that are not limited to primary and secondary sources. Exploration of social and cultural borders alongside physical interactions with technical designers makes critical elements of the primary sources in this design anthropology. Also, first-hand experiences as a technical designer working with the IBM Company provides more information that adds value to the research. The understanding of clients is based on the anthropological approach and provides relevant information for the technical design to be employed and the background of the clients involved. The framework of this research uses the Technical Design Anthropological approach, which influences the decision made by both clients and users. According to Smith, some of these decisions have to be reached without the designer’s formal training, but they would still deliver[2].
The anthropological design appreciates technological advancements by impressing users by creating complete products that impress the client and persuade them to get involved. This supports Suchman’s view that Design anthropology promotes proper planning among the users and the designers and, therefore, saves on time at the workplace[3]. Co – Designing is an observation element where most technical designers benchmark and improve existing products for better customer satisfaction. There is a strong correlation between Design anthropology and technical design since both rely on human presence and daily activities. There are several ethnographic issues within the technical design. For example, the product’s value and quality depend on the workers’ experience and not necessarily on the machines involved[4].
Relationship between typography and cultural structures
Typography is the responsive cultural environment that may prompt an individual or a society to shift from one system to another. Culture Beaudry influences the evolution of new designs and techniques in an organization[5], while the typography influences the communication skills that result in such new dispensations. However, one may have verse knowledge of visual anthropology but fails to explain the typographic information that makes a particular product. The interaction of visual anthropology and typography, resulting in the emergence of new designs. For example, according to Graffan, business gains momentum through interaction between design anthropology and distinguishable communication with the clients[6]. The designer’s professional role is to develop technical thinking and layout through passion and co-creation. They also provide an in-depth understanding and analytical skills required for a design for different ages in this changing technological trend. Furthermore, the technical designer professionally monitors the changes and informs the organization in the best ways by offering comparative education.
Even though Technical Design exited in the past, it involves a series of event which may not only creating a template or a product. There is much to do with the culture and theory which inform the actual design of the product. In his argument, Beaudry strongly disputes the direct application of some cultural research practices in the design since they add no value to Beaudry’s output product[7]. The complexity of the design task requires clarity in communication within the production unit more than with the clients. For instance, a graphic designer in IBM Company must use typography to enhance styles and layout to portray high standards in the production and circuit units.
Cultural disciplines, including visual culture, cultural education, and materials culture, have common methodological practices aligned with cultural anthropology. The layout of observable human conditions involved in the research is literary unique to a single identity. The benefits of cultural anthropology identifiable with the procedures and practices reflect on the visual anthropology. It is equally easier to predict the possible result of the research framework connected to these cultural disciplines based on the results obtained in one research.
Cultural Anthropology in Technical Design
Cultural anthropology emphasizes the study of people’s culture and norms and the intellectual and communal organization of human clusters. It focuses on methodologies in which anthropologists locates design ethnographically, as a serious and multiplicative mission. It also takes deep concern on the comprehension of what it means to relocate from the discourse of design as a signifier that removes its own cultural, historical, and political precisely on the contemplation of design as an uncertain provider of cooperative efforts towards transformational alteration. According to the politics of the artificial, it suggests that for the realization of the full potential of design contemplations requires full knowledge on the construction process of scenarios that surround design practices[8].
When applied by a designer, ethnographical practices provide a deep connection of project contexts, which aids in proper comprehension of the users and problems that may arise. Design anthropology aids at uncovering social facets of user experiences[9]. The ideas used here aims at global digital alteration and modernization. Within the design components, ethnography is very significant in digital transformation as one must have a better understanding of people you want to design things for them, and this is aid by anthropology tools. Communal application of anthropology major emphasizes inclusivity, which is obtained by a better comprehension of diversified cultures from different people[10]. In relation to design thinking for digitalization, it results in the invention of new types of machinery such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT). These inventories are achieved as a result of avoiding naval-gazing and traditional learning of anthropology.
Most anthropology is buried in mysterious theoretical language and culture, and therefore a comprehensive translation mechanism is required to translate it into a business express. Design thinking plays a vital role in contemplation of innovations, which later takes parts in transforming and translating the innovation into a simple form that can be understood by every individual within the innovation site: as man-machine boundary[11]. Anthropology also helps businesses have diverse thoughts on their activities by providing social, an ethnic lens that concentrates on social grouping that involves the engagement of products, organizations, and individuals.
Anthropology halts the dichotomies that are user-designers, human-tools, user-designers, and company-designers. All these can be reframed by anthropology as it causes procession empathetic of continuous human creation and re-invention. It also provides designers with a better understanding of the surrounding concerning the different interfaces on typographic expression[12]. Designers have adjusted and abridged to anthropology procedures and approaches to suit the desires of their practice and the space of their discrete ventures.
Material Culture in Technical Design
When we talk about material culture, we look straight to architectural designs that surround the people; how they use them, their importance to the society, behavior, values, norms, and rituals that the objects bring out to the community[13]. They are simply physical pieces that give significance to the culture of a community. Examples are; buildings, clothing, utensils, and any other objects created by human hands with a certain significance. They revolve around the three most necessities of life; food, clothing, and shelter. Consequently, nonmaterial culture is a collection of abstract ideas and ways of thinking that make up a culture.
Design, or technical design to be clearer, is a discipline that gives details on anthropologists’ practices who work hand in hand with designers from other disciplines to bring up new ideas to market. Design anthropology is mainly for ethnological and anthropological work, giving the critics of the culture in a society the observation of how people live and how they operate. Anthropology of the materials is, therefore, giving the relationship of how people operate and carry out their cultural activities at a place[14]. In the material culture in the technical design, the anthropologist can take a material and check its shape; then, he uses it on something he sees that can work with the shape size material or even the structure itself. He may also take the object to reinstitute it and therefore and make advanced stuff or even of a different form from the materials obtained.
The anthropological study of the materials gives the technology a new way and aspect of a combination of both the technological design and the inter-joining it with the current cultural practices. Technologists may appear to be the tools or more than ordinary humans; this is the anthropologist’s brain. A technologist reconstructed the cultural materials used by the community to the other advanced ways. The deal may be silent in society unless transformed into a normal and productive outcome as a result.
Therefore, having in mind that culture and technology have equal forces, and greatly influence one another, the anthropology plays a key role in joining this and making this transition[15]. And as culture changes, so does the technology, and as discussed earlier, technological design, anthropology, and culture are related; this means one is having a positive or negative impact in the environment, so does the other two.
Anthropological Design in the Research Process
In Anthropology, research has to be done. The anthropologist has questions he has to get answers directly from the community’s people, or indirectly depending on what method or methods he decides to use. Research design in Anthropology is a method of obtaining answers to a researcher’s questions that are relevant evidence to a certain evaluation, test to a theory, or some description to a phenomenon. An Anthropologist needs to have facts at his fingertips that will give him the information he has to the people with enough confidence. At any time, a question may arise, the researcher has to give correct answers with enough backup information[16]. Fieldwork is most common among Anthropologists. This is how most cultural anthropologists do their research. In this process, they document their research and give a direct focus on their topic.
Research methods in Anthropology: There are many ways through which Anthropologists do their research. One on one interviews, use of focus groups, observation, textual analysis through the use of questionnaires, among other ways. One on one interviews: Here, the researcher gets to the community and talks one on one to probably the leaders there or those chosen. This can turn out to be very accurate if the researcher gets to a community; all he will be told is nothing but the truth. Observation: In this method, the researcher goes to live among the people of the community. He or she will get to mingle with the people and practice some of their cultural practices as they observe their day-to-day lives. This takes more than a day. It could be weeks or months. This is for accuracy purposes since the researcher gets first-hand information and therefore draws dependable conclusions as claimed by Kawulich in his analysis of data collection methods[17].
Use of questionnaires: The Anthropologist setting for research can decide to put down questions, simple and not personal, to give the people of the community. This could be efficient where people are not open to speaking directly to the person[18]. Use of focus groups: Groups can set out on a mission to get answers. After that, they will bring together their findings and get what exactly they want. The use of data before the researcher can also decide to use data that was there before. This is easy. The researcher will just compare the previous and foresee the future. With all these methods, comes challenges in the process. Among the challenges, the researchers face the language barrier, bad weather, pests, and disease attack as well as uncooperative respondents. Language barrier: The researcher can get to a very interior community where they just know their local language[19]. This becomes difficult to a case where the anthropologist cannot speak nor hear the local dialect. It as well becomes a problem when there is no translator. Bad weather: The climate at the place cannot be favorable to the person. This can cause the researcher to fall sick.
Pests and diseases; the researcher can be attacked by pests and diseases, leading them to fall sick. In cooperative respondents, the respondents may choose to lie or not answer the researchers at all[20]. This is very heartbreaking. If the respondents lie about their answers, then the information is distorted directly from the source, which is not good.
All in all, the researcher is at liberty to use the method that suits him or her best, keeping in mind the challenges. He should as well use as many methods as he can to get an exact response.
Conclusion
The paper demonstrates a clear pathway in the design sector’s transformation process from the indigenous methods and the adoption of new systems in the design sector. Visual anthropology and its relation to typographic anthropology are discussed in detail and how they affect co-creation in design. The evolution of new design where clients do not dictate the processes involved in making a product has overcome critical challenges that pointed to its limitations and proposed ways of mitigating them. The research framework was constricted to design anthropology specifically to technical about a tangible product as an output. The recognition and application of technology are brought to light when work begins to flourish. The success of this depends on empathy and respect for cultural values and their influence on the economy.
Design anthropology relates strongly to other disciplines and requires professionalism, just like other sectors. The incorporation of design anthropology with cultural education motivates and creates a platform for developing a carrier in design. Professionalism involves profound judgment and analytical ability, in which the organization relies on the transform from one face to another. There are several beneficial aspects of design brought out in this discussion. These may include the perception of different communities on the interaction between culture and design, the visual role of design techniques, and their relation to anthropology. The application of technology in the design with typographic connection adds value to the research and promote technological appreciation in design anthropology. However, the research admits a few gaps that might exist in developing cultural structures that directly affect the output design techniques.
References
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[20] Prendiville, “A Design Anthropology of Place in Service Design,” A Methodological Reflection, The Design Journal 2, no. 18, (2015): 204.