Mahmoud
Keshavarz, Ramia
Mazé
A range
of alternative formulations of design, such as ‘social’, ‘activist’,
‘critical’, ‘relational’, ‘humanitarian’ design, are amassing.[1]
Instead of focusing on form and function, such formulations typically focus on what design produces. At
stake in the social turn within design is reconsideration of what
design is
about – not in terms of its objects but, and perhaps even more
fundamentally,
its subjects. Further, contemporary design oriented toward the public
realm in
multiple contexts involves a diversity of possible subjects and
political
subjectivities.
‘Participation’
has been an approach to addressing social questions in design.
Participation
has been linked, for example, to “a mindset and attitude about people” [2]
and a kind of ‘design humanism’ aimed at reducing domination,[3]
which meets the human ideal of mutual support for altruism, a
‘collective
instinct of humanity’.[4]
In a range of associated projects and practices in recent years,
methodologies
have been applied to involve more or different people directly in
product
development processes. Indeed, participation may itself be seen as the
objective of design processes.[5]
Concern, however, often tends towards methods for improving design
objects,
with certain questions about its subjects left under-examined or posed
in
overly general and loaded terms that might be further interrogated.
In this
paper, we query participation in design in order to discuss some of the
problematics of relating to ‘others’ in practices of design and design
research. We argue, as do other design
thinkers, for practices involving “micro-political participation in the
production of space”,[6]
in which design frames and stages the (re)production of social as well
as
spatial relations. We argue for increased reflexivity about how others
participate in design and the political implications. Here, ‘the
political’
refers to the issue of who is identified and represented as a subject
in
studies and practices of design. Concerned with the social organization
of
everyday life, the design role is always
engaged with “confrontation
of power relations and
influence by the identification of new terms and themes for
contestation and
new trajectories for action”.[7]
1.1 Design as framing and staging
participation
In terms
of participation, we relate to some design issues at stake in the
Scandinavian
countries since the 1970s.[8]
Scandinavian Participatory Design movements were oriented towards the
politics
and ethics of ‘workplace democracy’. Many projects took place in sites
of work
in the context of trade union struggles for a better and more equal
work
environment, in which participation was often carried out as joint
decision-making
in the development of new technological systems and organizational
practices. Design approaches to
participation often demonstrated two important concerns – first,
methods for
the direct engagement of those who should work with and use the new
technologies.[9]
Secondly, tools and techniques supported co-development of the
technologies
through mock-ups, prototypes, scenarios and games in order to establish
a more
egalitarian regime amongst diverse participants.[10]
Design processes could be understood to involve the framing and staging
of
relations among diverse participants, including those with very
different
starting points than designers, with distant positions within an
organizational
hierarchy and with heterogeneous skills and interests.
Early
Participatory Design was considered as a political matter, though
attention in
design discourse has since been almost exclusively focused on the
practicalities of its methods and tools. Pelle Ehn argues:
“Participatory
design started from the simple standpoint that those affected by a
design
should have a say in the design process. This was a political
conviction not
expecting consensus, but also controversies and conflicts around an
emerging
design object. Hence, participatory design sided with resource weak
stakeholders (typically local trade unions), and developed project
strategies
for their effective and legitimate participation. A complementary
reason for
participation, and in the long run probably the strongest motivation
for its
use in many organizations, was to ensure that existing skills could be
made a
resource in the design process”.[11]
As a
matter of political ideology, workers’ struggles were taken up on
principle in
a range of approaches by those “from the political to the ethical
system developer”.[12]
As a matter of political philosophy, consensus was recognized as
potentially
irreconcilable with change processes involving emancipation from
oppressive
norms and traditions.[13]
In our
work, we explore approaches to design in terms of contemporary concepts
of the
political. By ‘the political’, we refer to the term as employed in
political
philosophy, as concerned with how society is constituted and organized.
In
this, we also make a distinction from ‘politics’, which serve to regulate the ‘law and order’ of society through,
for example, institutions, and political parties. The political is
concerned
with how society is constituted as the organization of human
coexistence. This
includes a concern for how identities, subjectivities, and
collectivities are
posited – including how these are instituted by design, as one of the
practices
that organizes human coexistence. As some
political thinkers argue, the political is the space/time through which
democracy can emerge, as processes of ‘agonistic pluralism’ or
‘dissensus’ that
address the conflictuality inherent in coexistence. We, as design
researchers, engage in framing and staging processes among those
coexisting in
society whose differences cannot merely be resolved or managed. Design
can be
understood as a form of intervention in which a particular social order
may be
confronted with others.
To
explore the political implications of participation in design, we
propose and
explore design research practice oriented around ‘dissensus’. Within
current
consensus-based politics, an interventional act could take the form of
dissensus by framing and staging a diversity of subjects as adversaries
to
confront and engage. In a series of experimental design activities
within the
project ‘Forms of Resistance’, we deploy concepts such as
‘indisciplinarity’
and ‘free translation’ to reflect upon our experiences of participation
in
design. In a general sense, and as exemplified
in Forms of Resistance, it is necessarily a designer’s role to be
concerned
with how others are understood and engaged in design, with the
communicative actions among or across those in one or more
spaces/times, and with how these worlds confront each other. In
this, we argue, the design role is that of a reflexive and situated
translator.
2.
THE (DESIGN) ISSUE OF CONSENSUS
Participation
in design is often oriented to the practical matter of achieving
consensus, or
agreement upon and stabilization of a particular set of social
relations, norms
and courses of action. Indeed, consensus can be understood as a
predominant
orientation within societies characterized by participatory democracy,
in
which, as Jacques Rancière articulates, “[consensus] desires to have
well-identifiable groups with specific interests, aspirations, values,
and
‘culture’”.[14]
Rancière and other contemporary political philosophers do not ignore
nor reject
the fact of participation, but query how forms of participation
constitute the
identities and subjectivities of participants. Consensus, for example,
can be
seen merely as a temporary result of a provisional hierarchy, a
stabilization
of power, which always and inevitably entails some form of exclusion.[15]
While ‘agonistic pluralism’ and ‘dissensus’ approach the practice of
democracy
in slightly different ways, both are concerned with possible forms of
politics
that make democracy meaningful as an ongoing struggle rather than as a
fixed
state or goal.
We
share with some of the Participatory Design proponents of ‘workplace
democracy’
an understanding of participation as engaged with struggles among those
characterized by differentials in skill, representation and power. We
also
argue for conflict as necessary and productive, in contrast to a
prevailing
culture idealizing harmony.[16] This is particularly acute with respect to contemporary
design that takes place in the public realm, which is constituted by
widest
range of possible people and groups that may or may not be
pre-constituted in
relation to particular issues. There may be extreme differentials in
how they
are identified by others, in their possibilities for communication, and
in how
they are distributed across different or multiple space-time
situations. In
order to approach design in ways that do not merely affirm the current
constitution of society, along with exclusions and differentials, we
seek
alternatives to concepts such as consensus.
2.1
Consensus and its discontents
In
political philosophy, meanings and forms of participation are
continually
challenged and developed. According to thinkers such as Chantal Mouffe
and Rancière,
participatory politics, as practiced today, is based on a consensus or
agreement among representatives of actors or, ideally, among actors
themselves.
This dominant form of politics creates a situation resulting in an
absence of
‘political frontier’ – which parallels a wider ‘crisis of
political
identity’ within individuals or social groups in Western societies. As
Mouffe
argues, a lack of political struggles facilitates ethnic, nationalist,
religious, or antidemocratic identities in forming and establishing
themselves.[17]
Similarly arguing that xenophobia in consensus-oriented democracies is
not an
exception but is endemic to such political systems, Rancière argues
against the
logic assumed within the dominant political notion of consensus:
Consensus does not mean simply the
erasure of conflicts for the benefit of common interests. Consensus
means
erasing the contestatory, conflictual nature of the very givens of
common life.
It reduces political difference to police-like homogeneity. Consensus
knows only:
real parts of the community, problems around the redistribution of
powers and
wealth among these parts, expert calculations over the possible forms
of such
redistribution, and negotiations between the representatives of these
various
parts.[18]
Consensus suppresses the contestatory nature of common
life, reducing political subjectivization to rational debate among
parts of a
community. This prohibits various political forms and identities from
taking
form, impulses that may then be transferred into more extreme or
violent forms.[19]
Consensus-oriented democracies have conflicts and contradictions, but
these are
labeled as threats rather than understood as the essential condition of
democracy itself. In this way, consensual forms of political
participation can
be argued to be incapable of achieving more equality and emancipation.
Those criticizing such consensual politics also propose
alternative approaches. Mouffe suggests the concept of ‘agonistic
pluralism’.[20]
She posits antagonism as the basic
condition of human coexistence, proposing a form of politics
that would transform ‘antagonism’ between potential enemies to
‘agonism’ or
‘conflictual consensus’. While consensus-oriented politics is concerned
with
regulating law and order among antagonistic entities, Mouffe states
that, “the
prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions from the
sphere
of the public, in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to
mobilize those passions towards democratic designs”.[21]
She is concerned with the political space/time through which passions
and
conflicts fundamental to human coexistence can emerge.
The concept of conflictual consensus might still be
understood as a
product of consensus, however, as a presentation of conflicts between
interest,
opinions and ideas. Rancière proposes the more radical concept of
‘dissensus’.
Dissensus is formulated in relation to an aesthetical regime, a
‘sensible
order’ that identifies and defines who is qualified to speak and about
what,
who is heard and in what way. It concerns a break in the sensible
order, or a
‘gap in the sensible’,[22]
in which the established framework of perception, thought and action is
confronted with the ‘inadmissible’, ie. a political subject, or
political forms
and identities. As a process, rather than an achievement, dissensus is
always
underway, resisting the politics of law and order by questioning the
givens of
a particular situation. In this sense, dissensus is not the opposite of
consensus, but, rather, a process concerned with the potential
emergence of new
political formations.
While taking slightly different approaches, both
‘agonistic pluralism’ and ‘dissensus’ affirm that equality in
consensus-oriented politics can only ever be that among individuals
within a
well-identified group. Further, consensus is understood as premised on
a model
of ‘communicative action’[23]
in which participants in a communicative exchange are pre-constituted
within a
space-time that is either shared or that can be identified by those
participating. There is also the issue of how new forms of the
political could
interrupt such pre-established frames of consensus across identified
groups.
Also at stake is how subjects and identities that are not formed or
identified
can participate or break into an order or regime. As Rancière
formulates an
approach to dissensus:
Dissensus is not the confrontation between interests or
opinions. It is the manifestation of a distance of the sensible from
itself.
Politics makes visible that which had no reason to be seen, it lodges
one world
into another (for instance, the world where the factory is a public
space
within the one where it is considered a private one, the world where
workers
speak out vis-à-vis the one where their voices are merely cries
expressing
pain).[24]
2.2. Framing and Staging Dissensus in
Design
The framing of a design
project is typically premised on the definition of a problem or task by
the
initiators of a project (designers and/or their clients and
commissioners). The
first instance of consensus is already evident in an agreement upon a
problematic, which ‘they’ have seen in ‘their’ own way. While certain
of the
concerns of the designers may overlap with those of potential
participants,
nonetheless the origin and framing of the problematic presupposes but
is not done
by ‘others’. As Dave Beech articulates, “participation always involves
a
specific invitation and a specific formation of the participant’s
subjectivity”.[25]
Further, it is project initiators that generally determine the
approach,
methods, scope and resources. Participants are typically engaged and
even
selected afterwards, as project initiators determine and pre-constitute
those
who may participate, even in cases in which participation may be
extensive and
open-ended. Thus, to some extent, dissensus is prevented in advance, as
presuppositions about subjectivity govern the selection, terms and
means of
engagement for participation.
The staging of a design process involves
not only the framing of the problem and the social organization
for
addressing it, but a realm of materiality and sensibility within the
design
process that may also endure long after. Rancière discusses the
‘distribution
of the sensible’,[26]
in which the visible and invisible, the audible and inaudible, the
sayable and
unsayable are manifested in the distribution of time, space and
experience. It
is through perceptible means, for example, that communal or shared
situations
in space/time take place. In everyday life, this realm of sensibility
is
predefined and pre-established, in which some sensory possibilities can
be
perceived and others cannot. Sensible orders reproduce and enforce
divisions
within society – who is qualified to see, listen or discuss, and who is
not.
For Rancière, this is not a matter of good taste, but about the
sensible, through
which some parts of society come together while others are excluded or
ignored.[27]
That is to say, there is an established ‘community of sense’, though
others are
not recognized or valued, resulting in the invisibility of these
others.
Further, excluded from the prevailing sensible order, others have no
common
space/time to experience other possibilities for the distribution of
the
sensible – to see what is supposed to remain unseen to them, to listen
to what
is supposed to be inaudible to them, to discuss what is not supposed to
be
discussed by them.
Implemented by institutions, sensible orders are
established and reinforced through various practices, including design
practice. Designers take part in forming a regime of sense, sensory
perception
or a sensible order, which take place in space/time. While there are
many
possible ways in which designers may approach the sensible order, much
of
design is involved in (re)producing how established regimes distribute
space/time, thereby affirming the power and the politics of current
institutions. In contrast, other approaches, such as those oriented
around
dissensus, could intervene within an existing or established sensible
order. In
this, the identification and subjectivity of participants cannot be
presupposed
nor, indeed, the form of communicative action. Identities and subjects
may
become recognized through design practices that are framed and staged
in other
ways. By actively redistributing the sensible order, those
participating in
dissensus-oriented design could thereby also intervene in the political
order.
An intervention, interruption or break in the realm of materiality and
sensibility can thus institute a new aesthetical regime, other forms of
politics to come. A break in regimes of sense also produces the
potential for
thinking and acting in new ways – it is a matter of proposition rather
than
(re)production.
3.
Dissensus in design – reflecting on an example
A range of questions might be asked if we consider
design in terms of dissensus. How, for example, might the identities or
subjectivities of un-established or unidentified people or groups be
considered
in design? How might the ‘political frontier’ between unequal
people/groups be
considered? In what ways may they be considered or constituted as
participants
in design? In what ways might different participants interrupt a
particular
order and redistribute the sensible? How might such forms of
participation open
an experiential realm that does not merely include those excluded in an
already
established order but, rather, constitute a break? How might breaks in
the
established order of meanings, value and territories, the order of
sensible,
take form? How may ‘framing’ and ‘staging’ in design and research be
based on
dissensus, in which the problematics of participation may be queried
and
alternatives investigated? Such questions were at stake within the
Forms of
Resistance project, of which we give an account below, along with
retrospective
reflections on how participation was framed and staged.
Forms of Resistance follows a practice-based research
tradition,[28]
in which experimental design activities in different settings ground
reflection-in- and -on-action. By ‘experiments’, we refer to design
activities
involving forms of communication and materiality that both probe into
conditions ‘in the field’ as well as into research questions and
methods.[29]
Following a brief account, we elaborate on concepts of
‘indisciplinarity’ and
‘free translation’ that emerged from doing the project.
EXAMPLE: Forms of Resistance
Figure
1.
Figure
2.
3.1 Framing – an
‘indisciplinary’ approach to participant relations
An experience of the problematics of ‘framing’ was
evident in Forms of Resistance from the first experimental design
activity, in
which I, Mahmoud Keshavarz, entered into the world of the women
activists, into
their places of habitation and occupation. As a male, middle-class
designer
coming from
An example of this was the issue of how and among
whom communications took place. Besides ever-present security issues,[31]
there was an issue of who participated in the setup and organization of
activities.
These communications took the form of e-mail discussions among those
interested
in initiating a ‘creative’ protest regarding violence against women
(see Fig. 3
for a screenshot of the e-mail threads). The planning and arranging of
meetings
was done by e-mail, and sometimes nobody replied for 4-5 days at a
time. As I
entered into the ongoing communications within this context, I was
conscious
not to lead the communications which, inevitably, involved their
awareness and
plans around my being ‘there’. Even though some might have expected it
of me, I
did not initiate new discussions about my project by e-mail requests,
for
example. In relation to reflexivity about my own role, I felt that
asking
questions and making requests would constitute ownership or project
management.
Taking this approach meant
that the process of communicating and collaborating stemmed from their
own and
existing way of working, which was evolved to the new circumstance of
my being
there. In the form of the e-mail communications, this resulted in a
space of
action where the potential authority that I or my discipline might
represent
was dissipated, so that it was not a matter of ‘they’ and ‘I’.
Furthermore,
there was no phase of setting up an experimental activity, as might be
typical
in design or research work. This meant that there was no space/time for
legitimizing disciplines, for ‘educating’ or ‘convincing’ the activists
how
‘design’ is relevant ‘there’, with potential pitfalls of privileging an
incoming person or discipline in relation to the others already
present. I had
the experience that my discipline diminished in relevance. Instead,
what
mattered was implementing ideas and plans based on their previous
experiences
and ongoing agenda, which were emerging from the discussions. The
space/time of
virtual communications could be understood as a sphere of actions and
reactions, dialogues and conflicts, which, in some ways, broke down the
frontiers between or hierarchies among us.
This experience prompted
me to conceptualize an approach in terms of ‘indisciplinarity’.[32]
I use this term to describe a shared space of action/reaction, where no
one
imposes her or his voice, knowledge or discipline. This is in contrast
to interdisciplinarity, in which there is
always a risk of exclusion, discrimination and repression. When
multiple
disciplines are identified, classified and measured in relation to one
another,
each participant and discipline might too easily be reduced to
calculations of
which is most suitable, who is more relevant and who is not, who has
the most
effect and who has less. The danger is that collaboration, rather than
crossing
over and breaking apart the hegemony of any single discipline, as
intended in
interdisciplinary approaches, instead produces hegemonic divisions on
the basis
of disciplines. My experience was of becoming part of an environment
generated
by activists whose desires for political change took precedence over
any
specific discipline such as social work, sociology, political science
or
design.
From my experiences and reflections on the first experiment, I conceptualized indisciplinarity as an approach to framing collaborative activities in ways that avoid the hierarchy or domination of one discipline, one form of knowledge, or one person/group over another. This informed how I approached the second experiment from the first day that we began collaborating in Gothenburg. There, the project was almost entirely in the hands of the women who the activists were working with. It was the women that generated and implemented the ideas, in contrast to the first experiment, in which an idea and the method originated with the activists and was then put into the hands of participants (women in the writing workshops). From an indisciplinary point of view, I could now query the framing of the experiment in terms of new questions about the premise of story-writing as an idea and method, and how it was related or relevant to the participating women.
Fig. 3 A
screenshot of an e-mail discussion during collaboration in
This
particular screenshot is of a discussion about what concepts we
should think about when working with the idea of violence. Various
interested
people contributed, even if some of them did not participate in project
later.
3.2. Staging –
participation and the materiality of ‘free translation’
Particular issues of ‘staging’ surfaced in the third
experiment within Forms of Resistance. This took the form of bringing
experiences from the first two experiments, with their particular
situations in
terms of space/time and subjectivities, to another situation, which was
preconditioned by the terms of an exhibition, constraints in material
and other
resources and a particular audience. I conceptualized this in terms of
the
‘sensible order’, as discussed above. Here I saw my role, as a
designer, to
take, and translate materials from the first two experiments into other
material forms in a new situation. In other words, the previous sensory
worlds in which the materials were created, in those particular
‘communities of
sense’, would be staged within another sensory world of an exhibition
for
spectators that were well-established and well-identified in cultural,
social
and political terms. I considered how to stage the sensibilities and
materialities
of one field into another, which also entailed the translation from a
world of
experiences and communities that tend to be invisible or marginalized
into a
world of factual spectators.
The confrontation, or frontier, between these two
worlds can also be understood in the terms of dissensus, understood not
as a
conflict between ‘enemy and friend’[33]
but “a total break with the existing state of affairs in order to
create
something absolutely new”.[34]
The potential could be for the design role – that is, myself and the
design
materials – to propose an interruption, a break within one world, seen
and
realized as ‘factual present’ in which another that might be invisible,
excluded or not present could somehow be represented. Conflict need not
take
the form of confrontation among opinions and interests but a break in
the way
we perceive and experience the world in which we are presently located
and its taken-for-granted
sensible and social orders.
In design terms, I thought of the ‘community of sense’
concretely in terms of the “combination of sense data such as forms, words,
spaces, rhythms and so on”[35]
but also in terms of multiple meanings
of the term ‘sense’. Given the collected materials from the first two
experiments, words and images of experiences of violence and
resistance, I
considered how to stage participation in terms of two regimes of sense,
two
sensory worlds, two sensible orders. In my approach, I adapted and
developed a
conceptual approach based on Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the task
of the
‘translator’[36],
an approach of expanding the translation beyond the translation of
images and
texts. In between these two worlds, a translator does not dismiss the
contradictions and mismatches between the two but acts to ‘intensify’[37]
a dissensual situation in order to open a space for political
subjectivization.
More
specifically, I reflected on the role of the designer as translator
within a
process proceeded by participant’s storytelling (in
Fig. 4 An example of ‘free
translation’
The approach involved detaching
an image from its original story and extracting one sentence from the
story.
Fig. 5 The
‘free translation’
as staged in the exhibition (
The images
and text
excerpts were presented to spectators in the exhibition on separate
pieces of
paper on the installed boards and table.
Fig.
6 A page resulting from storytelling in a workshop session
The
image and text pieces were interpreted and redistributed by a workshop
participant.
My intention in rendering the materials more abstract,
in this instance of ‘free translation’, was to provoke a void in
meaning, a
space to be filled by a spectator who sees the materials, tries to make
sense
of them and does so in terms of her or his own experience. In this way,
he or
she becomes a participant, engaging her or his own story within the
space/time
of materials within a given situation. Outside the field of the
material
origins or translation, a spectator enters – not the others’ field –
but a new
situation in which they also become active in interpreting and
storytelling in
relation to the shared theme human experience on violence. A free
translation
results in materials through which a spectator relates to the theme and
becomes
a participant by staging images and words of someone else’s story in
their own
terms. If the spectator edits the material by deciding how to place an
image or
word and in relation to the others, she weaves her own sensory world
into
another world. In this situation, my design method acted to intensify
mismatch
or break between two sensory worlds. For me, free translation was
developed as
a critical engagement with the politics of the situation, as one way of
staging
an encounter between two worlds, in order to make a community of
storytellers
and translators.
4. DISCUSSION
Revisiting
Forms of Resistance in terms of how participation was framed and
staged, we can
begin to elaborate upon how design may orient toward dissensus. An
experience
of being ‘other’ prompted reconsideration of the role of design
researcher ‘in
the field’. Entering into a world of specific, ongoing socio-political
practices, the researcher’s gender, culture and class were put at
stake, along
with the knowledge and authority typically presumed and exerted by the
institutionalized practices of design and research over those who may
have very
different terms for identifying, involving and collaborating with
others. The
subjects and their political subjectivities came into focus as the
primary and
determining issue in the situation, fundamentally reconfiguring the
original
research plan and its pre-constitution of how things might proceed and
what
might be produced. The politics of communicative actions were
reconceived in
terms of how they were embodied (by the researcher and participants
with
diverse cultural identities, forms of knowledge and political
subjectivities)
and mediated (as access, opportunity and control within socio-technical
systems
such as email). Indisciplinarity conceptualizes a reflexive attitude
toward the
dimensions of power embodied in researcher-participant relations and
enacted in
communicative actions – in this case, breaking disciplinary hierarchies
took
the form of reticence, of refraining from initiating, directing or
determining
communications.
Forms of Resistance evolved across
multiple cultural and spatial/temporal settings, characterized by
different
sensible and social orders. Throughout, a guiding question was how to
make
sense of and how to make sensible, to other and perhaps dominant
‘communities
of sense’, the experience of those perhaps considered as ‘unqualified’,
‘illegal’, ‘amateur’, ‘weak’ or ‘undeveloped’. As a practice concerned
with the
‘distribution of the sensible’, design oriented toward dissensus
engaged a
politics of ‘redistribution’, in which the unseen was rendered visible
and the
un-said discursive. This was staged as an encounter between worlds
without resorting
to a false ideal of a ‘common’ ground (and the undesirability of merely
rendering a temporary stability in the form of consensus). In this
specific
situation, we also wanted to avoid the sensible order of reportage
journalism,
which attempts to make one, marginalized world as fully and
transparently
present in another, but in which there is only a one-way model of
communicative
action without reciprocity or conflict. Free translation is an approach
that
intervenes within another regime of sense – in this case, a systematic
approach
to abstracting and staging materials that does not merely reproduce one
world
in another but interrupts both the original and factual systems of
meaning by
provoking new interpretations and experiences of subjectivity.
Indisciplinarity
and free translation have been generated out of the communicative and
material
tactics of Forms of Resistance. However, we foresee that these may be
instantiated differently (or ‘resituated’[39])
within other examples and future work. This is only one example of how design might query,
intensify, break down
and reconfigure established sensible and social/political orders. In
this,
Forms of Resistance can be understood not only as a ‘community of
sense’ but as
a ‘dissensual community’, in which communities of translators
(designers) and
storytellers (participants) interrupt experiences configured within a
dominant,
pre-established sensory world. As such, it is also perhaps an example of the
radical shift in political discourse around the terms of ‘democracy’ –
indeed,
Jesko Fezer proposes this political project as one of design:
“For Mouffe, the major obstacle to
democratic politics, that is, to politics based on conflict and
contradiction,
lies particularly in neoliberalism’s self-image: its fundamental
assertion that
there is no alternative to the existing order. She calls for a common
symbolic
space that would facilitate confrontation. To create such a space would
be a
design task in the widest possible sense of the term.” [40]
4.1 Concluding remarks
The
problematic of participation that we have explored here resonates with
more
general issues in design and design research. Contemporary formulations
of
design oriented toward society and the public realm take place in
relation to
heterogeneous conditions and contexts. While early Participatory Design
found a
common ground within a shared space/time frame of the workplace, the
times/spaces of contemporary practices are often distributed widely and
unevenly (for example, as the ‘immaterial production of goods’[41]).
While there was a certain common ground within the social democratic
premise of
organized labor in Scandinavia, participation in design today may
involve more
diverse socio-cultural practices, distances between social locations,
and
political regimes. The role of the designer and researcher simply
cannot be
pre-constituted, nor its terms of participation. Design must be queried
at the
‘political frontier’, in which other, situated forms of knowledge are
embodied
in social- and change-oriented practices. Concepts such as ‘dissensus’
open
onto a range under-explored issues and approaches that may be
interrogated
within and through design research.
However, our approach raises further issues about the
politics of design research. Practice-based research approaches, such
as that
exemplified here, develop theory in the context of design practice,
through
active de/construction of theoretical concepts brought into practice as
well as
the generation of new concepts from within practice. In this, we argue
that the
challenge is not only to understand and incorporate critical-political
theories
from without, but to build an intellectual basis for design on the
basis of its
own modes of operation.[42]
However, Forms of Resistance surfaces the problematic (and perhaps
contradiction) of claiming a role for design, of strengthening its
intellectual
and ideological foundations, by means of which it is differentiated and
defined
as a discipline, apart from others, in terms resonant with those of
in/exclusion, authority and power.
In response, we argue that a critical role of the
design researcher is to better understand his or her sensitivities,
relativities and limits in situ, in relation to other forms of
experience,
knowledge and practice. This is not
merely about recognizing others, which might echo an ethics of cultural
pluralism, but, as Ross Birrell[43]
has argued, a more political, or disruptive and even destructive, form
of
indisciplinarity. In the area of
artistic research,
related arguments are made as, for example, Kathrin Busch articulates
how art
might function to disturb both its own and other established
knowledge
structures, to reveal innate power structures through forms of
knowledge and
practice that are ambivalent, incommensurable, and singular.[44]Arguing
for the potential of an indisciplinary space of action to facilitate
“democracy
of experience”,[45]
we seek to develop a non-hierarchical design research that leads into
the ‘de-compartmentalization of
each discipline’.[46]
We do not posit a new discipline, category or genre of
design, but argue for increased criticality – and dissensus – in
contemporary practices of design and design research.
Mahmoud Keshavarz
is a design researcher with a BA in industrial design from Azad
University of
Tehran and an MFA in experience design from Konstfack University
College of
Arts, Crafts and Design in
Ramia
Mazé specializes in participatory and critical methods for designing
systems
and products that alter social practices and public life. At the
Interactive
Institute in
Acknowledgements
The Forms of Resistance project was developed by Mahmoud
Keshavarz
during 2010-2011 with participants Samaneh Abedini, Delaram Ali, Hoda
Aminian,
Elnaz Ansari, Parvin Ardalan, Azadeh Faramarziha, Setareh Hashemi,
Andrea
Hjalmarsson, Nahid Jafari, K.K., Helena Parsmo, Maryam Rahmani, Maziar
Rezai,
Trifa Shakely, Maryam Zandi and as a collaboration between the ‘Change
for
Equality Campaign’ in Iran and, in Sweden, ‘Ain’t I A Woman’ in
Gothenburg and
the Interactive Institute in Stockholm. Jenny Althoff, Christina
Zetterlund and Ramia
Mazé
were the main advisors of the project, which was conducted as a
master’s thesis
project at Konstfack College of Arts, Crafts and Design. Thanks to
Konstfack
and to the Helge Ax:son Johnsons Foundation
in
[1] See, for
example, Magnus Ericson
and Ramia Mazé (eds.) DESIGN ACT:
Socially and politically engaged design today.
[2] Liz Sanders
and G. K. Van
Patter, in conversation, ‘Science in the making: Understanding
generative
research now!’, NextDesign Leadership Institute (NextD), 2004:
www.nestd.org/02/05/01/contents.htm, accessed august 2011.
[3] Guy
Bonsiepe, Design and democracy, Design Issues,
vol. 22, no. 2, 2006, 27–34.
[4] David
Stairs, Altruism as design methodology, Design
Issues, vol 21, no 2, 2005, 3–12.
[5] For example,
see Erling
Björgvinsson,
Pelle Ehn, Anders-Per Hillgren, Participatory Design and
‘Democratizing
Innovation’, Proceedings of Participatory Design Conference,
Sydney,
Australia, December 2010; Victor Margolin and Sylvia Margolin, A “social model” of design: Issues of
practice and research, Design Issues, vol 18, no 4, 2002, 24–30;
Sanders
and Van Patter, in conversation, ‘Science in the making!’.
[6] Markus
Miessen, The
Nightmare of Participation: Cross bench praxis as a mode of criticality.
Sternberg Press, 2010, 20.
[7] Carl
DiSalvo, Design, democracy and agonistic
pluralism, Proceedings of the Design Research Society Conference
2010,
[8] Susanne Bødker, Creating conditions for participation: Conflicts and
resources in
systems design, Human–Computer Interaction, 11, 1996, 215–236.
[9] For example,
see Gro
Bjerknes, Pelle Ehn, Morten Kyng (eds.) Computers
and Democracy: A Scandinavian Challenge.
[10] For example, see
Joan
Greenbaum and Morten Kyng (eds.) Design
at Work: Cooperative design of computer systems,
[11] Pelle
Ehn, Participation
in design things,
Proceedings of
Participatory Design Conference,
[12] Judith
Gregory, Scandinavian approaches to
participatory design. International Journal of Engineering
Education vol.
19, no. 1, 2003, 64.
[13] Pelle Ehn, Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts.
[14] Jacques
Rancière and Davide Panagia, Dissenting
Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière. Diacritics
vol. 30, no. 2, Summer 2000, 125.
[15] Chantal
Mouffe, The Democratic
Paradox.
[16] For example,
see Morten
Kyng, Users and computers: a contextual
approach to design of computer artifacts, Scandinavian Journal of
Information Systems, vol. 10, no. 1-2, 1998; Pelle Ehn, Scandinavian
design: on participation and skill, in D. Schuler and
A. Namioka (eds.) Participatory Design:
Principles and Practices, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993;
Judith
Gregory, Scandinavian Approaches to
Participatory Design. International Journal of Engineering
Education, vol.
19, no. 1, 2003.
[17] Chantal
Mouffe, The Return of
the Political.
[18] Jacques
Rancière, Introducing Disagreement. ANGELAKI
Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 9, no. 3, 2004,
7.
[19] Indeed,
Rancière states:
“From here it is possible to understand how consensus is able to
engender new
forms of identitarian passion. The core of consensus lies in
suppressing
supernumerary political subjects, the people surplus to the breaking
down of
the population into parts, the subjectivations of class conflict
superimposed
onto conflicts of interest between parts of the population. At the core
of
consensus is the dream of an administration of affairs in which all
forms of
symbolising the common, and thus all conflicts over that symbolisation,
have
been liquidated as ideological spectres” (Introducing
Disagreement, p.7-8). He goes further to argue that consensus
endangers the
very possibility of democracy itself.
[20] For example,
see
Mouffe, The
Return of the Political;
Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox.
[21] Chantal
Mouffe, Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic
Pluralism.
[22] Jacques
Rancière, The
Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans.
Gabriel
Rockhill.
[23] Jürgen
Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action (Jürgen Habermas,
The Theory
of Communicative Action.
[24] Rancière
argues: “This is
precisely why politics cannot be identified with the model of
communicative
action, since this model presupposes the partners in communicative
exchange to
be pre-constituted and that the discursive forms of exchange imply a
speech
community whose constraint is always explicable. In contrast, the
particular
feature of political dissensus is that the partners are no more
constituted
than is the object or the very scene of discussion. Those making
visible the
fact that they belong to a shared world that the other does not see
cannot take
advantage of the logic implicit to a pragmatics of communication. The
worker
who argues for the public nature of a 'domestic' matter (such as a
salary
dispute) must indicate the world in which his argument counts as an
argument
and must demonstrate it as such for those who do not possess a frame of
reference to conceive of it as argument. Political argument is at one
and the
same time the demonstration of a possible world where the
argument could
count as argument, addressed by a subject qualified to argue, upon an
identified
object, to an addressee who is required to see the object and to hear
the
argument that he or she 'normally' has no reason to either see or hear.
It is
the construction of a paradoxical world that relates two separate
worlds.”
Jacques Rancière, Ten Theses on Politics. Theory and Event,
vol. 5, no.
3. 2001, 10.
[25] Dave Beech, Don’t Look Now: Art after Viewer and Beyond
Participation. In Jeni Walwin (ed.) Searching for Art’s New
Publics.
Intellect Pub, 2010, 27.
[26] Jacques
Rancière, The
Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible.
[27] Mahmoud
Keshavarz, Opening the Space of Experience: On
Political Forms of Aesthetics in Design, Proceedings of
International
European Academy of Design conference, Porto, Portugal, 2011.
[28] Christopher
Frayling,
Research in Art and Design. Royal
[29] Eva
Brandt et al., Xlab,
[30] Mahmoud
Keshavarz, Forms of Resistance: the political and re-situated
design, MFA
thesis in Experience Design, Konstfack University College of Arts,
Craft and
Design,
[31] See
my diaries in Keshavarz,
Forms of Resistance: the political and
re-situated design.
[32] See Jacques
Rancière, Thinking
between
disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge. Trans. Jon
Roffe. PARRHESIA: Journal of Critical
Philosophy, no. 1, 2006, 1-12; Jacques
Rancière, Aesthetic community, Aesthetic
Separation. Art & Research vol. 2, no.1, summer 2
[33] Jacques
Rancière and
Steve Corcoran, Dissensus: On Politics
and Aesthetics.
[34] Chantal
Mouffe, Artistic Activism and Agonistic Space, Art & Research, vol.1, no.2, summer
2007, 5
[35] Jacques Rancière, Aesthetic Community, Aesthetic Separation, Art &
Research
vol.2,
[36] Walter Benjamin
argues that translation is an
irrelevant and inappropriate task. Translation is a mortal act, which
is the
result of a contemporary and mortality fact itself. The translator
clearly
exists, and the light of the content (text) crosses through her body
and
language, but the cracks and shortcomings of her language are visible as
well. “The task of
the translator consists in finding that intended effect [intention]
upon the
language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of
the
original,” The Task of The
Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of
Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, in Walter Benjamin and Hannah
Arendt
(eds.) Illuminations: Reflections and Essay.
[37] Otto Von
Busch, Fashion-able:
Hacktivism and engaged fashion design. PhD dissertation,
[38] Previously,
I have used
the term ‘bad translation’ to explaining my idea of translation
borrowed from
Benjamin (for example, Keshavarz, Forms
of Resistance). Now, I prefer to use the term ‘free translation’.
The idea
still is the same, but this term may better avoid the misunderstanding
of the
term as ‘bad’ in the sense of ’improper’. Instead, I understand this
kind of
translation as a ‘good’ thing. Moreover, ‘free translation’ resonates
with
related ideas in poetry, in which the translation of a poem is not
possible
except by engaging in a more free-form translation by another poet in
the destination
language. In effect, another poet in another language translates the
poem of
the original to create a third poem, which is related to my idea
of
storytellers and translators.
[39] Mahmoud
Keshavarz, Forms of Resistance: the political and
re-situated design.
[40] Jesko Fezer, Design for Post-Neoliberal city, e-flux
journal, no. 17, June-August 2010, 2.
[41] Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude,
[42] Magnus Ericson
and Ramia Mazé (eds.) DESIGN ACT;
Ramia Mazé and Johan Redström, Difficult Forms.
[43] Birrell,
Ross, Jacques
Rancière and The
(Re)Distribution of the Sensible: Five Lessons in Artistic Research, Art
& Research, vol.2, No. 1, summer 2008.
[44] Kathrin Bush, Artistic Research and the
Poetics of Knowledge, in Dieter Lesage and Kathrin Busch (eds.) A
Portrait
of the Artist as a Researcher, AS Mediatijdschrift / Visual Culture
Quarterly,
no. 179, 2007, 41.
[45] Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta, and Tere
Vadén, Artistic Research: Theories,
Methods and Practices. Helsinki : Academy of Fine Arts
[46] Mahmoud
Keshavarz, Forms of Resistance: the political and
re-situated design.