Nonhumans in participatory design

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article examines the role that nonhumans play in participatory design. Research and practice concerned with participatory design mostly focuses on human participants, however nonhumans also participate in the design process and can play a significant role in shaping the process. This article focuses on how nonhumans participate in the design process. An empirical case study is used to illustrate how humans and nonhumans assemble to form networks in order to effect a design. Nonhumans increase the level of participation in a design process. The case study reveals how nonhumans help to maintain, destroy or strengthen networks by substituting, mediating and communicating with humans and often, in doing so, making human actors more or less visible in the process. Nonhumans play a part in configuring the social. Revealing the presence and roles of nonhumans is an important means through which to increase the democracy within the design process

The Relevance of Anarchism

Close students of the vocabulary of established politicians and pundits will not have failed to notice a significant new development in the past three years : the reappearance of the word "anarchist" (and its variants) as a term of abuse. Applied almost invariably to radicals and radical activity, it is a label the simple use of which is enough, it is evidently assumed, to discredit the labelled effectively in the eyes of the general public. In the West it bids fair to replace "communist", "red", and the rest, as the would-be most damaging stigma; but this is a term which transcends orthodox ideological frontiers, and it is equally popular with the politicians of Eastern Europe. In this respect in Washington, Warsaw and Walsall the authorities speak the same language. Trybuna Ludu and Pravda, confronted by the Polish workers' rising of December 1970, call for "an end to all anarchy", while in Walsall, Staffordshire, a councillor denounces supporters of the gipsies' case against the local authority as "liars and anarchists"? Examples could be multiplied

What is Violence?

In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels expressed the view that "the epoch of the bourgeoisie", by contrast with earlier stages in human history, had "simplified class antagonisms", with the result that "Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat." One reason for this, they suggested, was that capitalism had had the effect of stripping away the various ideological veils, religious and secular, by which exploitation and oppression had normally been both concealed and justified, and had "left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'." They summed up this process of de-mystification as follows: "In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation." We do not need to assume that this represents the most central, or the most considered view on the subject expressed by Marx and/or Engels to recognise that this particular expectation as to the character of class conflict within capitalist society has not been fulfilled. Capitalist exploitation is not uniquely naked and unveiled. Ideology, bourgeois ideology, continues to play a quite decisive role in disguising and blurring class conflicts, and sustaining the claims to legitimacy made by the state and its agencies in capitalist society

Britain in Ireland, Ireland in Britain

The response of the British Left to the Irish crisis, which has now lasted for nearly a full decade, has not been impressive. There has, for example, never been a full-scale debate on the subject by a Labour Party Conference, and the Labour Party, then in opposition, failed to oppose, let alone campaign against, the introduction of internment without trial or charge in Northern Ireland in August 1971. It may be said that the Labour Party as an institution hardly deserves to be considered a part of any 'Left': nevertheless, its record on Ireland is significant. Enough local Labour Parties felt strongly enough about the American war in Vietnam, and the Labour Government's support for the American war, to ensure that the issue of Vietnam was extensively and hotly debated at party conference. The efforts of a minority of Left-wing MPs and activists have never succeeded in generating a similar response to the war in Ireland, although, unlike Vietnam, that war has been the direct responsibility of successive British governments. It has proved consistently difficult to campaign effectively on the Irish issue. Even the shooting of 13 demonstrators in Derry on January 30, 1972, failed to shock any substantial section of British opinion into an awareness of the true nature of the British Army's role in the conflict. I remember that the protest demonstration over Bloody Sunday in Sheffield was met with silent hostility by the people of this working-class city

Student Militancy and the Collapse of Reformism

Over the past few years the activities of students have provided the world's press with an unprecedented number of headlines. Often this has been due essentially to the dramatic or picturesque character of those activities rather than to their intrinsic importance; for while the significance of a college occupation or sit-in is not to be crudely measured by its immediate effects, it would be rash to rate the "average" event of this kind as more important than, let us say, a private lunch between the chairmen of ICI and Courtaulds, or Prime Minister Wilson's phone conversations with Chancellor Brandt. The significant difference is that the students, unlike, for much of the time, our de facto and de jure rulers, conduct their politics in public, and so are available to the press

Liberal Values and Socialist Values

The question of the relation of socialism to liberalism can hardly be regarded as a matter of purely academic, or even of purely theoretical, interest. It crops up in the daily experience of socialists in many parts of the world. At the verbal level we find that the word "liberal" is used by many people on the Left as a term of dismissal, abuse or criticism, as it is also by demagogues of the Right, such as America's Vice-President Agnew. Liberal attitudes, liberal causes and policies are implicitly contrasted with their radical or socialist opposites. "Liberalism" has become a dirty word on the Left, and it is not hard to see the reasons why. Most Western liberals, for example, were happy to accept the identification of liberalism with anti-Communism, and this sleight-of-hand led not only to such miserable episodes as the failure of so many of them to resist the McCarthyite attacks on intellectual and political freedom, but also to the major tragedy of the extended American war on Vietnam