Made in Criticalland: Designing Matters of Concern

Critical and theoretical concepts and theories are now firmly embedded within design education, but to what goal? How will the practice of design develop and change under the ethos of critical inquiry? Indeed, what version of ‘critique’? Taking inspiration from Latour’s essay 'Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern (2004), this paper will outline how we are introducing concepts and methods derived from science and technology studies (STS), principally developments in actor-network theory (ANT), as part of the BA and MA design programmes at Goldsmiths. To begin, we provide a brief reading of Latour’s essay, discussing its relevance for design education. In doing so we aim to propose an alternative version of critical practice: a criticality that is oriented towards a non-reductive empirical realism tracing the complex messy entanglements of societies with all their strange, weird and wonderful hybrid objects. At the core of the paper, then, is the question of how designers might adopt a realist empirical approach towards the research of societies, actors and networks, whilst allowing for creative speculation. To address this question we present two case studies to highlight the benefits and shortfalls of an STS and ANT inspired approach to design. The first describes a series of workshops with which we encourage our students to adopt the concepts and methods of STS and ANT as part of their design practice. In the second case study we present a design brief in which we ask students to seriously address fictional futures through the associative mingling of statistical entities. In doing so we are exploring how design can address the mediation of expectations and temporality: how, for example, designers might act with ‘matters of concern’ to prospect futures. Each of the case studies highlights a problematic found within both ANT and Design: the first issue is one of truncation. How, in accepting an empirical logic of connectivity, designers delimited and edit their networks of observation and influence. The second case study focuses on the issue of temporality, or more specifically 'future orientation', 'potential' or 'prospect'. Here, design can be seen as a means of ‘departure’ in the material-semiotic lives of objects

Learning by gaming:ANT and critical making

Relationships among theory, gaming, learning and socio-technical design are explored in the two contributions which compose the section. The theory in question is ANT, re-interpreted through critical making - an umbrella term for various distinctive practices that link traditional scholarship in the humanities and social sciences to forms of material engagement. Sergio Minniti describes an ongoing project called Game of ANT, which draws upon the critical making approach to design an interactive technology and a workshop experience through which scholars and students can conceptually-materially engage with ANT, hence exploring and approaching it from novel points of view. Game of ANT adopts the Latourian vision of technoscience as war and physically embodies this idea by proposing a sort of war game during which participants play the roles of human or non-human actors engaging with the competitive dynamics of socio-technical life. The commentary by Stefano De Paoli proposes new directions to develop the project, by deepening the concept of game and its value for design and learning processes.</p

How well does ANT equip designers for socio-material speculations?

In conversation with Claire Parnet, Gilles Deleuze (2002: 2) evokes the image of the be-coming of the orchid and the wasp: A ‘double capture’ whereby, and momentarily, each becomes a function of the other’s doings. In considering actor-network theory and design practice, this image is appealing as it can be understood to stage two ways by which their practices can be seen to converge. In the first, each discipline captures something from the other. For orthodox scholars of ANT design becomes another empirical domain to describe. For designers, ANT becomes another explanatory resource with which to capture the social and warrant the arrival of the new. A second way of relating, recalling Isabelle Stengers’ ‘reciprocal capture,’ a variant of double capture, opens up the possibility of the emergence of shared practices of empirical socio-material speculation where adding designed propositions to collectives brings into being new prospects and capacities to act. In what follows, and after a brief discussion of the possibility of ANT and design as a constructivist proposition, I outline how ANT can be understood to support design practitioners. I then draw on the case of an interdisciplinary project, involving designers and STS practitioners, to discuss how a workshop for exploring the use of smart energy monitors – and resourcing the design and deployment of an interactive research device amongst UK-based energy communities – involved practices of retroscription and procomposition. Here, retroscription characterises the visual and analytic evocation of the lived and situated experience of using smart monitors, whereas procomposition involves the mobilisation and re-patterning of retroscriptions into novel speculative compossibilities

An Intersectional Lifecourse Lens and Participatory Methods as the Foundations for Co-Designing with and for Minoritised Older Adults

The design of digital technologies for older adults is often premised on deficit models of ageing that position older people as a homogenous group and as passive users of technology, with an overwhelming focus on meeting practical needs in older age. In response, a growing number of scholars in HCI and Science and Technology Studies (STS) are engaging with processes of co-design that situate older adults as experts in their own lives and as central to the design process. These scholars highlight how an essential first phase of co-design is understanding and foregrounding the lifeworlds, experiences and expertise of older adults. This paper responds to these calls, alongside the lack of consideration of minoritised older adults in co-design. It draws on the empirical findings from the first phase of the Connecting Through Culture As We Age project, which places twenty minoritised older adults who identify as disabled, and/or racially and/or socio-economically minoritised, at the centre of a digital innovation process. Through a case study approach, we focus on two of the minoritised older adults involved, to demonstrate the value of bringing together participatory methods with an interdisciplinary lifecourse lens. We highlight the power of this approach for understanding minoritised older adults’ relationships with technology, as shaped by experiences across the lifecourse, for building relationships, and ensuring their agency and voice underpin the co-design process

Ordering Networks: Motorways and the Work of Managing Disruption

This thesis contributes to a new understanding of the motorway network and its traffic movements as a problem of practical accomplishment. It is based on a detailed ethnomethodological study of incident management in the Highways Agency’s motorway control room, which observes the methods operators use to detect, diagnose and clear incidents to accomplish safe and reliable traffic. Its main concern is how millions of vehicles can depend on the motorway network to fulfil obligations for travel when it is constantly compromised by disruption from congestion, road accidents and vehicle breakdowns. It argues that transport geography and new mobilities research have overlooked questions of practical accomplishment; they tend to treat movement as an inevitable demand, producing fixed technical solutions to optimise it, or a self-evident phenomenon, made meaningful only through the intensely human experience of mobility. In response, the frame of practical accomplishment is developed to analyse the ways in which traffic is ongoingly organised through the situated and contingent practices that take place in the control room. The point is that traffic does not move by magic; it has to be planned for, produced and persistently worked at. This is coupled with an understanding of network topology that reconsiders the motorway network as always in process by virtue of the materially heterogeneous relations it keeps, drawing attention to the intensely collaborative nature of work between operators and technology that permits the management of disruption at-a-distance and in real time. This work is by no means straightforward – the actions of monitoring, detecting, diagnosing and classifying incidents and managing traffic are revealed to be complexly situated and prone to uncertainty, requiring constant ordering work to accomplish them. In conclusion, this thesis argues for the frame of practical accomplishment to be taken seriously, rendering the work of transport networks available for sustained analysis

Academic librarians’ Twitter practices and the production of knowledge infrastructures in higher education

In recent years, academic librarians’ roles have increasingly encompassed practices of knowledge production, spurred in part by their role in supporting the creation and dissemination of university research outputs. Shifts in institutional trends have also seen librarians’ widespread adoption of Twitter to share information and encourage collaboration. There is little research, however, about relationships between knowledge production in HE and librarians’ Twitter practices. The few existing studies about librarians and Twitter tend to trivialise such work as promotional. This thesis investigates the mundane work and practical politics animating academic librarians’ practices of knowledge production via Twitter. Guided by a theoretical framework about knowledge infrastructures that posits that designing and maintaining infrastructure has concomitant effects on knowledge production, this multi-sited ethnography was informed by six librarians from one UK research-intensive university. Empirical data was generated from two rounds of interviews, Twitter activity diaries, Twitter Analytics data, a focus group and written follow-up questions. Research outcomes suggest that as academic librarians negotiate the promises (i.e., the perceived potential or possibilities) of Twitter, they engage in practices of knowledge production. Four main practices of librarians implicated in their knowledge production via Twitter include justifying Twitter work as efforts to contest stereotypes of librarians (Invisibility); grounding Twitter work in modern interpretations of librarian’s ‘traditional’ values (Roots); managing the multiple scales and ambiguous engagement of Twitter (Scale); and troubling institutional hierarchies to foster scholarly community, whilst spurring new vocational identities for librarians (Culturality). By building a holistic picture of librarians’ practices, the thesis contributes insights into new and devolved practices of knowledge production in HE, thus complicating depictions of university professional groups in the scholarly literature. The study furthermore suggests that drawing attention to quiet areas of work in the university helps demonstrate the fragility and contingency of practices in HE considered static or unassailable

Digital exhibition design: boundary crossing, Intermediary Design Deliverables and processes of consent

We present an exploratory case study of the nature and role of Intermediary Design Deliverables (IDDs) in digital exhibition design. Specifically, how they mediate boundary crossing across museum-designer teams; and facilitate the evolution of a shared exhibition-idea by mediating future and embodying past processes of consent. We bring together literatures on intermediary objects, boundary objects and design representations to conceptualise IDDs as representations of an evolving shared exhibition-idea and, thereby, as progressive objectifications of the digital exhibition. Through the case study, we demonstrate how deliverables capture progress in the exploration of the design space by embodying the consents that propel the exploration. The role of the museum team in these processes of consent (and thus in the production of the deliverable) is emphasised, suggesting a shift of focus for museum teams from appraising digital products to contributing to the digital exhibition design process

Corealisation: A Radical Respecification of the Working Division of Labour in Systems Development

Institute for Communicating and Collaborative SystemsThis thesis develops and assesses an alternative approach to developing IT systems in complex organisational settings, aiming to equip IT professionals with an orientation to design that allows them to create uniquely work affording artefacts that closely fit the working practices of those working with them. This involves a radical respecification of the working division of labour in systems development. Regular reports of failing IT projects have lead to a sense of an ongoing crisis that persists despite the development of various candidate remedies over the past decades. This thesis starts with a critical appraisal of various issues encountered in systems development, conceptualisations of design work and a discussion of the problem of “informing design”. A review of various approaches taken to address this issue reveals that the relationship between ‘design’ and ‘use‘ and between ‘designers’ and ‘users’ is at the heart of the matter. Drawing on ethnomethodology as a means of studying work as a socially organised, situated activity, I then introduce the notion of corealisation as a radical respecification of design. Corealisation aims to erase the boundaries between ‘design’ and ‘use’ by fostering a longitudinal partnership between IT and non-IT professionals orienting to the work on and with IT systems as a whole rather than as separate processes. It takes seriously the ethnomethods of all parties, calling practitioners to consider exactly what it is that they and their fellow members know and use in doing the work of IT design: how the work to be supported gets done in the here-and-now, with these resources at hand rather than according to some representation of how work gets done that is external to the setting and has little or no connection to the purpose at hand. An ethnographic study of work in a manufacturing plant and of IT design in this setting provides the background for the subsequent discussion of the programme of corealisation, especially the notion of design qua member. The thesis goes beyond traditional research methodologies by documenting and reflecting upon the researcher’s experiences as a corealiser of systems, working with other members of the setting. This highlights the importance of having a familiarity with the ‘biography’ of a place as a resource for design work. Finally, the thesis discusses various aspects of corealisation, drawing out implications for the social organisation of design work, especially issues of participation, the use of representations in design work, aspects of dependability and, last but not least, the question of how widely the approach of corealisation may be applied