Eve Pinsker and Anna Kirah
Systemic design increasingly confronts problems of scale, emergence, and social complexity that resist conventional design methods. Yet a persistent gap remains between the aspirations of systemic design—understanding people, contexts, and system dynamics holistically—and the methodological repertoire practitioners typically bring to the listening and understanding phases of their work. This paper argues that ethnographic methods and developmental evaluation, when used together, substantially strengthen systemic design practice, and that their integration represents a productive pluralism the field needs. We discuss the benefits of incorporating ethnographic methods and developmental evaluation in light of Sander’s design research and practice model that moved our way of viewing who we are and what we can achieve from a static and compartmentalized model (Sanders, 2006; Sanders, 2008), to a more dynamic and relational one). Due to the static and compartmentalized nature of the former Map of Design Research and Practice (Sanders, 2006; Sanders, 2008) and the age of design thinking and doing (Brown & Katz, 2009), the reality of the dynamic nature of our roles, subsequent mindsets, and the choice of our “designerly” tools at any given moment in a design process has not been subject to enough reflection as to how these practices affect outcome (Hay et al., 2024). An ethnographic and developmental evaluation approach gives us methods and tools that we can use to reflect on our design practice, how we build the relationships involved, and revise, in light of interim outcomes and shared understanding of goals (goals also being subject to reflection and revision), in iterative cycles. The model of iterative cycles of practice and reflection is built into action research (Baum et al 2006). Action research integrated into design practice, from this vantage point, becomes a methodology that can incorporate multiple disciplinary perspectives informing designers and design researchers to move design practice into an evolving relational space that not only acknowledges the space of designing for, and designing with others, but also understands the capabilities and value of people who are able to design for themselves (Hasselknipe et al., 2017). Others have recognised that designers are also often part of a transdisciplinary environment that can be conducive to both reflexivity and collaboration (Miller et al., 2022; Marg & Theiler, 2023). Ethnography and developmental evaluation have important roles in empowering people to design for themselves. Ethnography plays a crucial role because ethnographic inquiry works through active listening, participant observation, and dialogue with our clients as partners to support their own processes of reflection and articulation of their own knowledge of their world and lived experience (Fetterman 2020). Developmental evaluation also adds a needed dimension to support learning and improvement of design practice. Developmental evaluation can be considered a form of action research, as it also moves through iterative cycles of doing, reflecting, and re-doing. As an approach to evaluation – to reflecting and improving on the practice of intervention in a social process, in this case design practice – it moves beyond “formative” (implementing a model, focusing on process) and “summative” (evaluation conducted at the end of project, focusing on outcomes) to encompass both of those but also open up inquiry about goals, processes and the relationships of process to outcomes, and what understandings about them are shared and what are not (Patton 2011). Together, ethnographic methods and developmental evaluation address complementary weaknesses in systemic design practice. Ethnography deepens the listening phase; developmental evaluation makes learning and adaptation continuous throughout the design process. In an era of artificial intelligence and increasingly complex systemic design challenges, these human-centred capacities—active listening, compassion, relational intelligence, and transdisciplinary collaboration—become more, not less, critical.
Keywords: ethnographic methods, evaluation, Social interventions, Developmental Evaluation, design anthropology, participatory methods, listening and understanding, methodological pluralism