Design for Complex Situations: Navigating ‘Matters of Concern’

Design is increasingly being deployed within complex situations where networks of diverse organisations and actors seek to navigate contested futures that are subject to organisational, social, political and economic debate. Here, design supports collaborative exploration resulting in creative compromise that develops actionable, designed, opportunities. Using a case study from 2015-2019 in the context of careers guidance public policy and the practices in UK Secondary Schools, this paper reviews the participatory design practices and the challenges that came from working in a complex and contested space. Analysis highlights that design practices and artefacts can act as a mechanism that enables a public to identify and grapple with issues that matter to them while also navigating controversies that produce their own policy position. A design-content model is discussed and extended in the context of the case study’s finding leading to a contribution about the different roles that may be offered by design in complex situations as contributing to a matter of concern

Unsettling issues: valuing public goods and the production of matters of concern

What are public goods – of any kind – worth? How are they valued, and made valuable? What expertise is involved in their production? Questions over the value of public goods – a sporting championship, the arts, scientific advances or quality of life – figure prominently in our public and political discourse, as politicians and administrators struggle to manage the often competing claims of instrumental, economic reason and intangible, cultural evaluations. We must decide not only what characteristics and ‘goods’ to value, but how to value them, sometimes in the less than fully-realized knowledge that modes of valuation are performative (Austin, 1978) of worth.PostprintPeer reviewe

Design for Dynamic Challenges: Key Attributes of Designers for Leading Interdisciplinary Research and Projects

The world seems more burdened with large-scale global problems than ever before. One such challenge is to reverse the growing incidence of mental health issues, particularly in our cities. Traditional approaches to tackling such major global challenges has come from specific sectors and siloed organizations. These ‘matters of concern’ however are interdisciplinary in nature, and map closely to what those in the design world have attempted to frame as ‘wicked problems’. This article explores the value of design thinking and focuses on five key attributes that designers have in leading projects that attempt to tackle these major global matters of concern. Namely, that designers are: Naturally interdisciplinary, multi-specialists, comfortable with uncertainty, action-led, and people-centered. A case study is explored where designers have been engaged to tackle mental health issues in Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland. The paper ends by identifying opportunities and challenges for designers in the future

Urban wind energy conversion: the potential of ducted turbines

The prospects for urban wind power are discussed. A roof-mounted ducted wind turbine, which uses pressure differentials created by wind flow around a building, is proposed as an alternative to more conventional approaches. Outcomes from tests at model and prototype scale are described, and a simple mathematical model is presented. Predictions from the latter suggest that a ducted turbine can produce very high specific power outputs, going some way to offsetting its directional sensitivity. Further predictions using climate files are made to assess annual energy output and seasonal variations, with a conventional small wind turbine and a photovoltaic panel as comparators. It is concluded that ducted turbines have significant potential for retro-fitting to existing buildings, and have clear advantages where visual impact and safety are matters of concern

Negotiating Matters of Concern: Expertise, Uncertainty, and Agency in Rhetoric of Science

Debates over GMOs, vaccines, and climate change are but a few examples that highlight a growing body of high-stakes scientific controversies and the manifest difficulties inherent in communicating about them. Addressing these and similar issues requires navigating a wide array of competing scientific, technological, social, democratic, environmental, and economic exigencies. The development of scholarly approaches that can account for the complexity and dynamism of these cases is an essential part of ensuring effective, ethical interaction between scientists and publics. In this dissertation, I explore one such case, the L’Aquila earthquake controversy, in which seven technical experts were charged with manslaughter for failing to warn the public. With the addition of the trial, this earthquake overflowed the boundaries of seismology, entangling the public, political, and technical and foregrounding the specific challenges of public-expert communication about risk and uncertainty. To better account for and negotiate public-expert interaction, my dissertation develops rhetorically-oriented approaches for improving communication about risk and uncertainty. In so doing, I explore new synergies among three concepts – agency, expertise, and uncertainty – which have previously been treated separately by rhetoricians but are inextricably entangled in situations like L’Aquila

Circulating References and Matters of Concern

The main finding of this thesis is that when actors are fabricating the S&OP process, local actors create emergent, ongoing and multiple matters of concern around the S&OP process. The group demand chain, the actor who is responsible for guiding the implementation of the process, delegates the attempts to close these matters of concern to local actors located in separate times and spaces. As a result, constituents of the S&OP process are dispersed in diverse local times and spaces rather than being coordinated in a single time and space by the group demand chain. When local actors are closing these matters of concern, they create new properties on the S&OP process and new management possibilities in relation to integration. These new management possibilities may include, for instance, generating different primary keys of forecasting in different divisions, mobilising different inscriptions in different settings, using mean error to evaluate forecasting accuracy, connecting different visualisations such as ABC analysis and items with high growth rate and value to collaborators’ intelligence, creating new potentials for more consistent decision making and more proactive customer serving, creating new actions to help the under-estimated sales forecast, and transforming the minimal configurations of the S&OP process. Consequently, integration on the demand chain becomes uncertain because actors are always creating new possibilities to move towards integration but will never arrive at the destination of integration. To integrate is, thus, to postpone integration because there are always emergent matters of concern around the technology to foster integration. Because constituents of the S&OP process are separated in diverse times and spaces, to integrate is also to separate constituents of integration

Redirecting a Scattered Public Toward Alternative Matters of Concern: Shifting Perceptions of Urban Wastewater Governance in Indonesia

Designers can and already do play an important role in supporting publics as they are coming into being and to help clarify and express the publics interests. The coming into being of a public, however, does not guarantee it acts in its own best interest or in the best interest of the common good. Publics existing matters-of-concern might, as demonstrated in this article, be influenced by deeply engrained societal norms and values, or even fear for demonstrating other concerns. What is the role of the designer in such situations? In this article I suggest designers can engage in redirecting publics towards alternative matters-of-concern