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Access Type
WSU Access
Date of Award
January 2023
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
Anthropology
First Advisor
stephen chrisomalis
Abstract
The primary concern of this dissertation is an examination of the ways in which cultural models of technics, and their use in practical action, reflect larger order cosmological cultural models; and that, as a result, these larger order cosmological cultural models confer material consequences affecting the construction of the lived environment through design practice. In particular, this dissertation makes this argument through triangulating ethnographic and participant observation methods with secondary historical and philosophical literature. Throughout a multi-year study of automotive design and engineering departments in both the United States and China, I’ve observed and interviewed designers, engineers, and related research and development employees of a large American mobility company in order to understand the cognitive environment and processes of design decision-making. I conclude that human-centered design, and related normative constructs, circulate as media for collaboration, yet occlude where cultural models of progress and technics are in tension. These tensions, and the models of progress which underlie them, can be understood as consequences of expressively distinct, but ultimately comparable, long-developed and historically-situated cosmological worldviews. From this position, I challenge both East and West dichotomization and radical ontological incommensurability as unnecessary modes of analysis. I instead offer a universalist framework of technics based upon Eric Voegelin’s theory of history within which articulates a variety of cultural models that diverge from, or resemble, each other. Finally, I offer a vision for design that appreciates cross-cultural diversity and common humanity.
Recommended Citation
Thomas, Michael Howard, "Human-Centered Design In Medias Res: Automotive Design, Cosmotechnics, And Transcendence In The United States And China" (2023). Wayne State University Dissertations. 3787.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/3787