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

Régimenes de diseño, lógicas de usuarios

Este texto es una versión editada del capítulo introductorio de mi Tesis doctoral “User Assemblages in Design: An Ethnographic Study” La tesis fue supervisada por Mike Michael y Bill Gaver, y evaluada por Lucy Suchman y Matthew Fuller. El grado fue otorgado por la Universidad de Londres en octubre de 2010. Este texto expone la importancia y pertinencia sociológica de la realización de una etnografía del diseño y los usuarios. Al hacerlo, esbozo los fundamentos de la tesis, a raíz de perspectivas en STS, el enfoque empírico utilizado, así como las preguntas de investigación formuladas. Por último, presento un resumen de la tesis, incluyendo un breve resumen de la principal contribución teórica de la misma, a saber, el concepto de user-assemblage, basado en la obra de Deleuze y Guattari, y que contribuye a los desarrollos post teoría del actor-re

Regimes of Design, Logics of Users

The following text is an edited version of the introductory chapter of my Ph.D. thesis ‘User Assemblages in Design: An Ethnographic Study’. The thesis was supervised by Mike Michael and Bill Gaver, examined by Lucy Suchman and Matthew Fuller. The degree was awarded by the University of London in October 2010. This text sets out the sociological importance and relevance for conducting an ethnography of design and users. In doing so I sketch out the rationale for the thesis, following perspectives in STS, the empirical approach I undertook as well as the research questions I pursued. Lastly, I present a chapter outline of the thesis including a brief summary of the major theoretical contribution of the thesis, namely the concept of the user-assemblage, which draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and contributes to developments after actor-network theory

Prototypes in design: materializing futures

The two excerpts that follow are drawn from my Ph.D. research User Assemblages in Design: An Ethnographic Study. The thesis is an examination of the role of multiple users in user-centered design (UCD) processes and is based on a six-month ethnographic field study of designers employed to apply the principles and practices of UCD as part of the research and development efforts of a multinational microprocessor manufacturer. It is written from the perspective of science and technology studies, in particular developments in actor-network theory, and draws on the notion of the assemblage from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The central argument of this thesis is that multiple users are assembled along with the new technologies whose design they resource, as well as with new configurations of socio- cultural life that they bring into view. ‘Excerpt One’ forms part of an introduction into an empirical study of a health and fitness prototype being designed to address the increasing prevalence of obesity in North American and Western Europe. Excerpt two is drawn from the conclusion of my thesis and points to how prototyping, within user-centered and participatory design practices, can be understood as a material and formal method for managing the future

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

Poster for Design for more-than-human futures: Towards post-anthropocentric worlding

A book launch and masterclass, hosted by the Design Societies Research Unit, to celebrate the publishing of the edited collection Design For More-Than-Human Futures: Towards Post-Anthropocentric Worlding (Routledge). The event includes a masterclass in post-anthropocentric design and features designers and scholars involved in rethinking design as a practice focused on more-than-human coexistence. Design for More-Than-Human-Futures explores the work of important authors in the search for a transition towards more ethical design focused on more-than-human coexistence. In a time of environmental crises in which the human species threatens its own survival and the highest level of exacerbation of the idea of a future and technological innovation, it is important to discard certain anthropocentric categories in order to situate design beyond the role that it traditionally held in the capitalist world, creating opportunities to create more just and sustainable worlds. This book is an invitation to travel new paths for design framed by ethics of more-than-human coexistence that breaks with the unsustainability installed in the designs that outfit our lives. Questioning the notion of human-centered design is central to this discussion. It is not only a theoretical and methodological concern, but an ethical need to critically rethink the modern, colonialist, and anthropocentric inheritance that resonates in design culture. The authors in this book explore the ideas oriented to form new relations with the more-than-human and with the planet, using design as a form of political enquiry Following the masterclass, a roundtable discussion with the book’s editors and contributors will take place, engaging with the themes of the book and the challenges posed to design by the more-than-human. The book launch will close with a reception with wine provided by the Embassy of Chile in London. The schedule of the event is as follows: 15:00 Introduction: Towards pluriversal design 15:15 Masterclasses: In post-anthropocentric design 17:15 Roundtable discussion with editors & contributors 19:00 Chilean wine reception The book launch and masterclass features Nerea Cavillo, Marcos Chilet, Nicole Cristi, Liam Healy, Pablo Hermansen, Noortje Marres, Sarah Pennington, Martín Tironi, Carola U Marín and Alex Wilkie. The event is supported by the Embassy of Chile in London and Routledge

User Assemblages in Design: An Ethnographic Study

This thesis presents an ethnographic study of the role of users in user-centered design. It is written from the perspective of science and technology studies, in particular developments in actor-network theory, and draws on the notion of the assemblage from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The data for this thesis derives from a six-month field study of the routine discourse and practices of user-centered designers working for a multinational microprocessor manufacturer. The central argument of this thesis is that users are assembled along with the new technologies whose design they resource, as well as with new configurations of socio-cultural life that they bring into view. Informing this argument are two interrelated insights. First, user-centered and participatory design processes involve interminglings of human and non-human actors. Second, users are occasioned in such processes as sociotechnical assemblages. Accordingly, this thesis: (1) reviews how the user is variously applied as a practico-theoretical concern within human-computer interaction (HCI) and as an object of analysis within the sociology and history of technology; (2) outlines a methodology for studying users variously enacted within design practice; (3) examines how a non-user is constructed and re-constructed during the development of a diabetes related technology; (4) examines how designers accomplish user-involvement by way of a gendered persona; (5) examines how the making of a technology for people suffering from obesity included multiple users that served to format the designers’ immediate practical concerns, as well as the management of future expectations; (6) examines how users serve as a means for conducting ethnography-in-design. The thesis concludes with a theoretically informed reflection on user assemblages as devices that: do representation; resource designers’ socio-material management of futures; perform modalities of scale associated with technological and product development; and mediate different forms of accountability

Prototyping as Event: Designing the Future of Obesity

This paper takes up the notion of event to explore the practice of prototyping in design as a relational process generative of multiple becomings. The paper outlines a case involving a team of user-centred designers as they envision, construct and demonstrate a wearable technology to intervene in public health warnings concerning obesity. The paper examines various co-becomings of users and technology through the course of a two-stage development cycle and employs the heuristic distinction between ‘distal’ and ‘proximal’ users as means to examine the different definitions of obesity occasioned therein. The term ‘inventive risk discourse’ is coined to describe the designers’ articulation of the problem space of obesity as a future figuring putative users. Examples of proximal users are then discussed as users involved in the various enactments of the prototype system as it is programmed and assembled in the present. The implications of this are discussed in terms of the specific definitions of obesity that concresce around particular prototype–user assemblages as well as indicators of overspill that often exceed normative accounts. In conclusion, I consider the case as a rough cosmopolitical sketch where designers engage obesity science as inventive problem making where multiple empirical variations of obesity emerge