«D.A.» represents a cultural science handbook of «Design Anthropology», providing an epistemology, phenomenology and survey of the varieties of the extended concept of design. Here the design concept is placed at the centre of the nexus of meaning of cultural production that rests on the three pillars Segno, Mythus and Techne. Anthropological design research is trans-disciplinary, developing in the connexion between Visual Culture (signal, in/visibility, image/void, imagination, representation), Doing Culture (act, cooperation, relation, fabrication, exchange), Material Culture (object, artefact, thing, facing, texture), Knowledge Culture (techniques, practices, norms, beliefs, values), Narrative Culture (mythology, significance, meaning, memory, identity), Critical Culture (watching, criterion, antagonism, crisis, theory) and Aesthetic Culture (emotion, sentiment, taste, feel, sense). It is only against this background that the complex anthropological dimension of Design Culture can be understood, extending far beyond the horizon of a design science concept of design, industry-near design thinking and marketing, or a product-oriented concept of manufacture. «Design Anthropology» is the research field of the «Coming Community», which has been founded here with a «D.A.» fraternity of more than 100 contributions, partners and friends. Through «D.A.» Yana Milev has formulated the theoretical and curatorial foundation for an extended concept of design that she has been representing and practicing since the 1990s in the context of the arts, rendering it now as «Anthropo Design».

Yana Milev is a Berlin-based artist, cultural philosopher/anthropologist, curator and publisher. She studied stage design, visual arts and cultural theory in Dresden, martial arts in Ky?to and Berlin, cultural philosophy and anthropology of art in Vienna and Karlsruhe. After a successful career as an artist (e.g. Documenta 10 – dX in 1997), in 2003 she moved to the scientific sphere. In 2008, she received her PhD on a subject of political philosophy. Since 2009 she has been developing the research field «design anthropology» within her habilitation treatise (venia legendi) at the University of St. Gallen’s Institute of Sociology. Besides her academic engagements as an author, theorist, researcher and lecturer, she works as a curator, project manager and publisher. Since 1987, Yana Milev has realized dozens of worldwide projects in the fields of art, curating, science, publishing, education, research and cultural production.