Inclusive Design, Universal Design, Design for All,
Human-centred Design, Co-Design Participatory Design, Design for Social
Innovation—such new and not–so-new practices often claim to engage with people
in a variety of meaningful, rather than simply instrumental ways, while
attempting to codify a relationship between designing and taking responsibility
for a diversity of needs, points of view and life positions.
And these are just a
few of the questions we posed:
-
Can the available forms of
‘progressive’ designing be sustainable (as in ongoing) without addressing
larger systemic and political forces that perpetuate certain cultural habits or
inequities?
-
What influence can design
have on systemic and political change or development?
-
Can people/users be equal
partners with designers when structurally they are in a less powerful position?
Should users be equal partners or contributors?
-
Is the concept of need
sufficiently interrogated by ‘progressive’ approaches to designing?
The resulting papers
do indeed provide a much needed broadening of the critical dialogue while
simultaneously providing a platform to continue the conversation further to an
even wider range of voices and participants.
Given the richness of the contributions
and the emergent results of the discussion we have split the papers across two
issues – the first grouped to highlight issues of the social/political, looking
more explicitly out and beyond design; the second (to be posted late
February/March) ‘looking in’ and focussed more closely on situated contexts and
how design is being reconfigured as the designer, as conventionally understood,
is becoming decentred.
What follows are a few observations
and positions of our own, here on the social/sociality, in the next issue on
the human/humanism. They are deliberately provisional. We offer them as a start
to the conversation – that can begin right away at a comment space opened up at
Design
Philosophy Politics http://designphilosophypolitics.informatics.indiana.edu/ .
Our observations are clustered under these headings:
1. where is the social in design?
2. what do we mean by the social anyway?
3. where is design in the social?
4. the papers
1. where is the social in design?
How are we defining
the word ‘social’ in those design practices that are exploring expanded
contexts of engagement today? Sometimes it appears as an add-on adjective to
add surface value to a design project, and other times it is deeply rooted in a
project, both in its process and outputs. Many designers involved in
social/humanitarian/social innovation projects are working with vague,
uninformed notions of the social or with none at all. There is a pressing need to move beyond the
default definitions constructed through our everyday experiences and limited
disciplinary precedents to consider whether ‘social’
is just a label or whether it represents a deep-seated move in design
orientation and thinking.
That this “form” of design
calls itself social is a bit of a misnomer. All designing is social in that it
is embedded in exchange and social relations. What is actually being focused on
is the systemic or the “societal”. What it means to
contribute to a broader landscape of socially relevant matters is the challenge
for work in this area. The lack of models in design for
understanding how to position design disciplines/practices in relation to the
current state of global transition makes for both a lack of critical frameworks
while offering a scenario ripe for exploration and contribution!
Much
social design and the sources it draws on have high ambitions, citing ‘systemic
change’ as the ultimate goal.[1]
But systemic change is not likely to be achieved on a project-by-project basis
– unless the activity of social design is to multiply exponentially AND those
undertaking it become much better informed about the nature of the social and
its inevitable connection to the political.
A good starting point is to develop awareness of the social relations of
designing, especially in humanitarian projects where designers often disavow
their structurally powerful position vis
a vis ‘served’ communities. Linked to this is the need to recognise one’s
own ethnocentrism (which though not able
to be ‘cast aside’, needs always to be taken into account). A particular form
of design(er) ethnocentrism arises from the attachment to twentieth century
models of object-based design. This needs to be reconfigured: subsumed to a
preparedness to become ‘a designer of
processes and platforms that can enable/empower at multiple levels of social
orientation.’[2]
Social
and cultural anthropology has looked towards traditional forms of ethnography
to make sense of people’s daily lives, understand their interactions, actions
and communication, all of which form a key part of ‘being social’. Design, as a
time-pressured profession with a creative base, has co-opted and redefined
ethnographic methods, giving rise to the emerging discipline of ‘design
ethnography’. As a key aspect of adopting ethnographic practice in design is to
understand more of a person’s perception of the object, environment, system, or
service that they are engaged with, an argument could be put forward as to
whether this is really social or not. Is the engagement between person and artefact
a linear transaction; does it only truly become ‘social’ when it involves another
human being or is directed at them? Or are seemingly singular interactions
social even in their a-sociality? So, when we talk about ‘social’
in the context of design, do we really mean design that effects social
interactions, an aim to involve people in the design process, design that seeks
to address social problems, or is it a catch-all phrase for design that
benefits society? The word ‘social’ can mean something very different at the
scale of the individual person and their community than it does at the level of
political rhetoric, and its use in the design arena needs to be articulated and
considered rather than loosely applied.
2. what do we mean by the
social anyway?
Here is a huge question that could lead to a lengthy account of the
history of social theory. We won’t do that here. Instead some evocations.
Point one: a
simple definition of the social would be along the lines of ‘structured
relations between people’. In fact there can’t be relations that are not
structured in some way or another. At this level, the social is not exclusive
to human beings. A band of primates or a herd of elephants or a pack of wolves
have a social structure. Hierarchies, dominant and submissive, weak and strong,
top dog, alpha male – as soon as sociality is evoked, hot on its heels come
relations of power, struggle, competition, contestation; but also co-operation,
alliances for mutual benefit, the giving of gifts, the granting of favours,
sacrifice, altruism – which of course
are interpretations, projections, and certainly not unconnected to ideologies
and intellectual agendas (thus, for example, animal sociality used to be
observed and interpreted mainly in terms of competition, dominance, etc, but in
more recent years, co-operation, shared parenting and the like have been played
up). But even when steeped in that biologism that projects animal studies onto
human behavior (as well as that anthropocentrism that reverses the projection),
it cannot be escaped that sociality is never natural, always learned. Socialisation is
induction into the structures of sociality; it is learning to play by the rules
of the game. Education is a primary means of socialisation. And let’s not forget that
being inducted into a professional practice (like design) through formal education
is an instance of socialisation.
The second big
point is that sociality does not exist in a vacuum; it is always located within
the specificity of already given conditions (‘given’ here does not mean static
or immutable). This (structured but dynamic) already-given includes the
materiality of the ‘natural’; it also includes the naturalised artificial
environment as well as immaterial structures that structure – institutions,
practices, modes of thinking and doing – which in a large sense are all part of
the ‘ever-present historical now’ (as named by Benjamin).
Moving on from
sociality to that which might be misconstrued as something of a higher level:
society. This is a big idea which exists only as an abstraction according to
Latour (as discussed in Matt Kiem’s
paper) and which doesn’t exist at all according to Margaret Thatcher (her infamous words: ‘there
is no such thing as society’). Yet it is a powerful enough idea to be lived and
felt as oppressive, as with the notion of society as a repository of values and
a monolithic regulator of behaviors. ‘Society’
is often evoked as homogenous and flattened out, yet it never is. It’s not
viable to think it in this way while the goods and ‘bads’ of society remain
unequally distributed. As said, you cannot think the social without thinking of
relations between people, and that in itself makes the question of power
unavoidable – whether micro, macro, formal, informal, interpersonal, group vs.
group, individual vs. group, and so on. And from there one has to ask, ‘how, in
this particular situation, is power structured?’ What is the nature of its holding
power? What are its points of vulnerability? What is it doing to those caught
within its structures? Who is benefiting? Who is losing? And how might
understanding the operation of power in particular contexts and its potential
vulnerabilities be exploited so as to counter inequity? These are vital issues,
explored incisively in the papers by Shana
Agid, Kenton Card and Matt Kiem.
3. where is design in the social?
It becomes clear
that an understanding of the social cannot be provided from within design
discourses; it cannot be provided, for example, by simply embracing human-centred
design methods. Human-centred approaches do not singularly prove to be vehicles
for design intents that wish to address expanded social contexts and
relationships (or series of political and power relationships).
This opens the conversation as to where
design looks to for frameworks to parse larger social contexts. What can the
designer contribute? How does the designer confront the fact that they are
forwarding an agenda and what agenda do they choose? How is that justified?
Such questions challenge the service model of design, foregrounding the ethics
of practice in a fundamental sense. These are also questions about agency and
commitment[3],
and in the way we’ve posed them, they also reveal a shifting back and forth
between professional and activist ontologies – which are frequently in
conflict. Another question underlines this: what matters most – wanting to
preserve design as it is currently understood or wanting to understand
and contribute to the social challenges of our time
even if that means abandoning ‘being a designer’? It can be argued that
if one
is willing to do the latter, this could in fact transform the nature of
one’s
design practice rather destroying it. This goes to Tony Fry’s notion of
redesigning design as a 'redirective practice’ a ‘meta-discipline’ that
"elevates the seriousness, importance and futuring potential of design.”[4]
Importantly, this is not something that can occur at the level of abstraction,
“rather it is a matter of having redirective practice in formation and process
so that the redesign of design can occur in the course of working on a specific
project.”[5]
Defining design by what it has made in the past proves to be even “formally” insufficient. If design is a poster, book, blender, building, a service or an experience, systemic change is inconceivable. Others who also find this hard to see abandon form completely and often jump to ‘design thinking’ as a systemic ‘tool’. But if we define design by what it could be—even if only based on what is available now—for example, mobile technologies, computation, serial production, inexpensive materials—this opens possibilities of scale, access and new abilities that at one time would seem unfathomable—enabling the design of platforms that are open to multiple modes of participation. We need a formal design vocabulary that speaks to what is now and possible (multiplicity) not what once was (singularity).
4. the papers
The papers in this issue
engage explicitly with the nature of the social and the political in recent
social/ humanitarian design. Their perspectives are connected to practice, but
adopt a critical distance from it. Shana
Agid in ‘Social
Design and its Political Contexts’ seeks to expose “the mostly unspoken political contexts” of these
kinds of design practices by critical reflection on a project where design
students worked with an organisation that provides support for people returning from the prison system. The paper carefully elaborates seemingly small incidents
and interactions during the course of the project that revealed social inequity
as indivisibly lived and structural. Agid argues that the defining of ‘needs’
in such contexts is inevitably political and cannot be delimited by just
looking for ‘what needs to be designed’ in conventional design terms. Given
their training, designers are most likely to incline towards artefactual
solutions to perceived social problems, which according Agid’s argument may be
of little value or even counter-productive. This is borne out, and made nuanced,
in ‘Participatory Design as an
Approach to Social Innovation’ by Karine Freire,
Gustavo Borba and Luisa Diebold which
compares two design projects undertaken for service organizations in Brazil:
one aiming at improving the income of a group of women, in which the designed
object proved to be unsuccessful as a catalyst for social change, and another
where a different designed artefact inserted into a different context – a
health education program for people with diabetes – proved to be effective. The
difference, as they argue in detail, centred on the nature and degree of
stakeholder participation.
The
artefact is less of a problem for Matt
Kiem who in ‘Designing the Social and the Politics of Social Innovation’
shows that design is already deeply embedded in social processes
inasmuch as the social is mediated through designed materiality. His paper
gives a concise account of the ways in which some recent social theorists (such
as Elizabeth Shove and Bruno Latour) have foregrounded material practices, arguing
that this ‘practice theory’ needs to be taken notice of by
designers/researchers because the materiality of social practices inevitably
encompasses designed things. He then connects this to design for social
innovation which will always entail “designing with/for/against/and amidst the
dynamic of what has already been designed” and sets out to assess “how useful
design for social innovation is as a strategy for displacing the established
and unsustainable social relations that we currently have with forms that can
develop the ability to sustain.”
In social change
projects, the relation between the designer and those for whom the designer designs
is crucial, but the nuances of such relations often go unseen. Is it a relation
of imposition, soft coercion, co-operation, or mutual exchange? The politics of
a design project are located at this interface as well as at the large scale of
institutions and the State. The assumptions and mind-sets in play in the
conception and setting up of a project are crucial: Freire, Borba and Diebold’s discussion shows that meaningful
participation is enabled or disabled from the outset. The social relations of
‘progressive design’ and their political implications are also explored by Kenton Card in 'Democratic Social Architecture or Experimentation on the Poor?' where he discusses architectural
projects of Auburn University’s Rural Studio; the activities of Architecture
for Humanity; and a housing project where graduate architecture students
partnered with a Latino community in Austin, Texas. Using these ‘ethnographic
snapshots’, he finds “three structural failures that could expose
the paradox of social architecture—resulting in the opposite outcome of what
was intended” and further, asks, “how do we gauge success when ‘participatory’
practices are contested by locals?” His assessment might, to
some, seem bleak, but he goes on to explore where socially concerned architects
might find enabling knowledge – in the theorisations of the urban and the
political of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey and Slavoj Žižek – and where they
might seek allied practices, for example, the political action of the ‘Right to the City Alliance’.
Architectural
values and community values came into conflict in projects discussed by Card, and clearly it is inappropriate
to impose ‘solutions’ upon communities, but what about where the project is setting out consciously to change
community values – to change cultural practices rather than support and enable
them? This is the delicate territory into which Vera Damazio and Gabriel Leitão step in their account of ‘Design Against Domestic Violence’. They
present a moving account of the making of a video about non-violent ways of
bringing up children, and its first screening to a group of parents in
Amazonian Brazil. Interestingly, this was a communication design project, where
the designers sought to meet the needs of those delivering the social change
program; in this, they drew on Jorge Frascara’s theorisations of
communication design, which subsume formal aesthetic concerns to questions of
change and impact.
We are sure these papers will stimulate your thoughts, and we invite you to comment at Design Philosophy Politics http://designphilosophypolitics.informatics.indiana.edu/ and also to take a look at some substantial papers
engaging with similar concerns in the recently launched
journal, Zoontechnica.[6]
Sean Donahue is
principal of ResearchCenteredDesign, a
Rama
Gheerawo is Deputy Director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design in the
Anne-Marie Willis is
Editor of Design Philosophy Papers.
[1] See for example, Robin Murray,
Julie Caulier-Grice, Geoff Mulgan, The Open
Book of Social Innovation, The Young Foundation, 2011, as cited in Freire
et al’s paper in this issue.
[2] Of course, this is
recognised by some practitioners. Speaking of the Bayview Rural Village project
(in Virginia, USA) architect Maurice D. Cox said, “putting an organisational
structure in place – even before we had a design concept – turned out to be the
most strategic decision made during our design process”, an action that ultimately
led to Bayview Citizens for Social Justice Inc. becoming “the largest
affordable housing provider on the Eastern Shore.” Architecture for Humanity
(ed.), Design Like You Give a Damn,
London: Thames & Hudson, 2006, 162-3.
[3] A question
explored from an existentialist perspective by Philippe d’Anjou, see for
example, ‘The Existential Self as a Locus of Sustainability in Design’ Design
Philosophy Papers 3-4/2007 (online) and Design
Philosophy Papers Collection Four, ed. A-M Willis, 2008 (print).
[4] Tony Fry,
Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics
and New Practice, Oxford: Berg, 2009, 54-5
[5] Ibid.
[6] See especially Nada Filipovic’s ‘Taking to the Street’ and Jason Robertson and Daniel Sobol’s ‘The
Designer’s Paradox’. http://zoontechnica.com