Elizabeth

Tunstall began her professional life in the nineties defining user experience and strategy at Chicago-based E Lab, where she "undertook ethnographic anthropological research on everything from men’s grooming to community use of telecommunications." Tunstall's social sciences training was valued among interactive and product design firms aiming for a more rigorous approach to user experience and research. E-Lab was an experience-based research firm, leading a new marketing philosophy with a direct approach: Understand how real people experience real products to create innovative product concepts and services. The idea challenged companies to forget conventional market research (focus groups, consumer surveys, targeted test markets) because a breakthrough approach has tapped into the consumer behavior patterns that drive everyday purchasing trends. E-Lab pioneered that breakthrough. Cambridge-based Sapient Corporation, an IT provider and e-services consulting group for Global 1000 companies and startups, acquired E-Lab in 1998. E-Lab became Experience Modeling, one of five strategic disciplines that Sapient incorporated into its organization. Tunstall was a Sr. Experience Modeler, for Sapient Corporation from 1999–2002 then moved on to Arc Worldwide, a Leo Burnett/Publicis Company where she was a Sr. Experience Planner from 2003–2005. At Arc Tunstall immersed herself in hardcore advertising and marketing furthering expanding her range of experience and insight.

Tunstall describes Design anthropology as an evolving, "interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand the role of design artifacts and processes in defining what it means to be human (e.g., human nature). It is more than lists of user requirements in a design brief, which makes it different from contextual inquiry, some forms of design research, and qualitative focus groups. Design anthropology offers challenges to existing ideas about human experiences and values." She recommends design take some precautions. "Marking the boundaries between respectful knowing and making, design anthropology lives across and within design’s desire to serve as a positive force in the universe by drawing attention across evolving human values, the making of environments, objects, communications, and interactions that express those values, and the experiences that give interpretation to those values and their meanings. But design must learn to tread respectfully in order to avoid becoming another colonizing practice."

Tunstell suggests a shift in design education to focus on how students and staff exist ontologically, or ‘be,’ in the world rather than solely how they see the world.

In a 2011 Design Taxi article titled Design Anthropology: A Coming of Age, Rachel Xu wrote that Design Anthropology found its initial impetus in the dot-com boom of the nineties. Incessant developments in technologies in that decade meant little time was available to train young designers to understand the context in which their work was being developed for. Designers who possessed more than just a creative flair then began to apply their craft and knowledge to different—and bigger—fields.

After the turn of the century Tunstall focused on academic and civic-minded pursuits. In 2005 Tunstall became Associate Director, City Design Center, University of Illinois at Chicago and Associate Professor of Design Anthropology, School of Art + Design, University of Illinois at Chicago and began her career as an academic leader. From 2005–2006 she also served as the Managing Director of Design for Democracy, an ongoing AIGA program that applies design tools and thinking to "increase civic participation by making interactions between the U.S. government and its citizens more understandable, efficient and trustworthy. Design for Democracy collaborates with researchers, designers and policy-makers in service of public sector clients and AIGA’s goal of demonstrating the value of design by doing valuable things." In 2008 Tunstall organized the U.S. National Design Policy Summit and Initiative focused on creating an actionable agenda of U.S. Design policy for economic competitiveness and democratic governance. In 2009 Tunstall became Associate Dean of Learning and Teaching, Faculty of Design, and Associate Professor of Design Anthropology, Faculty of Health, Arts, and Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. In 2010 Tunstall found the Cultures-Based Innovation Initiative focused on the use of tangible and intangible cultural heritage to drive irreversible changes in peoples' attitudes, behaviors, and/or values that directly benefit communities under social and environmental distress.

Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall (born January 28th, 1972 Columbia, South Carolina) is a design anthropologist, researcher, academic leader, writer, and educator. She is Dean, Faculty of Design at OCAD University (Ontario College of Art and Design University) in Toronto, Canada and the first black Dean of a Faculty of Design anywhere. Tunstall holds a PhD and an MA in Anthropology from Stanford University [1994–1999] and a BA in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College [1990–1994]. She is interested in human values and design as a manifestation of those values. Tunstall observes that design translates values into tangible experiences and asks others to consider what their values are. In a Design Matters interview with Debbie Millman, Tunstall describes some of the motivations underlying her research and practice. She is trying to use design and design technologies to make values more tangible and apparent to people and believes that design is not all about mass consumption and unbridled capitalism. She suggests values like equality, democracy, fairness, integration, and connection are values that, to some extent, we’ve lost and design can help make those values more tangible and ultimately express how we can use them to make the world a better place. In 2016 Tunstall spoke about "decolonizing design education" and "respectful design" at the AIGA Design Conference.