Episode 34
Jamer Hunt, Vice Provost for Transdisciplinary Initiatives at The New School: how to blend social science with design; interventions & multidisciplinarity
Jamer Hunt is the Vice Provost for Transdisciplinary Initiatives at The New School, where he was a founding director (2009-2015) of the graduate program in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design. He is also Visiting Design Researcher at the Institute of Design in Umea, Sweden. With Paola Antonelli at the MoMA he was co-creator of the award-winning, curatorial experiment and book Design and Violence (2013-15), as well as collaborating on the Head Space: On Scent as Design and The Design and the Elastic Mind symposium.
He is the co-founder of Design Philadelphia; the country’s largest design week and he is one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People…Inspiring Leaders [who] are Shaping the Future of Business in Creative Ways.” He has published over twenty articles on the poetics and politics of design, including for Fast Company and the Huffington Post, and he is co-author, with Meredith Davis, of Visual Communication Design. He is currently completing a book manuscript for Grand Central Publishing on scale, complex systems, and the unruliness of everyday experiences.
In today’s episode we talk to Jamer about his career path from anthropology to design; the different perspectives on the definition and scope of an intervention; the ways in which designers & social scientists view the practice of ethnography, participation and co-creation. We talk about places where design and social science blend together, what they can bring to each other as well as what they can create together; tips on how to successfully form and operate multidisciplinary teams. Lastly, we cover the role of the university space in supporting the practice of anthropology outside of academia.
Mentioned in Podcast:
- Why the World Needs Anthropologists – Designing the Future
- ReD Associates, strategy consulting company based on the human sciences
- Human-Centered Design
- Parsons, Transdisciplinary Design (MFA)
- The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design
- Epic, advancing the Value of Ethnography in Business
- Maurice E F Bloch, How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches To Cognition, Memory, And Literacy
- Cumulus Association, International Association of Universities and Colleges of Art, Design and Media
- POLIMI DESIS Lab, design for Social Innovation and Sustainability
Jamer’s work:
Visual Communication Design, An Introduction to Design Concepts in Everyday Experience (co-authored with Meredith Davis)
MoMA, Design and Violence book
Design and Violence exhibition
Design Anthropology, Alison Clarke (editor)
Social media or other links:
