Paul Dourish delivered an intriguing paper at this morning’s final keynote, in which he considered how developers could cultivate a different relationship with anthropological knowledge. At present, the dominant mode of engagement is to consider 'implications for design' as the guiding principle in assessing and using ethnography. However, good anthropological knowledge can contain a plethora of useful analytic themes that have the potential to enrich development. If developers shifted their view away from simply focusing on the implications for design section towards analytical themes, then they could draw from a wide range of classical anthropological works which were not necessarily aimed at developers.

To illustrate this, Dourish pointed to two pieces of classical anthropological work: Munn's work on aboriginal navigation - which looks at the presence or absence of people from a landscape - and Malkki’s work on refugees and exile - which shows how, in contrast to the 'spoilt identity' of Goffman’s theory, the refugees clung to refugee status rather than accepting a new, inauthentic, identity. The analytic themes derived from such works, he argued, such as issues of interaction in space, absence and identity, could enrich understanding (and thus development) in such areas as electronic tracking of paroled sex offenders.