Curriculum Transformation for the Futuristic Worlds: Design Anthropology for Twenty-First Century African Universities

ABSTRACT

In their efforts to dissuade Africans from engaging fruitfully on matters of design, including design anthropology, colonialists dismissed the indigenes as only capable of designing witchcraft and sorcery for which they were sadly famed in colonial anthropology. Arguing that twenty-first century African universities need to include design anthropology in the curriculum, this paper contends that the future of anthropology, and of Africa, lies in design as is evident in discourses and practices on designer babies, designer humanoid sex robots, industrial robots, designer robotic spouses, synthetic biology, Artificial Intelligence, human enhancements, nanofabrication, biohacking, gene and genome editing, reverse engineering and rewiring humans, gene and genome deletion, social designs and so on. Drawing on autoethnography and extensive literature review, the paper argues that design anthropology is increasingly becoming relevant in a world that is rethinking modernist designs which are at the core of the Anthropocene. Put differently, design anthropology enables [African] graduates to engage with contemporary, empirical issues of design in a twenty-first-century world where the discipline can only survive by shifting focus from an obsession with sterile discourses about, inter alia, the past and present of African witchcraft, culture, society and sorcery.

KEYWORDS:

• Design
• anthropology
• transformation
• curriculum
• ethnography

Introduction

A world that is suffering modernist design problems requires design solutions which make design anthropology essential for twenty-first century African universities grappling with issues of climate change, coloniality, dispossession, exploitation and the Anthropocene. What is needed is a kind of design anthropology that offers what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call ‘lines of flight’ which offer ways to redesign the worlds beyond Enlightenment modernity. Shifting away from mere critique as postulated in critical anthropology, critical theory and so on, the twenty-first century world is heading towards what is variously called the ‘Great Reset’, the ‘New World Order’, global assemblages or another world which is envisaged by scholars writing about the ‘Brave New World’, and by others arguing that ‘Another World is Possible’, ‘Another Knowledge is Possible’ and so on (De Sousa Santos 2007; Huxley 2006; Latour 1993; 2004; 2005; McNally 2006; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013; Nhemachena 2021a; 2023a). Underlying all these postulations are questions of designing the world to avert the kinds of modernist problems currently bedeviling the twenty-first century. There is growing recognition that critique alone will not solve the problems in the world and that, as Latour (2004) argues, ‘critique has run out of steam’ and so it is time to ‘reassemble the social’ (Latour 2005), which is to say redesign the world beyond Enlightenment modernist logics. Contending that design anthropology has historically operated within the logics of the [humanist] Enlightenment modernity, this paper shifts attention such that design anthropologists begin to think in terms of plausible and possible worlds beyond the modernist one which is responsible for challenges of, inter alia, the Anthropocene.

Arguing that curriculum transformations and redesigning which are ongoing in African universities (Masenya 2021) need to be sensitive to the ways in which the wider world is being redesigned towards the post-Anthropocene scenarios, this paper contends that it is essential to introduce design anthropology in twenty-first century African higher education institutions. Apart from assisting in designing plausible, possible alternative worlds beyond Enlightenment modernity which is responsible for the Anthropocene, design anthropology also helps in the many thriving companies that deal with fashion designs, food designs, clothing, textiles and apparel designs, architectural designs, craft designs and social designs in Africa (ArchAfrica 2021; Design Education Forum of Southern Africa 2023; ILO 2016, 2022; Margolin 2013; Mosomi, Osanjo, and Mwiti 2022; UNDP 2023, April 21; UNESCO 2023; World Intellectual Property Organization 2015, october 19). Africa’s creative economy is heavily design-oriented; it is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the world; it accounts for 3.1 percent of GDP; the export of cultural goods and services in the design industries reached US$389.1 in 2019; besides, it has been noted that these cultural and creative sectors account for 8.2 percent of workers in Africa; what is more, the African Union’s AU Agenda supports the cultural and creative economy in order to boost African fashion designs (ILO 2022; UNESCO 2023). Design anthropologists can assist businesses design made-in-Africa brands, for instance, premised on the African ubuntu culture (Lutz 2009; Mangaliso and Damane 2001; Mosomi, Osanjo, and Mwiti 2022). While industries in design, including the creative economy, have tended to be small and financially troubled, the African Development Bank and some African governments are funding them after recognising their potential. For instance, the African Development Bank’s Fashionomics Africa Program promotes investments in fashion industry, supporting made-in-Africa brands, promoting incubation and acceleration of start-ups (Diallo 2023, August 22).

In other regions of the world such as Europe, as in Africa, there is emphasis on ensuring the employability attributes of graduates (British Council 2014; Coetzee and Engelbrehct 2020; Mgaiwa 2021). Such graduate employability attributes include possession of relevant knowledge, skills and other attributes which facilitate the gaining and maintaining of employment; in this regard, employability reflects the individuals’ subjective perceptions or assessments of their capacity for obtaining and retaining a job, confidence about their skills and knowledge being transferrable, relevant and sought after (British Council 2014; Coetzee and Engelbrehct 2020). Indeed, the employment of anthropologists and archaeologists, including in the non-academic sector, is projected to grow by 4 percent between 2022 and 2032 (Powell 2020; Wallace 2019, May 8).

Besides the foregoing, contemporary technological transformations are relevant to design anthropology as reflected in Delgado (2016, 914) who observes that:

Rather than producing static matters of fact, synthetic biology turns the dynamics of life itself into a matter of design. Arguably, living designs in synthetic biology displace the epistemic focus, moving its referential anchoring from ‘back’ in reality to ‘ahead’ in the future or from the natural organism to the possible luring thing. A will to act at a distant time is inscribed in the living wonderful things of synthetic biology … action is displaced towards the future within synthetic biology designs: as recursive innovation, potentiality, technological acceleration and anticipatory action. Matters of design in synthetic biology are justified on the premise that wished for futures can be realized.

The point in the quotation is that disciplines are adopting futuristic positions and designs given the emergence of new technologies which make it possible to create new sentient futuristic organisms, nanofabricating humans using synthetic biology, rewiring and reverse engineering human brains and so on. Design anthropology, with its futuristic orientations, helps to anticipate and deal with designs of the entities, including humans, humanoid sex robots, social robots, designer babies and others, which are emerging from synthetic nanofabrication, brain scanning and Artificial Intelligence. Design anthropology connects with the anthropology of the future which is also an emergent subdiscipline (Bryant and Knight 2019; Lanzeni et al. 2023) which enables design anthropologists to think of the future not necessarily within Enlightenment modernist logics as was done during the colonial era (Colson 2008), but the future plausible alternative worlds. Stuck in binaries between the human and nonhuman, nature and culture, real and virtual, Enlightenment modernity became oblivious of the fact that even nonhumans design the world in the sense of them being actors (Latour 1993; 2004; 2005). Thus, in Enlightenment modernity, only humans are recognised as designers, yet the discourses on the Anthropocene recognise nonhumans, including Gaia, as actors and designers in the world afflicted by climate change (Banerjee and Arjalies 2021; Lovelock 2007). In this regard, curriculum designers have to draw distinctions between, on the one hand, designing within the ambit of the humanist Enlightenment modernist logics and, on the other hand, designing beyond such modernist logics such that nonhumans are recognised as designers as well.

Curricula Transformations and Design Anthropology

Ongoing curricula transformations in African universities are meant to ensure human dignity, equality, human rights, freedom, social justice, decolonisation, democratisation, re-thinking and pursuit of justice, development, indigenous knowledge, enhancements of human capacities, Africanisation, indigenisation and decent quality of life (University of Pretoria 2017, February; Agbaje 2023; De Vos and Riedel 2023). In such a context, transforming the discipline of design anthropology requires a deep understanding of the broader transformations that are taking place in the wider world as well as the historical encumbrances posed by anthropology as it was colonially designed and practised for centuries in Africa. A design anthropology that continues to assume that Africans are mired in the past and present without ideas about the future and the emergent remains a colonial discipline. An anthropology that continues to rely on the ethnographic present without paying attention to African imaginaries, foresights and anticipations of plausible futures, remains a colonial anthropology to the extent that it is embedded in colonial chronopolitics wherein those assumed to be savages, primitive and backward can only be studied using methodologies that focus on the past and the present. Put differently, an anthropology which assumes that Africans only know the past and the present does not grant decency, dignity, equality, freedom and democracy to Africans.

As Park (2023) argue, it is also necessary to include, in curriculum designs, how to deal with disasters, including the Anthropocene-induced disasters, so that we prepare graduates to deal with disasters which may be emergent as the world navigates towards alternative worlds to the humancentric modernist constitution. The transformations in the age of the Anthropocene are aptly captured by Braidotti (2016, 38) thus:

The Anthropocene also happens to coincide with an era of high technological mediation which challenges anthropocentrism from within. The decentering of Anthropos challenges therefore the separation of bios, life, as the prerogative of humans, from zoe, the life of animals and nonhuman entities.

Elsewhere in the world, anthropology is being redesigned and transformed such that symmetries between humans and nonhumans are recognised and quasi-objects are also being recognised in the discipline that has historically tended to be anthropocentric and humancentric (Latour 1993; 2005). Anthropologists elsewhere are arguing for an anthropology beyond humancentrism and for an anthropology that recognises emergent forms of life; the anthropologists elsewhere are also contending that anthropology must recognise singularity where some emergent forms of life are more intelligent than humans and where humans are merging with new technologies in ways that require redefining what we mean by the human, and by extension, what it means to be a designer (Fischer 1999; Haraway 2006, 2016; Ingold 2013; Kuznetsov 2022; Latour 2005; O’Lemmon 2020). Whereas, traditionally, anthropology has focused on humans as its object of study, the merger between humans and new technologies is redefining what it means to be human, and the human is being redesigned in this age of postbiology to become a cyborg in Haraway’s (2006, 2016) sense where the humanities themselves are becoming humusities or composts. Anthropology can no longer pretend to privilege the ethnos and the anthropos in a world that is increasingly populated by newly and emergently designed life forms and intelligent existents. The point here is that anthropologists are writing about the emergence of the postsocial, including postsocial anthropology (Cetina 2005; De Castro and Goldman 2012) which means that design is no longer reducible to humancentric social designs and social activism (Heidaripour and Forlano 2018; Kuure and Miettinen 2017; Tromp and Vial 2023) because nonhuman entities are also being granted agency and vitality as legitimate actors, and designers, in the world.

The problem is that while ethnography has tended to focus on the ethnographic present and the past of the ethnos, design focuses on the emergent and it is radically future-oriented in the sense of offering lines of flight beyond modernist logics; besides, whereas ethnography has focused on generating ethnographic data, design focuses on interrogating possible or plausible scenarios and concepts that help understand the future or the emergent existents (Otto 2018). For Graber (2015, August 3), whereas design and innovation focus on generating new insights, creativity and fresh thinking, ethnography gives insights about the present or past—and any future that a modernist ethnographer offers would still be a future within the present humancentric modernist constitution of the world. Thus, whereas ethnographic projects conventionally describe the present and past, design anthropology focuses on what does not concretely exist yet (Hase 2013), including emergent plausible alternative worlds. Design pays attention to detail, skillfulness, meaning, the symbolic, commercial and other meanings, and to interpretation; design makes something more lively, more commercial, more usable, more user friendly, more acceptable, more sustainable and so on; besides, design also requires attention not only to meaning and interpretation but also to morality for instance where one is designing cities, landscapes, natural parks, societies, genes, brains, chips and so on (Latour 2008).

The field of design anthropology lies between the discipline of design and that of anthropology; it combines anthropology with the imaginative praxis of design skills and processes such that anthropology would be able to proffer plausible alternative worlds beyond Enlightenment modernity; and both anthropology and design are inherently speculative disciplines in that design is not retrospective but prospective and it studies new forms of life never before encountered—and anthropology (unlike ethnography) is not merely about describing life but it also involves speculations about the worlds (Anusas and Ingold 2013; Ingold 2014). Writing about design anthropology, Otto and Smith (2013) state that:

… design anthropology is coming of age as a separate (sub)discipline with its own concepts, methods, research practices, and practitioners, in short, its own distinct style and practice of knowledge production. Design is a pervasive aspect of modern society with a large number of practitioners and a great range of subfields, such as industrial design, architecture, systems design, human computer interaction design, service design, and strategic design and innovation.

Instead of spending years ethnographically studying the past and present societies and cultures of the supposed primitive people, design anthropologists focus on the future, that is, on the emergent, which has not yet settled into a field or may not settle in a field to enable ethnographic fieldwork. The import of design anthropology is aptly captured by Wallace (2015, 1) who writes thus:

As an emerging field, design anthropology is uniquely placed to help us understand and deal with the ‘world in the making’ by exposing our material engagements with the emerging possible … Design anthropology provides a framework for devising methodologies that can capture and build upon an emergent response to being in the world.

Because the twenty-first century is a post-Anthropocene and post-Enlightenment-modernity world in the making, it is replete with new imaginaries and emergents including new biotechnology food imaginaries. There are also imaginaries of posthumans and transhumans, cerebral internet or brain-net, brain-nanorobots, neuro-nanorobots, brain chips and other technologies (Kurzweil 2005; Nhemachena 2021b; 2023b; 2023c; Nhemachena, Hlabangane, and Kaundjua 2020). By emergents, I refer to entities or objects that are still on the horizon and in the process of coming into being and hence becoming. The twenty-first century world is one that is being redesigned such that traditional anthropocentric ethnography is ill-equipped to understand the emergents which are still unfolding beyond Enlightenment modernity and have not yet settled in a field for traditional ethnographic fieldwork to happen. One cannot be a participant observer with regard to the emergent that is still unfolding and has not yet settled in a field to enable traditional ethnography to be conducted. Put succinctly, the emergent of alternative worlds eludes modernist ethnography because it has not settled in a field and because it is still unfolding and ambiguous. It is not susceptible to observation in the ethnographic sense of participant observation. Even the interlocutors may not be clear about the emergents that are still unfolding and hence ambiguous in their locations and forms. It is only through design anthropology that such emergents can be studied and understood because design anthropology deals with future scenarios and with what has not yet settled in a field for ethnographic fieldwork.

While some scholars have called for decolonising design ethnography which is dominated by Anglocentric/Eurocentric ways of seeing, knowing and acting in the world (Pinkston 2019; Tunstall 2013; Tunstall and Agi 2023), the kind of design anthropology envisaged by this paper is one which recognises not only ways in which humans disinherit one another but also ways in which humans dominate nonhumans. It is a kind of design anthropology which recognises not only humans as worth of engagements in participatory designs but also nonhuman actors are envisaged as possible stakeholders in the emergent participatory designs beyond humancentric logics of Enlightenment modernity.

Design Anthropology, Salvage Anthropology and Foresight

In so far as it enables studying the emergent rather than the past and the present, design anthropology helps to overcome the historical challenges of salvage ethnography or salvage anthropology which is obsessed with collecting ethnographic data and artefacts about the past and present of localities and communities deemed to lack alternative futures beyond Enlightenment modernity (Harrison and Darnell 2011; Redman 2021; Shimizu 1999; Vettikkal 2023 April 30; Wilcox 2006; Wood 2018). Salvage ethnography focuses on collection of past and present indigenous materials, remains and data out of fear that these groups are disappearing; salvage anthropology competes with museum-centered professions to collect past and present indigenous remains, artefacts and data; in a typical salvage anthropology study, the researcher often ignores changes disrupting indigenous ways of life such that salvage anthropology aimed at producing an ‘ethnographic photograph’ of the way of life long characteristic of a people, and the salvage anthropologists relied on the memories of older members of the ‘tribe’ to construct an image of that particular way of life; salvage anthropology was problematic in assuming that indigenous cultures were moribund, with the salvage anthropologist largely ignoring the views of the people under study, keeping informants’ views, about plausible alternative worlds, out of the equation (Harrison and Darnell 2011; Redman 2021; Shimizu 1999; Wilcox 2006; Wood 2018). Writing about salvage anthropology, Shimizu (1999, 121) notes that:

Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown began their works in the style of salvage anthropology, and it was the latter who elaborated that style into the science of primitive society … By contrast, Malinowski in his final years tried to undermine the epistemological basis of salvage anthropology, criticizing contemporary anthropologists for their preoccupation with the imaginary past … As far as Britain is concerned, Malinowski was the first anthropologist who attempted to implement innovation and introduce a perspective alternative to the history-long salvage anthropology. It is a historical irony that he tried to replace salvage anthropology, a pristine discourse of colonialism, by another colonial discourse, ‘practical anthropology’.

The point in the foregoing is that salvage anthropology did not focus on the emergent plausible futures but on the past and present of indigenous people. In this regard, salvage anthropology did not focus the attention of the anthropologist on the future beyond Enlightenment modernity precisely because the indigenous people who constituted the subjects were deemed to lack alternative plausible futures; in salvage anthropology, what indigenous people had were the past and the present but not the future—and so salvage anthropology did not consider it worthwhile to focus on the future and on the emergent. In so far as design anthropology allows anthropology graduates to focus not merely on the past and present but also on the plausible alternative futures and emergents, it is decolonial because it allows for alternative imaginaries that speak to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Design inherently focuses on foresight and anticipation, because design, including engineering and industrial designs have to understand the future market and needs of the society (Cascini 2012; Klenk et al. 2023; Zamenopoulos and Alexiou 2007). The argument here is that an anthropology that overly focuses on the ethnographic present and past, and does not assist in developing foresight and anticipatory skills is colonial. Recently, Africa was struck by COVID-19 which it could not handle easily, because it could not anticipate the pandemic; also, Africa ran short of equipment to deal with the pandemic; and because Africans could not anticipate the pandemic, they could neither produce nor access vaccines (Nhemachena 2021c). Design anthropology would make it possible to anticipate the futures, develop foresights and develop anticipatory designs to prevent undesirable effects in a proactive manner. Countries that could anticipate pandemics were already researching on, designing and developing vaccines including nanovaccines and nanomedicines from cutting-edge nanotechnologies—and so some corporations in the West designed and manufactured novel mRNA vaccines, including novel nanovaccines, in record time (Nhemachena 2021c; 2023b).

The upshot of the foregoing is that African universities and institutions could not anticipate and deploy foresight about the pandemic because they fall short on disciplines that focus on designs, including design anthropology. With a kind of anthropology that focuses on the past and present of African societies, African universities could not have proactively put in place appropriate designs to deal with the emergent pandemic. Design anthropology is decolonising in the sense that design enables anticipation, foresight, preparations and proactiveness to deal with future situations to resolve problems in reference to a future state of the world; design [anthropology] would enable anticipation of future products including anticipation of future vaccines for pandemics; in so far as design allows for preparations and proactiveness, it also saves lives by designing and producing relevant products including medicines and vaccines in time (Cascini 2012; Zamenopoulos and Alexiou 2007). Writing about anticipatory designs, Cascini (2012, 29) argues thus:

The capability of anticipating the main features of future products and related manufacturing processes is more and more a critical asset in industry, due to the innovation-based competition of markets and to the extremely reduced lead time of modern product development cycles … The development of competitive products is largely based on the capability to bring in the market innovative solutions, i.e. characterized by new functionalities, higher performance, reduced resources consumption and costs and with no undesired effects for the product beneficiaries. The rate of innovation has reached a speed so high that despite the diffused efforts to shorten the lead time companies continuously struggle for renovating their products on a day-to-day perspective, while long term strategy definition has become a privilege for reduced number of fortune companies.

The point in the foregoing is that anthropologists must not merely focus on documenting indigenous knowledges but they must also employ design anthropology which allows them to put in place designs for different interventions including alternative medical/health designs, alternative economic designs, alternative development designs, alternative environmental designs, alternative agricultural designs, alternative architectural designs, alternative human rights designs, alternative good governance designs, alternative democratic designs, alternative infrastructural designs and alternative vaccine designs. Arguably, the reason why the Madagascan herbal cure for COVID-19 (Nhemachena 2021c) did not receive wide acceptance even in Africa is not that Africans do not know about the value of alternative health interventions: it is that Africans have not proactively put in place proper designs for alternative health/medical interventions. This is why design anthropology is very important.

Intersecting the field of anthropology and the field of design, design anthropology has a very practical import on the discipline of anthropology, particularly in the twenty-first century where anthropologists are turning away from purely socio-cultural issues and towards questions of practical designs on the basis of the social lives and biographies of things (Gosden and Marshall 1999; Kopytoff 1986). In a twenty-first century world where anthropology is shifting to new subdisciplines such as the anthropology of science and technology studies, anthropology of architecture, anthropology of infrastructures, molecular anthropology, neuroanthropology, biosocial engineering and so on (Nhemachena and Mawere 2022), the discipline is productively engaging with empirical questions of design.

Design anthropology deals with expressly designed phenomena like buildings, clothing, spaces, fashion, architecture, infrastructure, and post/social designs; there are also design issues in virtual spaces; besides, there are design issues in industrial engineering, graphics, product service materials, in marketing, in education, and other business operations (Bargna and Santanera 2020; Murphy 2016; Ventura and Bichard 2017). Design anthropology would make anthropology more relevant to the twenty-first century world which is being transformed towards Society 4.0 and 5.0. The point here is not that design anthropologists should uncritically facilitate the power of corporations, and other businesses, over society (Tunstall 2013; Tunstall and Agi 2023; Suchman 2011; Drazin 2013; 2021; Gregory 2018) rather they should import empathy and alleviate the power of corporations.

Design is different from manufacture in the sense that design happens prior to production or manufacture of objects; and, there are social cultural issues in designing objects (Murphy 2016). Historically designers have focused more on things themselves and their designer properties like forms, patterns, orderings and so on than on the details of designing in action; however, there has been a recent turn to design in anthropology and this rekindles sensitivity to the social world; anthropology is now seriously reconsidering the position of designers; also, the current flow of academically trained anthropologists into the corporate world has helped to create productive zones of contact between anthropology and design; and technology companies reach deeply into people’s everyday lives most notably Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon and so on—these developments speak to design issues which need to include post/social dimensions and be embedded in wider post/social discourses (Bargna and Santanera 2020; Murphy 2016; Nhemachena, Hlabangane, and Kaundjua 2020; Smith and Otto 2014; Ventura and Bichard 2017). The point here is that as global technology corporations become part of everyday life in Africa, anthropology has to give up the historical figment of studying the primitive, the isolated, savage, barbaric and anthropos—indeed, it has to preoccupy itself with alternative plausible worlds beyond Enlightenment modernity and the humancentrism associated with it.

Ethnography, the Emergent and Hybrid Entities

Whereas anthropologists of the old order have focused on long-term ethnography in the Malinowskian sense which assumed that cultures were static and could thus be easily represented in the subject-object assumptions that undergird the principles of participant observation, design anthropology focuses on studying the emergent which does not presuppose subject-object binaries that are assumed in traditional ethnography. The point here is that design anthropology brings in radical changes to the traditional objects-subjects assumption, including in the methodology of ethnography, such that instead of focusing on the historical ethnographic past and present, design anthropology focuses on the emergent futures which are a result of the design and redesign of the world. Whereas Enlightenment modernity, in its humancentrism, assumed that it was humans who designed the world, this paper draws attention to the fact that emergent sentient autonomous technologies are becoming designers and are re/designing the world. There are for instance already debates on how to grant intellectual property rights to Artificial Intelligence which is capable of creativity and inventions (Appel, Neelbauer, and Schweidel 2023; Chesterman 2024; Ogwuche 2022). The point here is that there is recognition that Artificial Intelligence or what is called generative AI is capable of designing, innovating and inventing to a point where they can be given intellectual property rights similar to those being granted to human designers, innovators and inventors. These developments have implications for design anthropology which is being forced to recognise not only humans as designers but also nonhumans which have not been recognised as designers within the logics of Enlightenment modernity. In order to adapt and survive the emergent, design anthropology has to shift its focus and methodology so that it is better able to address how the world is being designed and redesigned by human and nonhuman actors. Writing about the shortfalls of traditional ethnography, Singh (2021) state that:

We describe an ‘emergent’ sociocultural phenomenon with the following characteristics. It is a sociocultural phenomenon in its nascent form with minimal performances in the real-world or not yet occurring in people’s social life. However, the technical, economic, and sociocultural trends indicate that the real-world occurrences of the emergent phenomena may become a reality and get established in the near future. In other words, a sociocultural phenomenon that is not out there yet. Nonetheless, it is in the process of becoming. Considering the potential social realities of such a phenomenon, it may be a relevant object for an anthropological inquiry. However, a unique methodological challenge with an emergent phenomenon is that a ‘field-site’ for an anthropological inquiry may not yet exist.

Similarly emphasising the changes that design anthropology is bringing to the discipline of anthropology, Smith and Otto (2014, 1–2) observe that:

Design anthropology is emerging as an academic field of study and practice between anthropology and design. While its potential lies in the intersection between the two fields, the chances of how to intervene as anthropological researchers in this field are still highly unexplored. Often the focus remains on ethnographic or collaborative methods for understanding cultural practices, while less academic attention is given to the ways in which anthropologists engage with the complex challenges of emergent cultural forms, and with setting directions for possible futures […] We focus on emergence and intervention as central concepts for design anthropology … In doing this we focus on the cultural patterns and prospects of the near and emerging future, rather than the ethnographic realities of the past present, which is normally the focus.

The argument in the foregoing is that as African academics are doing curriculum transformation in their universities, it is essential for them to be aware of the current changes in the discipline, including the shifts in the object of the discipline and the methodological changes that are turning away from anthropocentric ethnographic methods traditionally used to study the ethnographic present. New ways of studying the emergent phenomena include horizon scanning, the Delphi technique, post-qualitative methodology, diffractive methodology and so on—in fact there is mess in social science research (Law 2004; Nhemachena and Mawere 2022). Once anthropology shifts its focus from the ethnographic present to the emergent beyond Enlightenment modernity, ethnography becomes otiose, precisely because the emergent does not yet have, or may not even settle in, a field to enable ethnographic fieldwork.

Questions around designer babies, transhumanist projects, posthumanist transformations, humanoid sex robots and industrial robots (Andorno and Yamin 2019; Atanasoski and Vora 2020; Ball 2017, January 8; Doring, Rohangis Mohseni, and Walter 2020; Knoppers and Keiderman 2019; Masterson 2022; Melillo 2021; Moyo 2021; Nhemachena 2021b; Pang and Ho 2016; Peeters and Haselager 2021) are all aspects that design anthropology needs to deal with as it grapples with the emergent futures and with what is on the horizons of the twenty-first century. In a world that is populated by such hybrid intelligent entities, the anthropos ceases to be the sole subject of anthropological research, and humans cease to be the sole designers in the world. Human sexuality, marriages and families are for instance being redesigned through humanoid sex robots. Writing about humanoid sex robots that are increasingly replacing biological human partners, Andreallo (2019, November 13) observes that:

Sex robots started to come on to the market around 2010. Those available now have skins that are claimed to feel lifelike, heated orifices, and the ability to groan on touch. They may have customizable eye colour, skin tone, hair styles, orifices and accents. A 2017 survey suggested almost half of Americans think that having sex with robots will become a common practice within 50 years.

However, making observations about the future, Wallace (2019, 181) argues that:

Envisioning future consequences resulting from the products of design activity will always be in a large part uncertain. Methods such as these however can be able to draw attention to particular ways of being in the world amid the emergence of new technologies. The cultural history of robotics and its deeply embedded imaginings and fantasy of human interaction, seem to call for a better understanding of people’s actual engagement in the world. The application of suitable design methods can provide ways of contextualizing imagination in ways that can draw attention to how people may be effected in ways that are grounded in particular cultural contexts and sensitive to people’s sociality and humanity.

The emergent hybrid entities offer an opportunity for design anthropologists to immerse themselves in what Bruno Latour (2013) calls the anthropology of the moderns – researching and studying emergent hybrid entities, working together with designers to improve the designs, to make them safe for users, to make them more attractive to users and to make them suit the contexts, including safety, of the users. Emergent hybrid entities and organisms including reengineered viruses and bacteria, which are no longer entirely natural, become the subjects of design anthropologists in so far as they become partly natural and partly cultural. In other words, through gain of function research, scientists are reengineering organisms including viruses and bacteria to boost their virulence and some of them become resistant to medication. Such research can be used for beneficial purposes to understand the ways in which the organisms work to benefit humanity, but they can also be used for harmful purposes such as when terrorists begin to reengineer and redesign viruses and bacteria, boosting their virulence and resistance to medication for nefarious purposes. These redesigned organisms bridge binaries between nature and culture because of their hybrid characteristics; they are natural organisms which are modified and reengineered by humans such that they also become cultural organisms or objects. Some insights on this arise from my participation in the World Health Organisation team of consultants on responsible use of life sciences research in 2021. Responsible use of life sciences research is a response to the possible beneficial and harmful uses of redesigned organisms.

Rume rimwe harikombi churu: An Autoethnography of Designing WHO Governance Frameworks for Responsible Life Sciences Research

Autoethnography is handy in anthropology because it describes and analyses personal experience in order to understand cultural experience; in autoethnography, a researcher uses tenets of autobiography and ethnography; besides, in autoethnography, researchers retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies from being part of a culture; also, the researchers seek to provide descriptions of personal experience and interpersonal experience; in the process the researchers try to make personal experience meaningful and cultural experience engaging while also drawing on wider experiences; the point here is that autoethnography draws on narrative research, autobiography and ethnography, and it ensures that the researcher’s voice and experiences are heard; the researcher explores his or her memories to reflect on cultural values so that they reflect on their lives through their own life stories (Cooper and Lilyea 2022; Ellis, dam, and Bochner 2011). Put differently in autoethnography, the ethnographer may do self-introspection and sensemaking at the individual level; the ethnographer can use metaphors as a tool to conduct and reflect upon autoethnography (Bolade-Ogunfodun, Soga, and Laker 2023; Leete 2021; Whitinui 2014). Writing about the value of metaphors in ethnography, (Leete 2021 p iv) observes that:

Metaphor enables us to reveal an ethnographic truth in complicated situations when scholars encounter cognitive or ethical challenges while trying to handle their field experiences or the process of comprehension directly. Metaphors may also reveal nuances of knowledge that remain unnoticed when one applies a stricter academic writing style. Making resemblance allows us to detect the possibility of new knowledge. Metaphoric expressions may also fail and indicate absence of cognitive potential at some point, although metaphor does give the potential to play with undertones of truth and meaning.

Using the Shona (an ethnic group in Zimbabwe) metaphor rume rimwe harikombi churi (literally a single big man cannot surround a hill alone) or a single person or organisation cannot solve problems alone, I would want to narrate my experience in the WHO consultations on responsible use of life sciences research meetings that sought to design regulations, policies and awareness programmes on dual-use research of concern: dual-use research of concern (DURC) involves the production or reengineering of organisms which can be used both for good and harmful purposes. In other words, the meetings arose out of the recognition that scientists including engineers, using the new convergent technologies like nanotechnology, biotechnology, synthetic biology and information technology, are producing novel organisms, redesigning or reengineering existing natural organisms, including to enhance their virulence, in ways that can be used for beneficial as well as harmful purposes. The aim was therefore for WHO, and governments around the world, to design regulations, policies and awareness programmes so as to govern the technoscientific designs of novel organism.

The consultations reminded me of the Shona metaphor rume rimwe harikombi churu because they involved broad consultations and included many experts from different disciplines including natural sciences, biological sciences, humanities and social sciences and so on. I understood this as an acknowledgement from WHO that no single discipline would be sufficient in designing rules on how to govern the DURC in the world. Even though the WHO itself is a very big organisation with branches and offices in many different parts of the world, it saw it fit to conduct consultations with experts from many different disciplines and from many different places of the world via the online meetings. In fact, the WHO intended to further engage and expect governments in the world to design rules to govern DURC—and because the designs of reengineered organisms can easily be shared including via the internet for purposes of terrorism, it was absolutely important for governments in the world to cooperate with WHO in putting rules in place to ensure safety and security in the world. All these aspects underscored the validity of the Shona proverb rume rimwe harikombi churu. The WHO could not do it alone despite its size, and no single government in the world can regulate the DURC alone to ensure the safety and security of the world from reengineered organisms which can be spread across borders. So, the meetings needed experts, including from the natural sciences that are designing and redesigning the novel organisms; they also included experts in biosecurity and biorisk domains; and of course, they included experts who could advise on education and awareness issues about the DURC. Besides, there were experts in humanities and social sciences who deal with how the social sciences could be harnessed to assist in designing the WHO regulations, policies, education and awareness issues. What the WHO did was to show that matters of design needed collaboration, partnerships and cooperation across the world, particularly in the twenty-first century world where national borders are very porous, permeable and susceptible to terrorist activities using the novel bioengineered organisms whose virulence would have been nanotechnologically boosted.

As an anthropologist-cum-sociologist who had also taken courses from different disciplines, and published in many different areas, such as law, security, political science, philosophy, science and technology studies, and education, I was delighted to be part of the team being consulted by WHO. However, I initially wondered how experts from the different disciplines and different parts of the world would actually work together in a context where often even the technical terms used by some were disciplinary. Luckily, the fact that I had studied courses from different disciplines and had published in a number of areas including the anthropology of science and technology studies helped me quickly understand colleagues from the natural sciences. I recognised that it is not enough for many people to help one another simply by surrounding a hill together, as it were, but that while they are surrounding the hill they need to be able to also speak to one another; be able to understand one another while they designed rules and regulations on the responsible use of life sciences research.

Whereas some anthropologists would have been shocked to see an anthropologist like me sitting with natural scientists discussing matters of life sciences research as well as emerging convergent technologies, the occasion relieved me from a sterile kind of modernist anthropology which focuses on humancentric ethnography, including human cultures, societies, human agency and so on. Here we were discussing not anthropocentric issues in the traditional anthropological sense, but we were concerned with the vitality, agency and actions of nonhuman redesigned and reengineered organisms that could be used for beneficial or harmful purposes. Indeed, unlike modernist anthropologists who assumed binaries between nature and culture, we sat in the WHO meetings to discuss reengineered organisms that defied binaries between natural and cultural, real and artificial. And the WHO sought to design the rules and regulations before the reengineered organisms could be used for the harmful purposes, including by terrorists. In other words, design does not wait for harm to ensue as a fact, but it seeks to forestall harm, which is to say, designing the rules and regulations had to happen before any harm was experienced as a fact. Indeed, the Shona people also advise humanity through the idiom kuyeuka bako wanaiwa (to remember a cave when one has already being pounded by heavy rain) that people should not wait for harm to occur as a fact before they react. In other words, it is necessary to act before harm is observed or witnessed; it is important to design ways and means to forestall harm which is foreseen in the future. Thus, focus must not only be on the past and present of harm, but harm which is still emergent also calls for designs to forestall it. The WHO was therefore preparing a cave for humanity to hide before the heavy rain begins to pound; that is, before the world experiences the harm emanating from reengineered organisms.

The point in the foregoing is that scientists are designing and producing novel organisms which are set to reassemble the social in Bruno Latour’s (2005) sense of redesigning the world in ways that challenge the modernist humancentrism and anthropocentrism. Writing a foreword in the booklet that came out of the consultations, the WHO Chief Scientist Dr Soumya Swaminathan (WHO 2022, vi, Foreword) stated thus:

Life sciences and technologies can offer endless opportunities to improve our health, our societies and our environment. However, developments and advances in life sciences and associated technologies may pose risks that include safety and security risks caused by accidents, inadvertent and deliberate misuse to cause harm. For example, advances in synthetic biology can have beneficial applications in medicine, energy, and environmental remediation but can also raise safety and security concerns by enhancing the pathogenic characteristics of ordinary organisms, creating new pathogens from synthetic DNA or reconstructing extinct pathogens. Developments in neurosciences can help preventing and treating neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, but new knowledge and applications can also create new risks, including those of manipulating the way we think, move and behave. These risks arising from developments in the life sciences and converging technologies need to be recognized and mitigated.

The engagements generated a sense in me that as anthropologists in Africa, we are not paying sufficient attention to the ways in which convergent technologies including synthetic biology and nanotechnology are decentering humans and generating risks and insecurities including biorisks and biosecurity which transcend national and continental boundaries and borders when new reengineered organisms, including enhanced viruses, become mobile. Besides, the engagements convinced me that it is necessary for design anthropologists to pay close attention to the ways in which scientists are designing and redesigning organisms beyond modernist nature/culture binaries; the benefits and risks associated with such designs need to be appraised ahead of time so that regulations and policies can be designed to ensure safety and security. During the engagements, we discussed ways in which knowledge about the biorisks, biosecurity, safety, dual-use research of concern, responsible use of life sciences research and gain of function research can be disseminated across the world, including through educational institutions such as universities. We also discussed how states could design regulations and laws for dual-use research of concern to ensure responsible use of life sciences research. Realising the relevance of design anthropology in understanding the ways in which the world is being redesigned through convergent technologies which have enabled the reengineering of even the humans themselves via synthetic biology, I decided to write this article. To meaningfully participate and engaged in design and in activism around the contemporary redesigning of the world, it is necessary to study design anthropology.

Design anthropologists would be able to work together with designers of the emergent convergent technologies and reengineered organisms to ensure that a better world is created. Because the ongoing redesigning of the world is defying modernist binaries between the natural/cultural, human/nonhuman, real/artificial, it is necessary to think in terms of a design anthropology that takes into cognisance the recent turn away from modernist ontologies. Universities that fail to transform their disciplines, including design anthropology, risk wasting scarce resources teaching and learning what is losing relevance or is becoming of marginal relevance. Indeed, universities that fail to keep up with ongoing transformations will lose their own relevance. Universities need to be redesigned and so design anthropologists should use their insights to ensure their universities are not stampeded out of existence as the world is being redesigned towards posthumanism and postanthropocentrism enabled by synthetic biology, nanotechnology and the other convergent technologies which are taking the world beyond the binary assumptions of Enlightenment modernity.

The world is transforming, including through technosolutionism, to solve many challenges such that design anthropology is ever becoming relevant, particularly at the interface of society and technology. For instance, instead of pledging children and then waiting for them to grow into marriages as happened in the past, humanoid sex robotic designs are accelerating the production of potential designer spouses, of which some can be purchased on instalments (Nhemachena 2021b). Similarly, instead of relying on old vaccines which took close to a decade to manufacture, the world is designing and accelerating the production of nanovaccines and nanomedicines through nanotechnology (Nhemachena 2021c; 2023b). And instead of waiting for natural evolution to take place in the way it has been understood by evolutionary anthropologists, the world is designing and fast-tracking evolution through nanofabrication and synthetic biology (Nhemachena 2023a). Similarly, instead of waiting for natural processes of growth, the world is accelerating the production of food through biotechnology, including genetically modifying organisms. To stay relevant, design anthropology has to adopt the anthropology of science and technology studies, including technoscience, in order to understand the new designs that are emerging. Given the significance of understanding these issues, it is no wonder that the famed British Anthropologist, Timothy Ingold (2014; 2017) has argued that instead of focusing on ethnography, anthropology should focus on bigger issues, beyond ethnography, in the world. A focus on the ethnographic past and present would constitute an encumbrance to anthropology which aims to grapple with bigger questions, beyond Enlightenment modernity, that are seizing the world.

Indeed, there are some academics in some of the universities who are adamant that anthropology of science and technology studies, which is closely connected to anticipation studies, is not anthropology (Nhemachena and Mawere 2022), and, one might surmise, they could as well argue that design anthropology is not anthropology—presumably because they are so used to anthropologies that focus on African witchcraft and sorcery, including the associated ethnographic present borne of Western metaphysics of presence in Derrida’s (Lawor 2002; Fuchs 1976) sense. It is imperative to begin to practice cutting edge anthropology in the twenty-first century to avoid becoming intellectual deadwood feeding the mosses of the old. Design anthropology offers the vistas and praxis to launch anthropology into Society 4.0 and 5.0, and offer alternative worlds to the Enlightenment modernist one. The changes that are taking place in the discipline of [design] anthropology are captured, with reference to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, by the President of the world-renowned funder of anthropological research, the Wenner Gren Foundation, Danilyn Rutherford (2020, June 19) thus:

Anthropology as a discipline, is not going to escape the pandemic unscathed. Never has the discipline seen such a sudden transformation in the conditions that make our research possible. The kinds of field methods for which we’re famous have become largely impossible. The relevance of the kinds of questions we were in the middle of asking has been cast into doubt.

The point here is that the COVID-19 pandemic and the emerging industrial revolutions should catalyse anthropologists to ask questions about the future of [design] anthropology as a discipline, much as humanists are asking questions about the future of humanity, and much as health practitioners and scholars are asking questions about the future of health. The zeitgeist of the moment is to think not obsessively in terms of the ethnographic past and present or even the modernist future, but in terms of the future beyond Enlightenment modernity, that is on the horizon, and which is forcing all of us to ask completely different sets of questions and to transform the methodologies with which we can understand that future. The point in this paper is that African universities should consider introducing design anthropology as part of curriculum transformation, and, as is conventionally part of the processes, they would need to conduct needs assessments during the curriculum transformations to determine what their various stakeholders would think, about design anthropology, in their contexts. African universities should not wait for rain to pound them before they start teaching design anthropology which enables anticipations of plausible alternative futures. As argued herein, the paper envisages two kinds of futures namely futures within the logic of Enlightenment modernity and futures beyond the logics of Enlightenment modernity. Design anthropology and futures beyond the logics of Enlightenment modernity have methodological implications in the sense that the modernist ethnography is inadequate to study the hybrid objects and organisms that are being designed and created in the twenty-first century world.

Conclusion

Arguing that design anthropology is important for the designing and redesigning of plausible alternative worlds beyond Enlightenment modernity that is responsible for the Anthropocene, this paper also contended that transformations in the world are challenging design anthropologists to consider nonhumans as actors and designers. Besides, the paper has argued that scientists are designing and redesigning natural organisms such that they transcend binaries between nature and culture; such designed and redesigned organisms become legitimate subjects of design anthropology. Also, the paper argued that universities need to consider introducing design anthropology in order to deal with the ways in which the world is being redesigned and transformed via new energy imaginaries, new nanovaccine imaginaries, new infrastructural imaginaries, synthetic biology imaginaries and so on. Because the present is increasingly becoming impossible in a world that is ravaged by the Anthropocene, it is increasingly necessary to teach design anthropology which proffers lines of flight from the modernist territory which is responsible for the environmental disruptions being witnessed in the twenty-first century. Put differently, design anthropology in the Anthropocene era should anticipate plausible alternative worlds, not within the same logics of Enlightenment modernity but, beyond such humancentric modernity.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).