Discovering the Familiar: Exploring Everyday Practice in the Design of Tools and Artefacts

The design of everyday objects and artefacts, tools and technologies can prove particularly challenging for design. Their very pervasiveness, ease of application and seeming simplicity can mask the complex array of human practice, knowledge and skills that enables their use posing serious implications for critical design research and practice. In this paper, we discuss an undergraduate programme: the Anthropology of the Object developed to encourage and enable students to explore and analyse the complexities that underpin the use and application of everyday tools and implements, the tacit knowledge, reasoning and practice on which participants rely in accomplishing routine actions and activities. The programme includes fine-grained field studies, naturalistic experiments, individual and group projects, tohave students both alone and in collaboration with others to begin to discover and analyse the complexities of the commonplace to explore and reflect upon their import and implications and inform their design practices.