Distributed learning infrastructures in the anthropology of design

The anthropology of design is a hybrid field of study which in recent years has undergone and produced remarkable developments, above all in the interactions between the research laboratories of private companies and public institutes (universities or government bodies). The platforms and philosophies of social media have established the technological infrastructure and the circuit for the exchange of these interactions. Today it is on these technological backbones that anthropology of design articulates its practices and its educational strategies: the access to simple publishing and sharing instruments on the web and the free distribution of information that is traditionally reserved for limited channels and media (podcasts of university lectures, recordings of conferences, specialized blogs) set up the junctions for pathways of new circuits of knowledge. These outcomes and medial trends not only profoundly influence the places and methods of production and access to scientific literature but also the teaching practices which, in some cases, are attempting to utilize this auroral phase of the discipline to propose creative and innovative ways of learning where spatial-temporal geographies are ever more distributed, liquid and omnipresent.