Design Research: Synergies from Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Citation preview

Design Research

Design research is a new interdisciplinary research area with a social science orientation at its heart, and this book explores how scientific knowledge can be put into practice in ways that are at once ethical, creative, helpful, and extraordinary in their results. In order to clarify the common aspects – in terms of features and approaches – that characterize all strands of research disciplines addressing design, Design Research undertakes an in depth exploration of the social processes involved in doing design, as well as analyses of the contexts for design use. The book further elicits ‘synergies from interdisciplinary perspectives’ by discussing and elaborating on differing academic perspectives, theoretical backgrounds, and design concept definitions, and evaluating their unique contribution to a general core of design research. This book is an exciting contribution to this little explored field, and offers a truly interdisciplinary approach to the treatment of design and the design process. It is valuable reading for students in disciplines such as design studies and theory, participatory design, informatics, arts-based education, planning, sociology, and interdisciplinary programmes in humanities and technology. Jesper Simonsen is Professor of Design Studies at the Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde University. Research interests include Participatory Design, and offering theories and methods for IT design in an organizational context. Recent publications include Participatory IT Design: designing for business and workplace realities (MIT Press, 2004). Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt is Professor of Human Geography at the Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change (ENSPAC), Roskilde University, leading the Space, Place, Mobility and Urban Studies Research Unit. His books include Performing Tourist Places, with Haldrup, Larsen and Urry (Ashgate, 2004), Coping with Distances (Berghahn, 2007), and Mobility and Place, edited with Granås (Ashgate, 2008). Monika Büscher is Senior Lecturer of Sociology at the Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University and Co-director of the Mobilities Lab – an interdisciplinary research laboratory. Recent publications include Configuring

User–Designer Relations: interdisciplinary perspectives (Springer, 2009), Ethnographies of Diagnostic Work (Palgrave, 2009), Mobile Methods (Routledge, 2010). John Damm Scheuer is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde University. His research interests focus on the encounter of innovative ideas and practice in organisations. Recent publications include The Anatomy of Change: a Neo-institutional Perspective, co-ed (CBS Press, 2008), and a contribution to Innovation and the Creative Process: towards innovation with care, ed. Lars Fuglsang (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008).

Design Research Synergies from interdisciplinary perspectives Edited by Jesper Simonsen, Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Monika Büscher and John Damm Scheuer

First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 Edited by Jesper Simonsen, Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Monika Büscher and John Damm Scheuer; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Design research : synergies from interdisciplinary perspective / edited by Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt . . . [et al.]. p.cm. 1. Social sciences—Research—Methodology. 2. Design—Research— Methodology. I. Bærenholdt, Jørgen Ole. H62.D454 2010 001.4'2—dc22 2010003252 ISBN 0-203-85583-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-57263-7 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-85583-6 (ebk)

Contents

List of illustrations List of contributors Preface

1 Perspectives on design research

vii ix xvii

1

JØRGEN OLE BÆRENHOLDT, MONIKA BÜSCHER, JOHN DAMM SCHEUER AND JESPER SIMONSEN

2 Iterative participatory design

16

JESPER SIMONSEN AND MORTEN HERTZUM

3 Designing as middle ground

33

NIELS CHRISTIAN NICKELSEN AND THOMAS BINDER

4 Designing pathways

49

JOHN DAMM SCHEUER

5 Design and management

63

JAN PRIES-HEJE AND RICHARD L. BASKERVILLE

6 Knowing through design

79

POUL BITSCH OLSEN AND LORNA HEATON

7 Makeshift users

95

JULIEN MCHARDY, JESPER WOLF OLSEN, JEN SOUTHERN AND ELIZABETH SHOVE

8 Deep translations MARIA DUCLOS LINDSTRØM

109

9 Design and sustainable transition

123

JESPER HOLM, BENT SØNDERGÅRD AND OLE ERIK HANSEN

10 Designing an exhibition

138

BRUNO INGEMANN

11 Joyful, collective design processes

156

HENRIETTE CHRISTRUP

12 The becoming of urban space

172

KRISTINE SAMSON

13 Tourist experience design

187

MICHAEL HALDRUP AND JØRGEN OLE BÆRENHOLDT

14 Synergies

201

JESPER SIMONSEN, JØRGEN OLE BÆRENHOLDT, JOHN DAMM SCHEUER AND MONIKA BÜSCHER

Index

213

Illustrations

Figures 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 7.1 7.2 9.1 9.2 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 11.1

The Task-Artifact Cycle An iterative model for sustained participatory design Results from three iterative participatory-design workshops Photos from the five-day period of trial use Team leader orally presenting the information in the paper record (left) and shared EPR display with patient information visible to all participants (right) Whiteboard from discussing relationships Overview of the general improvement recommendation process Four agenda types: the perspective on outcome that drives the entire process improvement project Agenda examples Detail of stitchers Running Stitch Main stages in the design process of the flax insulation mats: Discursive framing and institutional framework, 1990–2005 Discursive framing of flax insulation. The final series of the poster exhibition The cliché images have to be formulated to get rid of their influence on the Designer These elements create the specific idiolect of the entire exhibition The first of the eight posters in the series This is only a section of the diagram showing the flow in a biorefinery. Difficult The title on the last biorefinery poster reads: ‘OIL, PAPER AND PLASTIC ARE HARVESTED HERE . . .’ The rough draft shows the thought process of the black-box metaphor The model ‘Space for joyful, collective design processes’.

18 20 21 22

24 67 68 72 74 100 101 130 132 140 141 143 146 148 148 150 162

viii Illustrations 11.2

12.1 12.2 13.1 13.2 14.1 14.2 14.3

Photograph of the model ‘Space for joyful, collective design processes’ in use in the Performance Design workshop on ‘Creative Leadership’ Process diagram for the Varvsstaden development showing the stages and interchange between user participation and design The scaled plan worked within the aesthetics of emergence The Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde The Sea Stallion from Glendalough just landed at the Viking Ship Museum, 4 August 2008, back from Ireland Designing simply outlined as a change from situation A to situation B The design process depicted as a series of iterations Illustrations of the chapters of this book as related to the design process presented in Figure 14.2

164 181 183 194 195 203 205 207

Tables 2.1 3.1 3.2

Summary of the mutual learning process conducted by the nurses during their investigation of the patient. Regime of science and regime of designing Regime of knowledge, middle ground and regime of authorship

29 41 45

Contributors

Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, MA in History and Geography, PhD in Geography, Dr. Scient. Soc. in social sciences. Professor of Human Geography at Roskilde University, Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change (ENSPAC), Roskilde University. Belongs to the Space, Place, Mobility and Urban Studies (MOSPUS) Research Unit and to the Centre for Experience Research, Roskilde University. He has been a Professor in Planning at University of Tromsø. His interdisciplinary efforts include research into how societies become organized spatially and research into tourism experience, cultural heritage and design. Both fields are concerned with mobility studies. Among his books in English are The Reflexive North (Nord, 2001), edited with Nils Aarsæther, Performing Tourist Places (Ashgate, 2004), with Michael Haldrup, Jonas Larsen and John Urry, Space Odysseys (Ashgate, 2004), edited with Kirsten Simonsen, Coping with Distances: producing Nordic Atlantic societies (habil. Thesis, Berghahn, 2007) and Mobility and Place (Ashgate, 2008), edited with Brynhild Granås. Richard L. Baskerville is a Board of Advisors Professor of Information Systems and past chairman in the Department of Computer Information Systems, Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University. His research specializes in security of information systems, methods of information systems design and development, and the interaction of information systems and organizations. His interest in methods extends to qualitative research methods. Baskerville is the author of Designing Information Systems Security (Wiley, 1988) and more than 100 articles in scholarly journals, professional magazines and edited books. He is Editor-in-Chief for The European Journal of Information Systems and serves on the editorial boards of Business & Information Systems Engineering (Wirtschaftsinformatik), Information Systems Journal, Journal of Information Systems Security and the International Journal of e-Collaboration. A Chartered Engineer, Baskerville holds degrees from the University of Maryland (BS summa cum laude, Management), and the London School of Economics, University of London (MSc, Analysis, Design and Management of Information Systems, PhD, Systems Analysis). Thomas Binder, PhD in Science and Technology Studies, Associate Professor at The Danish Design School in Copenhagen where he is part of the co-design

x

Contributors research cluster engaging open design collaborations and participatory design in the context of workplace change, interaction design and social innovation. His research includes contributions to methods and tools for experimental design research and open innovation processes with a particular emphasis on participation and learning. He has been publishing on a.o. design games and co-design as prototypical learning both in the research fields of participatory design, interaction design, design research, and workplace learning. He is directing a research project on designing anthropological innovation models and participates in a Danish research network on temporary spaces of innovation. He has published more than 40 articles and book chapters and is co-editor of the book (Re)Searching the Digital Bauhaus (Springer, 2008).

Monika Büscher, PhD in Sociology, Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University and Imagination Lancaster, a new design and innovation centre. She is Co-director of the Mobilities Lab. Her ethnomethodological studies include studies of professional work practice in emergency response, healthcare, design, architecture and multi-media art. Her methodological innovations in ethnographically informed innovation have contributed to several research fields, including participatory design, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), palpable and pervasive computing. She is co-investigator for a research cluster on the digital economy, where she is coordinating a number of pilot research projects. She is external examiner at Domus Academy, Italy. She has published over 30 articles, is co-editor of the book User-Designer Relations (Springer, 2008) as well as the main editor for Ethnographies of Diagnostic Work (Palgrave, 2009) and Mobile Methods (Routledge, 2010). Henriette Christrup, MA in Psychology, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde University. She is teaching and doing research in Performance Design. She has worked with developing theory and research-based tools that can facilitate processes in a multitude of contexts within the fields of pedagogics, organization and performance design. More recently she has focused on the management of collective design processes, experience analyses and the use of experiments. Her contributions in English include: ‘On Sense and Sensibility in Performative Processes’, in Jon Sundbo and Per Darmer (eds), Creating Experience in the Experience Economy (Edward Elgar, 2008). Contributions in Danish include: ‘The Public Happiness Project’, in Pedersen, Karsten et al. (eds), Public Communication in the Splits (Copenhagen Business School Press, 2006) and ‘Competent Collectivisation of Knowledge-Creating Processes’, in Andersen et al. (eds), Competence in an Organizational Perspective (Roskilde University Press, 2000). Michael Haldrup, MA in History and Geography, PhD in Geography, Associate Professor of Geography, Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change (ENSPAC), Roskilde University. He has been a Visiting Fellow at

Contributors

xi

Lancaster University. His research concentrates on tourism, mobility and everyday life and draws inspiration from material/technology studies and theories of practice and performance. Project manager for the Danish Social Science Research Council (DSSRC) project Tourism Practices and the Orient, which focuses on materials and practices involved in Danish Tourism to Turkey and Egypt. Besides many international journal articles and book contributions, his books includes Performing Tourist Places (Ashgate, 2004) (with Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Jonas Larsen and John Urry) and Tourism, Performance and the Everyday (Routledge, 2010) (with Jonas Larsen). Ole Erik Hansen, Associate Professor, Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change (ENSPAC), Roskilde University. For the last fifteen years, he has studied the ecological modernization of companies, production networks and industrial policies in a Danish, European and global context. These studies have been carried out in four trans-European research networks. In recent years, he has focused on the governance of industrial transition processes in order to understand how networks of actors can contribute to the development of sustainable consumption and production patterns. He edited Planning in Theory and Practice: a cross disciplinary perspective [in Danish], (Roskilde University Press, 2007) (with Anne Jensen, John Andersen and Kurt Aagaard Nielsen). Lorna Heaton, MA in Theatre, PhD in Communication, Professor, Department of Communication, University of Montreal. Co-founder and head of the Laboratory for Uses and Design of Information and Communication Technologies (LUDTIC) and founding member of the CITÉ (Interdisciplinary Research Center on Emergent Technologies). Her research interests include interdisciplinary collaboration and technologically-mediated cooperation, particularly in the workplace. She is presently leading a research project which examines changing conceptions of expertise and relationships between designers and users in participative, Web 2.0 environments. Co-author (with Taylor, Van Every and Groleau) of The Computerization of Work (Sage, 2001). Her publications have appeared in top journals such as Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Information Technology and the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). She was Vicechair of the biannual conference ‘Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication’ in 2002 and Vice-chair of the 2009 Canadian Communication Association Conference. Jan Pries-Heje, MSc, PhD, Professor in Information Systems, Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde University and Head of User-Driven IT Innovation Research Group. His research focuses on designing and building innovative solutions to managerial and organizational IT problems. His previous and current projects explore process improvement as design, the ability for an organization to improve, and how one can design a process for making better sourcing decisions. He is the co-author (with David Avison) of Research in Information Systems (Elsevier,

xii Contributors 2005) and has published more than 150 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications. His publications have appeared in top journals such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Journal, Journal of the AIS, and European Journal of IS. He is Chair of the IFIP TC8 Working Group on Information Systems and was Co-chair of the 2010 international IFIP 8.2/8.6 working conference ‘Human Benefit through the Diffusion of IS Design Science’, held in Perth, Western Australia. Morten Hertzum, PhD in Computer Science, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde University. His research is in human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, information-systems development, and medical informatics. He has, since 1992, pursued an overarching research interest in how technology supports, and otherwise affects, human activities. Since 2004, he has been involved in a long-term research project on effects-driven IT development, primarily based on empirical work concerning the development and organizational implementation of IT systems in health care. He has recently published in Behaviour & Information Technology, Information Processing & Management, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, and International Journal of Medical Informatics. Jesper Holm, MSc in Socio-Technological Planning, Associate Professor in Environmental Regulation, Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change (ENSPAC), Roskilde University. His research on environmental and technological policy and stakeholder relations focuses on innovative impacts on enterprises, products, and technology systems. Another focus is on Local Agenda 21, deliberation, experimentation and environmental transition. He has been member of four EU-concerted action and research programs on Local Agenda 21, The Ecological State, Successful Environmental Policy, and Environmental Innovation. He is leading a R&D project on Learning Environmental Tourism, and is member of the R&D project Climate Change and Innovation in the Building Sector. He has co-edited three interdisciplinary books on environmental policy and innovation, and contributed to over 40 articles published in journals and books. Bruno Ingemann, PhD in Visual Communication, first trained as a graphic designer. Associate Professor, Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde University. Head of the research group Centre for Visual Communication. His research has focused on photography, museology and experimental reception studies, including pictures in digital cultures, museum communication, production of visual media and theories of visual communication. His was co-founder of the New Museology Network and of the Network of Visual Culture. As well as more than 50 articles in Danish, he has published articles in Visible Language and Nordicom Review of Mass Communication Research. He has published more than 20 books in Danish including Fotografiet under pres. Mellem

Contributors

xiii

realisme og konstruktion (Photography under Pressure: Between Realisme and Construction) (Samsfundslitteratur, 1996), Fatamorgana – Pressefotografiets virkelighed og læsernes (Mirage: The Reality of Press Photos and the Readers) (Museum Tusculanum Press, 1998) and is co-editor of Ny dansk Museologi (New Danish Museology) (Aarhus University Press, 2005). His book (with Lisa Gjedde) Researching Experiences: exploring processual and experimental methods in cultural analysis was published by Cambridge Publishers Press in 2008. Maria Duclos Lindstrøm, MSc in Public Administration, Roskilde University. She is currently enrolled as a PhD student in sociology at the University of Copenhagen. Her work explores how economic expert knowledge is redesigned for media and a general public. She combines actor-network theory and Science, Technology and Society studies (STS) with more pragmatist views of relations between knowledge, form and society. This is the topic of her chapter in this book, as well as of her PhD thesis. This research interest in the ‘shaping of knowledge’ is explored within a theoretical field of actor-network theory as well as more pragmatist views of relations between knowledge, form and society. Julien McHardy, ESRC PhD candidate in sociology at Lancaster University in cooperation with Imagination Lancaster, a new design innovation centre and IDEO London. He is trained as a designer and researcher at the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Glasgow School of Art. His PhD study of electric cycling brings together approaches from science and technology studies, practice theory and design practice to explore how new and potentially more sustainable practices emerge through the mutual configuration and scripting of technology, use, users and policy. First results have been presented at the Lancaster Sociology Summer Conference 2009 and the MultipleWays conference 2009. Niels Christian Nickelsen, trained in psychology; PhD in Organization Theory and Associate Professor in organizational psychology at the Department for Psychology, Copenhagen University. His empirical research is based in ethnometodology and concerns learning in industry and accreditation in health care. Currently, he is particularly interested in the way certain actors initiate organizational change by creating support behind their ideas and by producing texts and narratives concerning themselves and their efforts. Theoretically, he works with perspectives such as actor-network theory, symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. His empirical research concerns learning and product development in industry; intervention and accreditation at a hospital; teamwork and cross-professional connections at a hospice; and entrepreneurship in haute cuisine. During the last years he has published a number of scientific papers and contributed to several anthologies within these fields. Poul Bitsch Olsen, MA in Sociology, PhD in Business Studies, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde University. His research relates to leadership and organizing

xiv

Contributors

as well as studies of institutional relations and micro processes in businesses. He is involved in discussions of secondary education in academic institutions, in particular related to education in management, leadership, technology, structure and knowledge work. Book contributions in Danish include Problem-Oriented Projectwork: a workbook (Roskilde University Press, 2008), Techniques in the Social Sciences (Roskilde University Press, 2007), with Lars Fuglsang and Peter Hagedorn-Rasmussen, and Theory of Science in the Social Sciences (Roskilde University Press, 2004), with Lars Fuglsang, and, in English, Six Cultures of Regulation (CBS-Publishing/Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1992). Jesper Wolff Olsen, MSc, Doctoral Scholar, Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University. His work connects interdisciplinary topics, specifically architectural challenges in mobile and ubiquitous computing, participatory and collaborative socio-technical innovation, and ethnomethodological studies of human perception. In the major European IST project PalCom, he contributed substantial parts to the conceptual framework and the design, coordination and implementation of several core prototypes. He has a further 8 years of commercial experience working with and being a partner in several software development companies. His publications have appeared in a broad range of conferences and journals such as Internet of Things – International Conference for Industry and Academia, Pervasive Workshop – International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Physicality – International Conference on Physicality, Scandinavian Conference on Health Informatics and IEEE’s flagship journal Computer. He is also co-author of several scientific reports published during the European IST project PalCom. Kristine Samson, MA in Literature and Modern Culture, PhD scholar at the Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change ENSPAC), Roskilde University. She has been working as an urban consultant and is now working on a thesis focusing on Performative Aesthetics in Urban Space as a Strategy for Change. She has contributed to the Realdania financed project Urban Space as Catalyst for Change anchored at JUUL | FROST Architects, 2007–10, where she has been co-editing the volumes Byens Rum I–II with Helle Juul and John Pløger, and has been involved with the development of a cross-disciplinary method for the project. She has been a visiting scholar at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) and is contributing text and ideas to the research lab Urban-Think Tank (U-TT). Furthermore, she has written articles to several Danish magazines within art, film, design and aesthetics. John Damm Scheuer, MS in International Business, Administration and Modern Languages, PhD in Organizational Studies, Associate Professor in organizational change in the Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde University. His research interest focuses on the encounter of innovative ideas and practice in organizations. Recent research has focused on developing an alternative perspective on implementation based on

Contributors

xv

the neo-institutional and actor-network concept of translation. As participant in the EU project ServPPIN, he investigates innovation in public-private innovation networks. His contributions to books in English include The Anatomy of Change: A Neo-Institutionalist Perspective (CBS Press, 2008), edited with Steen Scheuer, and a contribution to Innovation and The Creative Process: towards innovation with care (Edward Elgar, 2008), edited by Lars Fuglsang. Elizabeth Shove, Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. She currently holds an Economic and Social Research Council Climate Change Leadership Fellowship concentrating on transitions in practice and their implications for climate change. Her previous research and writing focused on patterns of ordinary consumption, everyday life and changing conventions like those examined in Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: the social organization of normality (Berg, 2003). More recently, studies of design, home improvement projects, plastic and digital photography resulted in The Design of Everyday Life (Berg, 2007), with Matt Watson and Jack Ingram, and in a range of articles and papers dealing with the materiality of daily life. Elizabeth is also editor, with Frank Trentmann and Rick Wilk, of the edited collection Time, Consumption and Everyday Life (Berg, 2009). Jesper Simonsen, Professor of Design Studies, Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT), Roskilde University. PhD in Computer Science, MSc in Communications and Computer Science. His research focus is on Participatory Design. He has, since 1991, conducted design research in collaboration with industry – the research focused on how IT designers can cooperate with users and their management, especially when relating to the clarification of goals, formulation of needs, and design and evaluation of coherent visions for change. He was program chair for the 10th biannual Conference on Participatory Design (2008), President of the IRIS Association – the Scandinavian Chapter of AIS, and manager of the EffectsDriven IT Development research program (EDIT). Book contributions include Participatory IT Design: Designing for Business and Workplace Realities (MIT Press, 2004), with Keld Bødker and Finn Kensing. Has recently published in Communications of the ACM, Design Principles and Practices, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, International Journal of Medical Informatics and International Journal of Integrated Care. Jen Southern, practicing artist and AHRC PhD candidate in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. Her research explores social uses of locative and geo-spatial media through collaborative and participatory contemporary art practice. Southern received an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal. She works across the disciplines of participatory art, sociology and mobile application design, and has contributed to international projects and workshops funded by NESTA, BBC, Arts Council England and Sagasnet. She has had over 60 exhibitions of her solo and collaborative work both in Europe and internationally. Most recently, her collaborative work with Chris Speed was exhibited at

xvi

Contributors

Futuresonic Festival, Manchester, and ISEA09, Belfast, and with Hamilton, Southern & St Amand exhibited at Fabrica, UK; dislocate festival, Yokohama, Japan; Hannah McClure Gallery, Dundee, Scotland; Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden; and MOCFA, San Francisco, USA. Bent Søndergård, MSc and PhD in Electronic Engineering. Associate Professor at the Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change (ENSPAC), Roskilde University. His main research activities have been within cleaner technology, environmental innovation and capacity building. His recent research projects deal with strategies for sustainable transition of socio-technical systems, including environmental technology policy and innovation (ENVINNO 1998–2001), Environmental communication of environmental properties of chemicals (related to the design of science-based IT-systems) (KEMI 2000– 2004), Climate adaptation and innovation in construction in Region Zeeland (KIBS 2008–11). Recent publications have addressed ecological modernisation and institutional transformations in the Danish textile industry, creation and sharing of environmental knowledge across communities and networks, and sustainable transition of socio-technical systems in a governance perspective.

Preface

This book is the result of ongoing discussions between interdisciplinary design researchers. The discussions were initiated among researchers at Roskilde University in 2007 when the university opened a new subject area within design studies, combining humanistic, technological, and social science perspectives to develop students’ competence to engage with complex design problems. Roskilde University is known for its interdisciplinary and design-oriented approach to research and teaching. Moreover, a tradition of interdisciplinary problem-oriented project work aimed at solving practical problems in the ‘real world’ has existed since the university was established in 1972 as an alternative to more traditional and mono-disciplinary universities. A series of workshops was arranged between researchers from different areas of design research, including business and organizational studies, urban planning, computer science and informatics, geography, health, performance design. We quickly realized that we shared interdisciplinary perspectives on the emerging field of design research and discovered a need for more research into interdisciplinary approaches to enable design that is robust by appreciating the realities and dynamic complexities of its context. The idea of investigating synergies between our own forms of design research culminated in a conference discussing nine paper contributions (some of which later formed input to chapters of this book) on the theme ‘Perspectives on PracticeOriented Design Science’, held in spring, 2008. The proposal for this book was made after this conference, in collaboration with design researchers from Lancaster University, which is also famous for its interdisciplinary and design-oriented programs. The team of contributors finally comprised 23 authors from Roskilde University, Lancaster University, University of Montreal, University of Aarhus, Georgia State University, Copenhagen University, and The Danish Design School. Our discussions have focused on how our interdisciplinary design research knowledge is put into practice, and on which common aspects and approaches characterize our different ways of addressing design research. To develop synergies, all contributors met at an international workshop held in Denmark in August 2009, funded by Roskilde University where authors peer-reviewed and discussed draft chapters. Over two days, we discussed and elaborated our different perspectives, discovered and nurtured synergies, and identified core aspects of our

xviii Preface interdisciplinary design research. The results from the workshop were subsequently analysed by the editors using a grounded theory approach and are presented in the concluding Chapter 14: Synergies. As editors, we have immensely enjoyed our numerous conversations and exchanges of draft materials with the authors in this book. We hope that you will enjoy reading the book and participate in the discussions that it raises. During fall 2009, we had the opportunity to test a draft of the book in an advanced graduate course and experienced how the chapters opened up deep and relevant discussions among students and their supervisors. Finally, we would like to thank Roskilde University’s Rector for funding the international workshop, and our departments colleagues for their support. To work with the enthusiastic and competent staff at Routledge has been a pleasure. Making this book was a rewarding experience of iterative and emergent collaborative design, challenging, enriching and joyful! Jesper Simonsen, Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Monika Büscher and John Damm Scheuer Roskilde University and Lancaster University December 2009

1

Perspectives on design research Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Monika Büscher, John Damm Scheuer and Jesper Simonsen

The aim of the book History shows that humans are capable of designing remarkable things: bridges, skyscrapers, dams, cities, the Internet and, less glamorously, sewers and transport systems spring to mind immediately. There are also more subtly extraordinary achievements, including bureaucracies, organizations, IT systems and processes that allow people to work better together. All of these innovations involve, and are driven by, research. Yet a clear definition of the relationship between design and research is elusive. It is certainly not linear. The complexity and potential impact of contemporary problems, from societies’ difficulty in designing and implementing IT systems through defining economic policies for the maintenance of welfare ideals to climate change, cry out for a better understanding of the relationship between design and research. Such understanding may enable designers and their ‘users’ to conduct research and inform design more effectively. However, again, the relationship between understanding and action is not linear. One of the reasons is the emergent nature of design. While humans are able to achieve extraordinary things, they are equally capable of producing incredible waste, destruction and injustice. Indeed, extraordinary ambition and destruction often go together, as is illustrated by innumerable examples. A case in point is the car, designed to provide amazing automobility and flexibility for people, based inter alia on research into fuel systems, aerodynamics and driver psychology. Yet, at the same time, cars are now choking our cities and countrysides with air pollution, CO2 emissions and congestion, contributing to 1.2 million road deaths annually (WHO 2004) and climate change. According to Thackara (2005: 1), ‘[m]any of the troubling situations in our world are the result of design decisions’. This is, in no small part, because design is producing multiple effects in complex systems with intended but also many unintended consequences. Nevertheless, Thackara is optimistic, seeing design and designers as part of the solution: ‘if we can design our way into difficulty, we can design our way out’ (ibid.: 1). This is far from simple, of course, since any attempt at design will be appropriated in unanticipated ways, and with unpredictable ‘systemic’ intended and unintended consequences.

2

J. Bærenholdt, et al.

Environmental problems urgently point to a need for new sustainable researchbased designs, such as zero energy housing, more sustainable forms of production and consumption, and ‘intelligent’ technologies for mobility. This must be synchronized with social innovation in everyday practices, with policies and politics (Urry 2008). All such efforts involve and depend on research from many disciplines – from the social sciences and the humanities to the technical and natural sciences. Design decisions mean a lot to how societies change, and there is a widespread expectation that insights from research are key to ‘good’ design decisions and outcomes. However, just placing knowledge from research before design is insufficient. It is misleading to conceive research to be external to design, only providing insights into contexts for design, informing design, or controlling design. To base design on research is not enough; more critical involvement in designing is needed. History is full of examples where design based on research has been harmful, sometimes in matters of life and death, such as the failure of the computeraided despatch system that created chaos for the London Ambulance Service in 1992 (Shapiro 2005). The relationship between design and research is complex, but also promises just and sustainable social transformations. Critical enquiry into this relationship is needed. This is what this book is about.

Types of design research Most design processes involve very many different actors and perspectives. It is therefore not surprising that a huge diversity of actors talk about doing design but find it difficult to identify shared aspects of their practice. In a co-citation analysis comprising design literature cited within the period of 1990–2000, Atwood et al. (2002) conclude that one of the most cited resources of modern design literature is Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial (1996) in which he describes design as devising ‘courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (p. 111). There are also alternative views on design that are often cited in the literature (as described in Atwood et al. 2002: 126ff.): Christopher Jones (1970), for example, describes design as ‘initiating change in man-made things’, while Christopher Alexander (1964), who discusses design in architecture, characterizes it as ‘the process of inventing physical things which display new physical order, organization, forms, in response to function’. From the point of view of urban planning, Horst Rittel (1984) describes design as ‘structuring argumentation to solve “wicked” problems’, while Donald Schön (1983, 1987), who studied how designers work and learn, views design as ‘a reflective conversation with the materials of a design situation’, and Pelle Ehn (1989), representing a Scandinavian approach to Participatory Design, describes design as ‘a democratic and participatory process’; while Jens Rasmussen et al. (1994) and Kim Vicente (1999), with a background in Cognitive Systems Engineering, characterize design as ‘creating complex sociotechnical systems that help workers adapt to the changing and uncertain demands of their job’. Paradoxically, the influence of research on design and design done by researchers is widespread, but studies on how research works in designing are not. Across

Perspectives on design research

3

different disciplines, this book is in search of a deeper understanding of the relations between design and research. Broadly speaking, we discuss three different types of design-research relations and, building on Cross (1995, 2006, 2007), we argue that much can be learned from exploring and, in some cases, combining these three perspectives: • • •

Research for design (research-based design). Research into design (research analysing how design works). Research through design (design-based research) – which also include design through research.

First, research for design has perhaps the longest tradition, for example in engineering, product or industrial design, computer science, and informatics, where investigations of materials, mechanics and function have long informed design. This tradition dates back to inspirations from scientific design and Le Corbusier’s ideas of ‘modern architectural science’ (de Vries et al. 1992: 20). This form of research for design is especially strong in design science, which appeared as part of 1960s attempts to build systematic knowledge applicable to design. Simon’s classic work The Sciences of the Artificial (2006) is central to this tradition, which is represented in this book by Pries-Heje and Baskerville in Chapter 5. Across several disciplines and application fields, design science seeks to provide universal models for rational responses to specific design situations. The relationship is usually instrumental and only loosely connected with reflection on how research works in designing. More qualitative approaches that cut across other forms of design research are found in ethnographically informed design, for example in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Randall et al. 2007). Secondly, Cross argued that the 1980s and 1990s opened up interesting avenues of research into design, with approaches that he later labelled as ‘science of design’, studying how design processes work (Cross 2006: 98f.). This trend has continued, shifted and expanded to include new theoretical resources such as phenomenology and actor-network theory, and several chapters in this book contribute to this field, for example Binder and Nickelsen in Chapter 3, Olsen and Heaton in Chapter 6 and Lindstrøm in Chapter 8. A separation between design and research is characteristic for the more ‘scientific’ types of this approach. While research for design is functionalist in the way that research is seen to provide knowledge, models and input for designers, in research into design, researchers study, describe and analyse how design is done. In both approaches research and design, researchers and designers are held apart, although studies of design practice may inform research for design, and we can imagine a bi-directional move across and between the two forms of design research. However, in the third kind of design research we discuss in this book, design and research cannot be kept separate. Research works through design and design works through research. This is, for example, the case in Chapter 2 by Simonsen and Hertzum and Chapter 10 by Ingemann. Research and design come together,

4

J. Bærenholdt, et al.

and this becomes central to contemporary design challenges and opportunities, as we will argue below with reference to, among others, Schön’s (1983, 1987) influential work on the reflective practitioner, Buchanan’s (2001) design revolution, Cross’ (2006) designerly ways of knowing, and Nowotny et al.’s (2001) observation of the growing integration of the social, the material and the scientific in Mode-2 (knowledge) production. Design-based research is about the complex and multi-directional integrations of research and design, where design becomes as much a medium and process of research, as a result. We argue that this move carries inspiration and implications for both the critical enquiry into design and the ambitions of making a difference with research for design.

How design research takes place Design draws together actors who want to change something or create something new. Attractive and wished-for effects are sought; aesthetic experiences in art, architecture, music, design, performance, a new product that satisfies new needs or desires, a new material or technology that alleviates dull or difficult tasks or makes something new possible, a new service or process, a reduction in people’s environmental footprints, higher quality, reduced costs, heightened employee or customer satisfaction, pleasure in experience – the list is endless. Some science and research-based knowledge about how to obtain such results is available but how this knowledge is folded into design effectively, and how it can be synchronized with everyday innovative practice is often unclear. With this book we would like to contribute to efforts of taking design beyond Design (the creative genius kind). What scholars and practitioners refer to as design facilitation (Buchanan 2001, Thackara 2005) informs our exploration. But we wish to show how designers and researchers are practically going beyond traditions, mobilize different scientific disciplines and address extremely complex design challenges in different contexts in and through idiosyncratic combinations of design and research. The book looks for common characteristics of design processes across disciplines and for how different design perspectives and practices cross-fertilize each other, devising design processes to pursue wished-for effects and outcomes. The book studies examples of how analytical and prescriptive approaches can inform each other. Our focus is on how interdisciplinary scientific knowledge is put into practice in ways that are helpful for practitioners and others and that make extra-ordinary results possible. Our objective is to explore common aspects that characterize a diversity of relations between research and design. Our focus on research through design and design through research raises questions of how design and research practices are integrated and feed each other. This form of design research shapes up as Mode-2 design. Nowotny (2004) observes an ever deeper integration of knowledge and society, where research ‘is increasingly carried out in the context of application, that is, problems are formulated from the very beginning within a dialogue among a large number of different actors and their perspectives’. Building on this, Mode-2 design research acknowledges that research, design and society are

Perspectives on design research

5

heavily integrated, since research contributes to assembling society and society is a constant field of testing and experimenting in research and design. A central point of the book is to focus on the processes involved in doing design. Another central point is that designs emerging from analysis of the contexts for design use are much more likely to be successful and of lasting value. Although some designs arises ‘out of the blue’, research into the various aspects of context for a design-in-the-making are a common starting point. From the analyses of processes and contexts in this book, we learn about the various ways in which research is increasingly being used in the field and how this works in practice in a society where science is deeply embedded (Novotny et al. 2001). However, as we will explain further later in this chapter, we do not want to overstate novelty and innovation; creativity in designing clearly also involves improvisation beyond great plans and outlines, in making ‘things right’ in the day-to-day (Hallam and Ingold 2007). Our approach thus refers to reflexivity-in-action (Schön 1983, 1987), and through studies of how designs emerge through experimenting in dynamic contexts, our focus leads to a consideration of design research approaches that are socially robust by appreciating the realities of contexts of design and research.

Emerging design research ‘Design research’ has been developing for many years. One proponent of its revolutionary potentials is Richard Buchanan (2001). Looking back at the history of design since the Renaissance, where design became second to science, he suggests that the twentieth century brought a new agenda for design research. Design research takes design beyond its focus on the visual and form, e.g. in graphic design or industrial design, and into academia and interdisciplinary collaborations, now including interaction design, service design and environmental design (ibid.: 11). Design knowledge today is of another kind than traditional scientific knowledge, it is practical and scientific, and it works through synergies. Another central figure in design research is Nigel Cross. In his book Designerly Ways of Knowing (2006) he introduces explanations of how design research differs from the kinds of knowledge derived from both (natural) science and humanities. Design is about ‘the artificial world’ and its value is ‘practicality, ingenuity, empathy, and a concern for “appropriateness”’ (ibid.: 2). Design research is thus about problem solutions, and this ‘way of knowing’ has common features across and beyond specific applied fields and professions. Designerly practice involves envisioning and trying out solutions, it requires science, but also intuition, emotion and aesthetic judgement. Thereby designers’ knowledge is constructive with pragmatic abduction, reaching beyond debates over induction versus deduction in science. To the authors in this book, many of whom have a grounding in the social sciences, the humanities, informatics and engineering, Cross’ way of carving space out for design research between science and humanities reminds of the twentieth century fight for a place for social science in-between the ‘two cultures’ of natural science and humanities (Snow 1959), which was firmly described in the Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences

6

J. Bærenholdt, et al.

(Wallerstein et al. 1996). This report argued for opening up the social sciences. Design research, too, aims at interdisciplinary research across the faculties of natural science, humanities and social science. Design research is thus closely related to the kinds of social science that are practically engaged in societies as proposed in Making Social Sciences Matter (Flyvbjerg 2001) or ‘For Public Sociology’ (Burawoy 2005). Buchanan (2001: 20–22), in his example of case studies in design research, also points to important inspirations from and synergies with social science methodologies. However, unlike social science, design research was never in a situation where it had to argue that design matters. Design research had to defend why it was research, rather than just professional design. As mentioned above, it is not sufficient to argue that research produces better design. Design research needs to explicate its hybrid nature where design and research are integrated. Cross argues for such a position, referring to the not always promising results from attempts of legitimizing design research as a kind of science, from scientific design to design science, not unlike social science’s feverous attempts of ‘becoming like science’ during the twentieth century. As we will explain more in the next section, the critical evaluation of these aspirations benefits from Donald Schön’s (1983, 1987) postpositivist constructive paradigm. This discussion fosters recognition of similarities between designerly practices of research, experimentation and intuition and scientific practices. As evident from Science Studies and critical reflection among scientists themselves, the practices of natural science are to a much higher degree than formally recognized about experimental ‘designerly’ intuition (Galison 1987). The emergence of design research is therefore embedded in the broader reflective transformations of science, education and the knowledge society that science studies and designers like Buchanan (2001) and Cross (2006) have argued for. Designerly ways of knowing are of a broader relevance than just for traditional design professions. In order to meet the challenges of the present world, designerly ways of knowing are becoming part of what contemporary societies need (Cross 2006: 11). However, design research is more than programmatic. Over recent years, approaches that constructively appreciate the systemic interdependencies between designed objects, use and context, and between designers and the people they are designing for have emerged. Participatory or collaborative design (see, for example, Greenbaum and Kyng 1991, Schuler and Namioka 1993, Voss et al. 2008) have a long tradition and practices in the area of information technology-based socio-technical innovation, and there are other approaches, such as user-led design in the commercial sector (Von Hippel 2005), and open source design in technology (Ghosh 2006) but also in other areas such as urban design (Fuller and Haque 2008) expanding the scope and ambition of collaborative design approaches. They aim for different forms of collaboration, explicit, open and collective experimentation, creating not just products and technologies, but also support for creative appropriation, new processes and services, and they productively blur the boundaries between designers, engineers, users, the technical sciences, the social sciences and the humanities.

Perspectives on design research

7

From multi- via inter- to post-disciplinarity Interdisciplinary design research is emergent, always in the making, alive, a constantly evolving collective effort. In this book, we do not aspire to provide a comprehensive overview or map of the field. Instead, we want to clarify through case studies and reflective accounts what makes design research matter. A variety of research traditions are involved and they differ in their understandings of the relationship between research and design, as explained with the threefold typology introduced above with our main interest in the synthetic third: research through design and design through research. Design research includes analytical and descriptive as well as formative, normative and prescriptive studies. To better understand design processes – in general and in specific fields – we study the practices of designers who want to change something or make something new. We identify the kinds of processes that are decisive to obtain attractive effects or outcomes. Meanwhile, we also discuss the forms of normativity developed in some fields, such as in information systems and participatory design. Scientific disciplines clearly have different traditions in regard to analytical versus prescriptive studies. Our ambition is to point to a complex field of synergies involving, across analysis and prescription, but not to one meta-narrative. Synergies (Chapter 14) emerge from a diversity of sources and relations. It is no coincidence that in spite of forty years of design research a unified cross-disciplinary (or interdisciplinary) body of theory about design has not been developed (Cross 2007). Many have called upon design researchers to develop such a body of theory. But obstacles to the development of a coherent interdisciplinary theoretical, epistemological and terminological basis for research and theory making, include a lack of agreement about definitions of core concepts and terminology. Furthermore, there is poor integration of theories specific to designing and designs. It is thus a question whether it is at all possible to specify and differentiate theories of designing and designs from theories of other fields. Terence Love (2002) suggests that a coherent body of interdisciplinary design theory should address and identify cross-disciplinary relevant definitions of core concepts of design and design-processes. We doubt that a unified theory of design is possible, feasible, or necessary. However, we agree with Love (2002) that theories of design should be developed and related to theoretical debates elsewhere. Knowledge about design research, its possibilities, advantages and difficulties is highly desirable and relevant. To some degree, it is possible to identify general and common themes that characterize different strands of research for, into, and through design. However, we do not want to territorialize a new exclusive field of design research with borders to science, humanities and social sciences. Above, we marked some similarities between the formation of social science and of design research, and we could point to other convergences with developments in engineering, science studies and cultural studies. Inclined to such an agenda, this book provides an initial picture of core themes of design research around participation (Chapter 2, 7, 11, 12), design exemplars

8

J. Bærenholdt, et al.

(Chapter 4, 5), epistemic and material practices (Chapter 3, 6, 10), translations, transitions and actor networks (Chapter 3, 8, 9, 13). We approach design research from a number of different disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives – computer science, informatics, sociology, geography, organizational studies, performance design, planning, urban studies and cultural studies, and we discuss many different application areas for design. These include information technologies, engineering, healthcare, safety management, policy, service design, economics, sustainable products, public exhibitions, performance and tourist experiences. This diversity is not exhaustive but typical of design and design research approaches. The chapters demonstrate the value of different perspectives, exploring how design approaches and processes are understood, theorized and practiced differently. No chapter in this book is ‘monodisciplinary’. Indeed, given the complex, unpredictable, context dependent and emergent nature of design constraints and opportunities, monodisciplinarity makes little sense. Disciplines – like design, sociology, economy, engineering – study different areas from different perspectives; they separate what needs to be understood as whole, such as the appropriation of new technology, the workings of policy measures, or the effects of a performance. Multi-disciplinarity can facilitate insights into the dynamic complexities of the socio-material-technical cultures design seeks to change. However, sometimes ‘just’ approaching this complexity from different perspectives is not enough. Combining multi-disciplinary insights does not enable an understanding of the lived, emergent, ongoing production of socio-materialtechnical cultures. Some of the work we present in this book paves the way for more ambitious ‘post-disciplinarity’ (Jessop and Sum 2001, Mayer Harrison et al. 2007), a return to the pre-disciplinary roots of many disciplines whose isolation and specialization was formed in the enlightenment spirit of rational inquiry and the (social) engineering confidence of modernity. Post-disciplinarity fosters study and intervention as a deliberate (although uncertain) holistic Mode-2 endeavour. It enables analysis and design to follow connections all the way through and to forge viable new connections, because they are more mindful of the multitude of dependencies. Post-disciplinary researchers and designers integrate other disciplines’ knowledge and skills, allowing for sophisticated interferences and synergies that enable groups of people to grasp the interconnectedness of factors and domains influencing socio-technical innovation. In our view, some of the interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches discussed in this book take a step towards post-disciplinarity.

Creativity, social change and experiments Since design is occupied with making things and processes, creativity is a central theme in design research, but very different interpretations exist. Creativity and innovation are buzz words, for example, in Richard Florida’s best seller The Rise of the Creative Class (2002). Economic prosperity and welfare is here associated with the ability to adapt successfully to constant change, inventing novel modes of doing things. Perhaps the most problematic aspect of this work is that these

Perspectives on design research

9

abilities are said to be properties of a particular social class – the creative class. In contrast, anthropologists Hallam and Ingold (2007) are sceptical towards this focus on novelty and design, and suggest to emphasize improvisation and imitation to reach a more generative understanding of creativity. Improvisation sits well with most of the contributions in this book, as it thrives on collaboration and diversity, depends on epistemic and material skills, and the networking abilities and strategies employed in design. A very different orientation is found in design science research and their interest in technological rules (Van Aken 2004), seen to be capable of guiding design processes, as suggested in Chapter 5 by Pries-Heje and Baskerville and critically discussed in Chapter 4 by Scheuer. In contrast to approaches focused on describing and enabling collaborative ‘control’ over improvisation, emergence, translation and situated practice, technological rules are attempts to define general procedures that can be applied in certain situations, categorized according to the types of problems and their contexts. Whether such procedures lead to their goal is discussed in Scheuer’s reflective study of the making of clinical pathways in a psychiatric hospital where he was a development consultant. Technological rules represent a reductive rather than integrative Mode-2 approach to complex systems, in no small part motivated by the limited time and often sever pressures organizational managers experience in search for business or production process i mprovements. However different these approaches are, they share a common perspective on design processes. In addition to this, Chapter 9 by Holm, Søndergård and Hansen broadens the analysis by discussing the power of technological regimes in their study of attempts of eco-friendly design in building materials. They show how construction industries are heavily structured through such regimes, placing significant and intractable constraints on design. New ways of manufacturing materials may succeed in niches, but a deeper societal ‘meta-design’ process is required to manage the institutionalized and path-dependent powers of the existing industrial systems (including types of materials used). ‘Creativity’ takes on a different meaning here, moving away from notions of ‘the unfettered freedom for creativity’ towards practices of improvisation, experimentation and networking to bring about change. Indeed, one could say more broadly that society and the environment have become the experimental objects. In the name of progress and global economic competitiveness, individuals, societies and the whole planet have become experimental objects (Wynne and Felt 2007). For example, medical interventions, energy and people’s food, are enhanced or created through instrumental application of design, science and technology. Innumerable, both positive and negative examples of emergence of unanticipated problems and opportunities reveal that in contemporary knowledge or information (technology) societies, uncertainty is not residual but immanent, or – to put it more flippantly – a feature, not a bug. Combining Wynne and Felt’s analysis with Nowotny et al.’s concepts of Mode-2 science may, we would like to argue, inform Mode-2 modes of design. That is, designers and their clients/customers/collaborators may use this book to inform

10

J. Bærenholdt, et al.

their search for a more deliberate, collective and considered integration of science, design and everyday practice. This is critical when we acknowledge that emergence cannot be controlled by more scientific inquiry or more circumspect technological development, it is irrepressible. As a result, all design, science and technology is inescapably experimental at local, social, global and environmental scales.

From designers and users to relational translations Much research in design has been around the enormous importance of involving users. This book points to the often problematic or even scapegoat character of users. Chapter 7 by McHardy, Olsen, Southern and Shove underlines the problematic construction of users, often involved in design processes, or just the making of certain kinds of representatives of users. The need of involving a diverse range of users is discussed in several chapters, among others, by Simonsen and Hertzum (Chapter 2), and Haldrup and Bærenholdt (Chapter 13). However, the main problem remains, as stressed in Chapter 7 by McHardy, Olsen, Southern and Shove, that sometimes design processes with far-reaching, unforeseeable and irreversible consequences did not or could not involve users from the outset. This observation seems valid, whether or not consequences are predicted. The representation and even the ‘making’ of users is therefore neither straightforward nor democratic, but relational and a matter of struggle. Similarly, can we always be sure about who the designers are? Designs often emerge without designers being in control. A positive example is the unanticipated up-take of SMS messaging capabilities by predominantly young mobile phone users. Initially intended as an exclusive business service emulating the success of paging technologies, the stampede of unexpected users gave rise to rapid innovation in technology and service models, enabling the use of SMS for everyday communications. A more problematic example is the discovery of the greenhouse effect of CO2 emissions – embedded in the design of homes, everyday appliances and transport. Many aspects of contemporary societies come into being by such coincidence, unanticipated use or unintended consequence, unpredictably being ‘invented’ for other, not necessarily ‘efficiency oriented’, purposes. Designing technologies and organizations is thus not a simple and straight-forward process. From their perspective of interpretive sociology, Olsen and Heaton (in Chapter 6) stress how much any kind of design process is a question of many actors (and we could add non-human actants) acting in ways that aggregate or synchronize in certain ways (or that do not do so, causing frictions, resistance and obstacles). If, then, human intention is involved, trust and coordination among those involved is very important, a condition sine qua non. While some chapters in this book more concretely describe the experiences of processes where the authors have learned directly from their own reflective practices (including Chapter 2 by Simonsen and Hertzum, Chapter 10 by Ingemann and Chapter 11 by Christrup), other chapters (including Chapter 3 by Nickelsen and Binder, Chapter 7 by McHardy, Olsen, Southern and Shove, Chapter 8 by Lindstrøm and Chapter 12 by Samson) explore processes as questions of

Perspectives on design research

11

assembly and translation, inspired by actor-network theory (Latour 2005). The approach taken in these studies focuses on practices, revealing the distributed and relational nature of agency, affordances, human and non-human actors. In these and other chapters, researchers detach themselves through reflection and analysis of how designs become, are assembled and translated, rather than just defining the designers and specific ‘heroic’ or ‘creative’ actions, and – in the process – research through design and design through research become a ‘middle ground’ (Chapter 3 by Nickelsen and Binder) between scientific research and designing practices. Such approaches emerged in response to critiques of modern rationality and design as a means of controlling the social and the material. Participatory design approaches are another response to these problems, exemplified in Chapter 2 by Simonsen and Hertzum. They describe the process of designing an electronic patient record system and show how representatives of users, along with various designers, are involved in shaping emergent and opportunity-based change, which is not foreseeable. The process is iterative and includes real-world experiments, where designers and users observe and analyse how the design works and take responsibility for emergent outcomes, whether they are positive, wished-for and intended or negative, unanticipated and unintended. It is a frequently recurrent question how ‘scaleable’ participatory design is, to what kinds of design objects and to what forms of socio-technical organization such an approach can be taken. Samson, for example, in Chapter 12, explores the use of participatory processes for urban planning and in Chapter 7, McHardy, Olsen, Southern and Shove imply that design research can support negotiation, necessary struggle and reconciliation between different interests and positions, enabling groups of people to cope more creatively and more circumspectly with the myriad forces involved in heterogeneous processes. This normative assumption that design research should facilitate collaborative management of change is common to all chapters, as is the acknowledgement of the open-endedness of the processes involved, and the concluding Chapter 14 readdresses the synergies required for this.

The material and the social in design processes Several chapters discuss the role of materials or materiality, for example, the ecofriendly affordances of flax (Chapter 9 by Holm, Søndergård and Hansen), the quality of historical urban-industrial neighbourhoods (Chapter 12 by Samson), and the engaging character of archaeological craftsmanship (Chapter 13 by Haldrup and Bærenholdt). The latter highlight that while ‘design’ was not a part of the conceptual toolbox, for example, in tourism studies until recently, use of the term ‘design’ is increasing in areas that more commonly used words like ‘produce’, ‘make’, ‘construct’, ‘build’, ‘fabricate’ or ‘plan’. Latour remarks that design has emerged in numerous professions, and ‘it now extends from details of daily objects to cities, to landscapes, to nations, to cultures, to bodies, to genes, and . . . to nature itself in great need of being redesigned’ (Latour 2008: 2). He claims that the use of ‘design’ implies going into a practical engagement with the material ‘envelops’

12

J. Bærenholdt, et al.

– things, artefacts and environments – that humans dwell in. Going beyond professional design, interest in the role of things and design in everyday life is growing (Coastal and Dreier 2006, Miller 2010, Shove et al. 2007). But material aspects matter not only when it comes to the shape and feel of products, technologies and urban spaces. They are also critical in design work. Much design research, including this book, talks about the important role of artefacts and materials. In Chapter 2, Simonsen and Hertzum show how the materiality of design can foster change, for example: their technology enables material changes in the organization of communication between health professionals, allowing them to move from oral reporting to a shared view of issues at hand. In more theoretical terms, Binder and Nickelsen in Chapter 3 and Lindstrøm in Chapter 8 explain how the concept of translation in Latour’s work can help design research to understand the continuous making and shaping of sociomaterial networks. Binder and Nickelsen investigate the materiality of rubber and of different types of moulding machines to reveal the nature of design as middle ground, while Lindstrøm’s case study is about the use of expert economics for policy. This way of thinking also comes through in Chapter 12 by Samson, who translates Latour’s ideas about ‘drawing things together’ into architecture and urban planning. Haldrup and Bærenholdt in Chapter 13, in addition, suggest the Gibsonian concept of affordance in order to understand the role of museum artefacts such a replica Viking ships in relation to tourist experiences. Material design involves the making of affording artefacts, offering certain possibilities of experience to people, thus further developing classic approaches to design as suggested by Norman (1988). Daniel Miller (2010: 50), writing on material culture, has an appealing way of describing the humility of objects, powerful because we do not reflect on their capacities for defining sites. Much of the discrete power of models, blueprints and masterplans, for example, is exactly because of their non-apparent organization of interaction – first as an ‘immutable mobile’ (Latour 2005), organizing interactions between interdisciplinary teams of designers, clients, users and contractors – then as the structure for interaction in a place or with an object. The coming together of the social and the material in design processes is discussed in most chapters in this book. Importantly, attention to the entangled relation between the material and the social reveals how research is done through design, and design through research. Design research practice integrates social and material relations in ways where we can no longer make exact judgements of what is inside and outside of designing, where epistemic practices are shown to affect the shape of things, just as much, albeit in different ways, as material endeavours to design and control change. Uncertainty, unpredictability, irrepressible emergence and the lived everyday creativity of collectives makes the world fluid. This fluidity must be matched by sensitive, responsive and ‘fluid’ practices of researching and designing. It requires processes of researching and designing that enable people to participate responsibly and creatively in the making of researchers, makeshift users, and designers as well as the making of wished-for change.

Perspectives on design research

13

References Alexander, C. (1964) Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Atwood, M.E., McCain, K.W. and Williams, J.C. (2002) ‘How does the design community think about design?’, in Amowitz, J., Gaver, W., Mackay, W., Sutcliffe, A. and Verplank, B. (eds) Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, London: ACM, pp. 125–32. Buchanan, R. (2001) ‘Design research and the new learning’, Design Issues, 17(4): 3–23. Burawoy, M. (2005) ‘2004 American Sociological Association Presidential address: for public sociology’, The British Journal of Sociology, 56: 259–94. Coastal, A. and Dreier, O. (eds) (2006) Doing Things with Things: the design and use of everyday objects, Aldershot: Ashgate. Cross, N. (1995) ‘Editorial’, Design Studies, 16: 2–3. —— (2006) Designerly Ways of Knowing, London: Springer. —— (2007) ‘Editorial: forty years of design research’, Design Studies, 28(1): 1–4. de Vries, M.J., Cross, N. and Grant, D.P. (1992) ‘Design methodology and relationships with science’, Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Design Methodology and relationships with Science, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 29 September–2 October 1992. Ehn, P. (1989) Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Florida, R. (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books. Flyvbjerg, B. (2001) Making Social Sciences Matter: why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fuller, M. and Haque, U. (2008) Situated Technologies Pamphlets 2: Urban Versioning System 1.0., New York: The Architectural League of New York. Galison, P. (1987) How Experiments End, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ghosh, R.A. (ed.) (2006) CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Greenbaum, J. and Kyng, M. (eds) (1991) Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hallam, E. and Ingold, T. (eds) (2007) Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, ASA Monographs. Oxford: Berg. Jessop, B. and Sum, N-L. (2001) ‘Pre-disciplinary and post-disciplinary perspectives’, New Political Economy, 6: 89–101. Jones, J.C. (1970) Design Methods: seeds of human futures, London and New York: Wiley-Interscience. Latour, B. (1986) ‘Visualization and cognition: thinking with eyes and hands’, Knowledge and Society: studies in the sociology of culture past and present, 6: 1–40. A revised version can be found in Latour, B. (1990) ‘Drawing things together’, in Lynch, M. and Woolgar, S. (eds) Representation in Scientific Practice, Amsterdam: Kluwer. —— (2005) Reassembling the Social: an introduction to actor-network-theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2008) ‘A Cautious Promethea? A few steps toward a philosophy of design (with special attention to Peter Sloterdijk)’, keynote lecture for the Networks of Design meeting of the Design History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, 3 September 2008. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 9 December 2009).

14

J. Bærenholdt, et al.

Love, T. (2002) ‘Constructing a coherent cross-disciplinary body of theory about designing and designs: some philosophical issues’, Design Studies, 23: 345–61. Mayer Harrison, H., Harrison, N., Haley, D., Harrison, G. and Fremantle, C. (2007) Greenhouse Britain: losing ground, gaining wisdom. Touring exhibition. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 11 December 2009). Miller, D. (2010) Stuff, Cambridge: Polity. Normann, D.A. (1988) The Design of Everyday Things, New York: Basic Books. Nowotny, H. (2004) ‘The potential of transdisciplinarity’, from the web conference ‘Rethinking Interdisciplinarity’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 25 November 2009). Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2001) Re-Thinking Science: knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity. Randall, D., Harper, R. and Rouncefield, M. (2007) Fieldwork for Design: theory and practice, London: Springer. Rasmussen, J., Pejtersen, A.M. and Goodstein, L.P. (1994) Cognitive Systems Engineering, New York: Wiley. Rittel, H. (1984) ‘Second-generation design methods’, in Cross, N. (ed.) Developments in Design Methodology, New York: John Wiley & Sons. Schön, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action, New York: Basic Books. —— (1987) Educating the Reflective Practitioner, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Schuler, D. and Namioka, A. (eds) (1993) Participatory Design: principles and practices, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Shapiro, D. (2005) ‘Participatory design: the will to succeed’, in Bertelsen, O.W., Bouvin, N.O., Krogh, P.G. and Kyng, M. (eds) Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing: between sense and sensibility, New York: ACM, pp. 29–38. Shove, E., Watson, M., Hand, M. and Ingram, J. (2007) The Design of Everyday Life, Oxford: Berg. Simon, H.A. (1996) The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd edn, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Snow, C.P. (1959) The Two Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thackara, J. (2005) In the Bubble: designing in a complex world, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Van Aken, J..E. (2004) ‘Management research based on the paradigm of the design sciences: the quest for field-tested and grounded technological rules’, Journal of Management Studies, 41: 219–46. Urry, J. (2008) ‘Innovation, systems and synchronisation’, paper given to the AIM Fellows Meeting, Imperial College, London, 6 November 2008. Available from: . Vicente, K.J. (1999) Cognitive Work Analysis: towards safe, productive, and healthy computer-based work, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Von Hippel, E. (2005) Democratizing Innovation, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Voss, A., Hartswood, M., Ho, K., Procter, R., Rouncefield, M., Slack, R. and Buscher, M. (2008) Configuring User-Designer Relations: interdisciplinary perspectives, London: Springer. Wallerstein, I., Calestous, J., Keller, E.F., Kocka, J., Lecourt, D., Mudimbe, V.Y., Mushakoji, K., Prigogine, I., Taylor, P.J. and Trouilloy, M.R. (1996) Open the Social Sciences: report of the gulbenkian commission on the restructuring of the social sciences, Stanford: Stanford University Press. WHO (2004) ‘Road safety: a public health issue’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 11 November 2008).

Perspectives on design research

15

Wynne, B. and Felt, U. (eds) (2007) Taking European Knowledge Society Seriously, European Commission. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 9 December 2009).

2

Iterative participatory design Jesper Simonsen and Morten Hertzum

The theoretical background in this chapter is information systems development in an organizational context. This includes theories from participatory design, human– computer interaction and ethnographically inspired studies of work practices. The concept of design is defined as an experimental iterative process of mutual learning by designers and domain experts (users), who aim to change the users’ work practices through the introduction of information systems. We provide an illustrative case example with an ethnographic study of clinicians experimenting with a new electronic patient record (EPR) system, focusing on emergent and opportunity-based change enabled by appropriating the system into real work. The contribution to a general core of design research is a reconstruction of the iterative prototyping approach into a general model for sustained participatory design.

Introduction Experimentation, reflection and learning are inherent aspects of design. A design process carried out by an experienced and reflective design-practitioner can be characterized as ‘reflection-in-action’ (Schön 1983), where: The practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomenon before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behaviour. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomenon and a change in the situation (ibid., p. 68) In this chapter we apply Schön’s reflection-in-action to participatory design and implementation of information systems in an organizational context. The traditional iterative prototyping approach is reconstructed into a process model that (1) emphasizes experimenting by evaluating fully integrated information systems as appropriated into real work practices; (2) incorporates improvisational change management including anticipated, emergent, and opportunity-based change;

Iterative participatory design

17

and (3) extends initial design and development into a change process driven by sustained participatory design. The model outlines a process that enables mutual learning, including collective reflection-in-action, through the use of information systems in real work practices. Participatory design is a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, tools, environments, businesses and social institutions more responsive to human needs. A central tenet of participatory design is the direct involvement of (representatives of) future users in the design process. This involves collective reflection-in-action through the establishment of a process of mutual learning between designers and users from the work domains in question. We draw on theories from participatory design and human–computer interaction. The design traditions in these research fields emphasize information-technology designs that emerge from a solid analysis of the intended use context. Appreciating the realities of a work-oriented organizational context implies viewing work as a socially organized and situated activity, where the actual behaviour differs from how it is planned, described, and prescribed (Suchman 1987). In such a context, design benefits from being informed by the use of ethnography to develop a thorough understanding of work practices as a basis for the specification of information systems (Simonsen and Kensing 1997; 1998). Most approaches to technology design include iterative prototyping as part of the early design of information systems. We argue for an extension of prototyping into participatory-design experiments where designers and users – as part of an overall design and implementation process – evaluate fully integrated information system by facilitating their appropriation into real work practices. In the following, we present a process model for practice-based participatory design of information systems to be used in an organizational context. The model outlines a process that enables mutual learning, including collective reflection-in-action, through trial use of information systems for real work. The potential and impact of the model is illustrated by an ethnographic study of emergent and opportunity-based changes resulting from a clinicians’ trial use of a new electronic patient record (EPR) system. This chapter is part of our research program on ‘effects-driven IT development’ (Hertzum and Simonsen 2008; Simonsen and Hertzum 2008). The program’s aim is to establish sustained participatory design processes through an effects-driven, participatory, and experimental strategy for managing large, long-term design and implementation projects. This includes strategic partnerships based on trust, mutual learning, and close collaboration between vendor and customer. Effectsdriven IT development focuses on (1) effects of using information systems instead of products and processes; (2) measurement and evaluations instead of expectations and estimates; and (3) specifications of the anticipated effects of system use instead of specifications of system functionality. The vendor and the customer should, based on these three characteristics, design and implement information systems that demonstrate utility value and measurable effects on the work they support. Measurement of anticipated effects and identification and evaluation of unanticipated effects are important means to manage the general design and

18

J. Simonsen and M. Hertzum

implementation process. Thus the process is driven by several iterations of formative evaluation.

A model for sustained participatory design The iterative prototyping approach is well known within information systems in general (Floyd 1984; Budde et al. 1992). Prototyping is the process of creating, in advance of the completion of the final product, a working model (the prototype) that exhibits essential features of the final product and using this prototype to test aspects of the design, illustrate ideas or features, and gather early feedback and experiences from usage. The prototyping approach is most often illustrated as an iterative process reflecting a hermeneutic circle as in the task-artifact cycle by Carroll et al. (1991), see Figure 2.1. The task-artifact cycle shows how a new system (artefact) and the task it is developed to support interact and mutually define each other: ‘A task implicitly sets the requirements for the development of artefacts to support it; an artefact suggests possibilities and introduces constraints that often radically redefine the task for which the artefact was originally developed’ (ibid., p. 79). Studies of small information systems (including groupware applications) that allow for quick iterations of design, use and redesign have stressed the importance of using the system for real work in order to learn about the possibilities and constraints imposed by the artefact. Orlikowski and Hofman (1997) have characterized this as ‘improvisational change management’ and made a distinction between anticipated and unanticipated change. Anticipated change denotes the desired change that is planned ahead and occurs as intended by the originators of the change. As indicated in Figure 2.1, it is impossible to plan and predict all changes that occur when introducing new artefacts such as information systems to a work context. The nature of work itself is characterized by being ‘situated’ (Suchman 2007) where the course of the work process depends of the material and social circumstances at hand. Thus ‘[u]nanticipated use of computer artefacts

Figure 2.1 The Task-Artifact Cycle by Carroll et al. (1991).

Iterative participatory design

19

reflects the fact that work itself is undetermined until realised in situ’ (Robinson 1993, p. 189). Unanticipated change can, according to Orlikowski and Hofman (1997), be divided into ‘emergent’ or ‘opportunity-based’ change. Emergent change is defined as local and spontaneous change, not originally anticipated nor intended. Such change does not involve deliberate actions but grows out of practice. Opportunity-based change is purposefully introduced to take advantage of unexpected opportunities, events, or breakdowns that have occurred after the introduction of a new information system: Over time, however, use of the new technology will typically involve a series of opportunity-based, emergent, and further anticipated changes, the order of which cannot be determined in advance because the changes interact with each other in response to outcomes, events, and conditions arising through experimentation and use (Orlikowski and Hofman 1997, p. 13) Traditionally, iterative prototyping has been conducted in the initial phase of the development process and led (in commercial settings) to a contractual bid (Kensing 2000; Bødker et al. 2004). And typically, the development process succeeding the contractual bid is based on a traditional sequential waterfall-type process, where the system is eventually ‘rolled out’ in the organization (Davis 1990). Today, standard, one-size-fits-all systems are, however, increasingly giving way to an ‘era of configurability’ (Balka et al. 2005), where information systems are based on flexible, generic frameworks (Bansler and Havn 1994). Configurable frameworks include high-level configuration tools (often XML based) and embed standard interfaces for other systems as well as general business logic for specific domains. One example is the Oracle Healthcare Transaction Base (HTB)™, which constitutes a development framework that enables agile modelling of processes and objects native to the healthcare domain. Such generic frameworks substantially ease the creation of individual applications because much of the work is transformed from development of functionality from scratch to configuration of domain-specific building blocks. The ‘era of configurability’ introduces increasingly mature technological means for an iterative, real-life experimentation-based participatory design approach, comprising design as well as organizational implementation of information systems. Configurable information systems may be implemented, used and evaluated as part of an overall iterative design process. This opens for an important aspect of the design process since only real and situated use of the system enables emergent and opportunity-based change. During the period where a system is exposed to real use, ethnographic evaluation studies can be conducted to investigate how the system affects the users’ work practices. Ethnographic evaluation studies provide an opportunity to become aware of unanticipated changes. Such evaluations might identify and analyze emergent and opportunity-based changes, hereby informing the subsequent design and implementation of the system. This reconstruction of the iterative prototyping approach is outlined in Figure 2.2.

20

J. Simonsen and M. Hertzum

Figure 2.2 An iterative model for sustained participatory design. © Jesper Simonsen 2010.

The sustained participatory design process outlined in Figure 2.2 is adopted from Simonsen and Hertzum (2008) and emphasizes the evaluation of systems through exposing them to real work. The starting point of an iteration are the changes that are anticipated and aimed for. The anticipated changes are further specified, for example, in terms of what effects are expected from using the system. The system (or a part/prototype of it) is then implemented and tried out under conditions as close as possible to real use – a process sometimes referred to as a pilot study (Glass 1997; Turner 2005). Actual use of the system allows for emergent and opportunitybased changes to occur and inform subsequent design iterations. The model in Figure 2.2 outlines a process of long-term engagement of both the designers and the users of the proposed and evaluated information systems. This has also been described as a process of ‘co-realisation’ (Hartswood et al. 2002).

The case The hospital in Roskilde, Denmark, is in the process of replacing paper-based patient records with electronic patient records. The case below concerns a neurological stroke unit that treats patients with acute apoplexy. The case is described in detail by Hertzum and Simonsen (2008) and Simonsen and Hertzum (2008). An advanced prototype of a fully functional EPR system was designed, implemented, used for real work, and subjected to an ethnographically based evaluation. During the period of trial use, the EPR supported the clinical process and replaced all paper-based patient records. The period of trial use was the culmination of five months of preparations, during which clinical personnel in cooperation with the vendor (CSC Scandihealth), the hospital’s EPR unit and two researchers (the authors of this article) configured the EPR system to support the stroke units’ patient trajectories. The clinicians used the system 24 hours a day throughout the five-day period of trial use.

Iterative participatory design

21

Anticipated changes were specified in the first part of the project during five full-day participatory design workshops. The clinicians at the stroke unit specifically requested change in terms of support for obtaining an overview of patients’ conditions and for mutual coordination. A major activity during the workshops was the design and configuration of the system. Main parts of the system were designed and configured in three steps as depicted in Figure 2.3: at one workshop, mock-ups were drawn on flip-over charts. At the following workshop, a preliminary noninteractive PowerPoint prototype was discussed. At a third workshop, a running prototype was demonstrated and discussed. The vendor undertook the technical development of the EPR system. The system was based on Oracle’s HTB, comprised a total of 243 screens, and included realtime integration with the hospital’s patient administration system, its medication system and several of its laboratory systems. The system involved stationary and portable PCs and PDAs for bedside measurement of patient parameters such as temperature and blood pressure (see Figure 2.4). Data from the hospital’s patients from the previous five years (in total, more than 26 million records from 330,000 patients) were migrated to the system prior to the trial period in order to have access to past information about patients and to obtain a realistic data load. A back office was established and staffed 24 hours a day, and Wizard of Oz techniques (Maulsby et al. 1993) were used to simulate a fully integrated system. If the clinicians initiated transactions that included other wards at the hospital (other wards that were not included in the experiment), this would be captured in the back office, mailed in the conventional fashion, and when the results came back they would be entered into the EPR system. In this way, the clinicians experienced the

Figure 2.3 Results from three iterative participatory-design workshops: mock-up, noninteractive PowerPoint prototype and running prototype of screen to be used during nursing handover. © Jesper Simonsen 2010.

22

J. Simonsen and M. Hertzum

Figure 2.4 Photos from the five-day period of trial use. The system involved portable PCs, PDAs for bedside measurement and a large shared EPR displayed on the wall during nursing handover and team conference. © Jesper Simonsen 2010.

EPR system as if it supported all transactions (except for maybe a slight temporal delay).

Method During the five days of the trial period, we investigated the clinicians’ work when using the EPR system. Our observations focused on the clinicians’ use of a large shared EPR display during two highly collaborative situations: the nursing handover and the team conference. The nursing handover happens three times a day at the beginning of each nursing shift (7 a.m., 3 p.m. and 11 p.m.) and lasts an hour. During nursing handovers, one nurse is designated as the team leader. This nurse reviews the patient records immediately prior to the handover and then, during the handover, orally informs the other nurses about patient status and plans for the upcoming shift. The team conference lasts approximately 15 minutes and involves all clinicians. It takes place on weekdays within an hour after the nursing handover at 7 a.m. The current status of each patient is given orally by a the team leader from the preceding nursing handover, and an interdisciplinary assessment ensues. On this basis plans

Iterative participatory design

23

are revised. An overview of the current plans is available on a large whiteboard or, during the trial period, on a shared EPR display projected on the wall. The nursing handovers and team conferences took place in a designated room where the EPR was displayed by projecting a PC screen onto the wall using a standard projector mounted in the ceiling. We observed nine nursing handovers and five team conferences, all performed using the EPR system. Prior to the trial period, we became acquainted with these situations by observing six nursing handovers and seven team conferences. Each observation was done by one researcher acting as an observing participant (Blomberg et al. 1993), that is, sitting in the room where the handover or team conference took place, while being as unobtrusive as possible. The observations informing the ethnography in this chapter were focused and thorough: they focused on nursing handovers and team conferences (only), yet they were thorough by aggregating 27 of these recurrent events. We documented all observations by writing notes. In addition, selected observation sessions were audio and video recorded, and the full-motion screen interaction with the EPR system was recorded. During the trial period, the researchers were present at the ward during the day shift (7 a.m. through 4 p.m.). This allowed us to ask clarifying questions when the clinicians were not busy as well as to arrange follow-up interviews. We conducted five interviews with three nurses, one physical therapist, and one speech therapist. These interviews elaborated details from our observations and clarified our immediate interpretations. A few days after the trial period, we conducted a group interview with three nurses about their experience of using the EPR system. Finally, we interviewed the nurse acting as the team leader and presented our results from our ethnographic records, for verification. We audio-recorded all interviews and later wrote extended summaries. The evaluation and the anonymous involvement of patients were authorized by the hospital. Our observations, interviews, audio-, video- and screen-recordings were authorized by the stroke unit and approved by the participating clinicians.

Ethnographic record Our observations of the traditional paper-based nursing handovers and team conferences (prior to the trial period) showed a common characteristic regarding the nurse who acted as team leader. This nurse would hold the paper record in her hand and read out key status information prepared before the meeting, while the others would listen to her presentation. This oral reporting is a common practice for nursing handovers (Strange 1996) where the team leader as the chair of the handover disseminating the information in the patient record. In the trial period, the EPR was displayed on the wall during nursing handovers and team conferences. By using such a large shared EPR display the content of the patient record is available to all participants (see Figure 2.5). We observed an emergent change in the way of informing about patient status as the traditional oral reporting by the team leader changed to collectively reading the shared display. This was followed by observations of additional unanticipated changes to the

24

J. Simonsen and M. Hertzum

Figure 2.5 Team leader orally presenting the information in the paper record (left) and shared EPR display with patient information visible to all participants (right). © Jesper Simonsen 2010.

collaboration among the clinicians during nursing handovers and team conferences. Along with continuous negotiation about how to navigate the patient record, a process of collective inspection, interpretation and learning unfolded, during which the clinicians assessed the status and condition of the patients. A similar process was not observed during any of the nursing handovers and team conferences observed prior to the trial period. The nurses experienced how the shared display designed for the team conferences formed the agenda for these conferences. During the trial period, the nurses had the opportunity to initiate a change of this screen thus influencing the agenda of the team conferences. The change consisted of adding a panel specifying selected nursing observations of relevance to the team conference. These observations, selected and promoted by the nurses, became more salient to the clinicians as they were forming their overview of the status of the patients. In addition, the panel also involved a change in the nurses’ recordings as the panel required that selected information was extracted from the nursing documentation and recorded on the panel in a condensed format. Thus the panel introduced more structure compared to the traditional chronological and narrative nursing report (Strange 1996). Below we present a detailed ethnographic record, which describes the collective investigation that emerged and the nurses’ opportunity-based change of the team conference. The investigation involves a patient who has been admitted on suspicion of acute apoplexy, but the collective investigation causes the clinicians to realize that the patient actually suffers from acute kidney failure. Immediate action is then taken to treat this life-threatening situation. Follow-up interviews with clinicians indicated that this might have saved the patient’s life. Collective investigation of the patient record at the nursing handover The collective investigation was initiated when reviewing the patient during the nursing handover at 7 a.m. on the last day of the trial period. The handover was attended by five nurses: the team leader and nurses A, B, C and D. The patient record concerned an elderly woman from Pakistan who did not speak Danish. The

Iterative participatory design

25

review of this patient lasted 12:30 minutes and started with the team leader reading aloud information from the preceding shifts. At the beginning, the team leader managed the review by navigating through the record, marking text as she read it out loud with no interruptions from the other participants: Team leader: ‘. . . blood pressure is fine; had eaten yoghurt this morning; drinks well; feels thirst; urination in toilet; dry diaper; bladder scanned to 250 [millilitres], but the patient does not feel any need for urination.’ The team leader opens a window on the screen with a note from the preceding evening shift: ‘Son informs that at home the patient urinated frequently, which points to a usual flow of urine. We continue to control after each urination and observe the need for SIP [a scoring system for Stroke Intervention Parameters that indicates the scope and level of severity from an acute apoplexy].’ The team leader continues opening the window with notes from the preceding night shift: ‘Patient still had low blood pressure at the beginning of the shift; she has been given [drug] that increases the blood pressure; physician in attendance will inspect patient; sodium chloride is installed for slow infusion over night; fluid control started . . . because of increasing creatinine the infusion of sodium chloride is increased.’ Team leader now opens a note specifying a problem with catheterization: ‘Fluid control attempted because patient at 2100 hours had over 325 [millilitres] when bladder was scanned, but control failed; unknown when patient urinated; diaper was wet; physician in attendance attempts a catheterization, but without success . . . contact made to Gyn [the gynaecological department] . . . they will come and make a catheterization.’ At this point, a discussion starts about the fluid control and the problems with catheterization. Patients with acute apoplexy are routinely observed for bladder dysfunction, because a stroke often affects the nerve paths controlling urination. Nurse A makes the remark that the patient is very hard to scan: ‘I would say that it is difficult to scan the patient because [her tissue] is a bit adipose [fat] and I find it difficult to assess what it really is [that I am scanning]: is it the stomach that I scan or what it is – and what way it [the scanner] should turn – well I must say I had trouble scanning her, so maybe we are scanning her wrongly?’ Nurse B adds: ‘But the frequency? It could, of course, be a bit of a bladder dysfunction when she does urinate frequently, but it might also be that she is intolerant to this?’ Team leader: ‘[You mean the] catheterization?’ Observing that the patient is hard to scan and that the infrequent urinations might be due to the apoplexy or a side effect caused by the catheter, the team leader continues to investigate this matter by looking into the fluid intake and output notes: ‘Catheterization done by physician at 1200 hours; at 1330 urine in the bag; a little urine in the tube; bladder scanned several times with different results: from 13 millilitres to 400 millilitres; awaits urine in the bag . . . And this morning; one new liter of sodium chloride has been set up as ordered by the physician in attendance because there is suspicion of possible dehydration. Only 100 millilitres in the bag at 600 hours; complains about pain in stomach and bladder region; bladder scanned to eight millilitres . . .’

26

J. Simonsen and M. Hertzum

Nurse D interrupts by saying: ‘That sounds suspicious’, but the team leader appears not to notice the interruption and continues: ‘. . . and the sodium chloride has entered, physician in attendance informed, agrees on giving one gram of ‘Pinex’ [a pain relieving drug] on day shift, awaits further planning . . .’ Then the team leader is interrupted again, this time by nurse B: ‘Honestly . . .’ Nurse D adds: ‘Where is she depositing it? – That’s insane.’ Nurse B continues: ‘That’s really a lot of hours with that catheter. Well I don’t know if it works but it did work – a little came out.’ Nurse D: ‘Can we read if there was something [in the bag] when she was catheterized [the second time]?’ The team leader opens a window on the screen and checks for this but there is no further information on this in the EPR system. Nurse B asks: ‘Are any blood tests ordered for this morning?’ The team leader responds: ‘Let’s see . . .’ and opens a window. Looking at the laboratory results, nurse C remarks: ‘And the creatinine is on its way up.’ Nurse B says in a low voice: ‘There is something wrong.’ They continue to study the laboratory results. Team leader: ‘. . . it’s here, fluid and lymphocyte balances this morning . . .’ Nurse D requests the team leader to open another window with graphs showing the fluid balances: ‘Could you try to look at . . . no that one . . . the one you had up there . . . can you click at the answer . . . up there . . . try making a right-click on the result up there . . . what does it say?’ They investigate the graphs and the numbers presented when they pause the mouse over the graphs. They note that one of the fluid controls has been recorded wrongly. After investigating the recent laboratory results and the fluid balances, they investigate the SIP scores. This investigation is done to examine whether the observed bladder dysfunction could be due to a stroke. They notice that the SIP scores might be misleading due to the language barrier (a language rating is part of the SIP score because apoplexy patients often suffer from aphasia). Team leader: ‘She is scoring two on legs and she has top scores on the others, except language where she gets a three. She has a blood pressure measured to 108 over 82 and a heart rate of 118, and her temperature rose to 37.6 [celsius] this morning.’ Nurse D continues: ‘. . . the language, I mean you might question if [the score is due to] they couldn’t do otherwise. Without mobility [one of the SIP scores] it adds up to six.’ Team leader: ‘I did score her and I got a [language] score reading of six because the son told me that she had problems pronouncing words.’ Nurse D: ‘Then it’s a question whether she got three because they were in a night shift [where the son was not there] and they could not do anything else?’ They end the investigation by looking for the patient’s weight measurements to see whether they show signs of a congestion of fluids but find that the patient’s weight has not been recorded during the past 24 hours. They decided to control the patient’s fluid balance (measuring all fluids getting in and out) every second hour. The hypothesis resulting from the investigation was that the patient possibly suffered from acute kidney failure, which is not caused by her apoplexy. This hypothesis was brought forward at the subsequent team conference (further described below).

Iterative participatory design

27

Sharing nursing observations at the team conference As a result of having experienced how the shared display (designed primarily by participation of the chief physician) determined the agenda and discussion during the team conference, the nurses proposed the addition of a panel with nursing observations in the upper right corner of the shared display. The chief physician agreed to this change, and it was implemented during the third day of the trial period. Consequently, important observations made by nurses during their shifts were instantly visible – with no need for a nurse to orally introduce an observation into the discussion of a patient. During the last three days of the trial period, we observed how the nurses’ entries at the team conference were advocated in parallel with those of the chief physician. The impact was that the nurses’ observations affected the agenda of the discussion and that they got a more peer-like voice and role. The transcript below is from the team conference following the nursing handover described in the above section with the Pakistani woman. Prior to the team conference, the team leader from the nursing handover added their observation about the urine problem to the panel, which then contained three nursing observations (the first two from the day before): • • •

Fluid balances Apparently reduced strength in right arm Urine retention, catheter [new problem added by team leader].

At the team conference the patient was reviewed for 2:20 minutes. The conference was attended by 10 clinicians: two physicians (including the chief physician), three nurses (the team leader and nurse D from the earlier handover as well as the administrative head nurse), a neuropsychologist, three therapists (physio-, occupational- and speech therapist) and a medical secretary. The following transcript of the conversation demonstrates how the nurses’ observations impact the discussion. Team leader (right after bringing the patient up on the shared display): ‘There is something wrong [with regard to this patient] because there is nothing coming out at the other end . . .’ Nurse D adds: ‘. . . urine.’ Team leader continues: ‘Attempts were made to SIP-score her yesterday; she has been catheterized and SIP-scored again. So, there is a lot [to do] during the ward round, and we are a bit . . . [concerned] . . . When we are [SIP] scoring her then it is hard to assess . . .’ Nurse D interrupts: [addressing the new problem added to the panel with nursing observations]: ‘What’s new is the urine retention that we are not able to take action on.’ The physiotherapist now points to the second observation in the panel (reduced strength in right arm) bringing this up as a new issue: ‘When we [the therapists] assess her [we observe that] she is generally weakened but it is the right arm that’s the problem. She can hold a glass but she has reduced functionality from the shoulder – that’s where the immediate symptoms were . . .’ The physiotherapist continues to explain these observations but is, after a little while, interrupted by the the chief physician who returns to the issue brought

28

J. Simonsen and M. Hertzum

forward by the nurses: ‘There is apparently something wrong with her [fluid] system. Do we know anything about her past [diagnoses]?’ The team leader opens a window with a list giving an overview of the patient’s hospitalizations in the past five years. The chief physician looks at the shared display and continues: ‘She did previously have an infarct . . .’ Nurse D adds: ‘It’s one year old.’ Chief physician: ‘. . . And a little hypertension – but that does not explain the issue of her [fluid] system.’ Nurse D: ‘I am quite concerned since she is not producing urine – as far as we can [tell] . . .’ Team leader: ‘So she might have to be prioritized so that eeh . . .’ Chief physician: ‘Yes, she must be highly prioritized.’ There is no detailed summary of the discussion from the nursing handover. The nurses seem confident in their analysis and introduce the patient by pointing to their new observation. All three observations in the nursing-observation panel are touched upon while the nurses emphasize the new problem of urine detention. The chief physician recognizes this as an urgent problem, checks for earlier diagnoses (which do not provide an explanation), and ends by assigning the patient high priority. The other physician present at the team conference went to the patient on her ward round immediately after the team conference, and in less than an hour the patient was moved to a nefrological ward (the medical specialty concerning kidney diseases) on suspicion of an acute kidney failure. Summary The above analysis shows three important changes resulting from the appropriation of the EPR system into real work practices. While the first of these changes was partly anticipated, the two others were genuine examples of emergent and opportunity-based change. The three changes were: first, the collaboratively available patient records supported the clinicians in getting a more instant and efficient overview, enabled collective investigation and, thereby, strengthened clinicians’ possibilities for gaining thorough insight into patients’ conditions. Second, the team leader’s role changed from being in charge of a (mainly) oneway oral handover of information to participating in a handover characterized by peer-review, second opinions and the establishment of a professional confidence based on collaboratively developing an understanding of the patients. The collective investigations fostered a mutual learning process where the nurses shared their observations and interpretations and, thereby, stimulated clarification of open issues and a pursuit of hypotheses about the patient’s status and condition. Third, the nurses had confidence in their observations and quickly recognized an opportunity to impact the agenda of the team conference by having selected nursing observations presented on the shared display. The inclusion of the nursing observations on the shared display increased the visibility and prominence of the nurses’ work at the team conferences and thereby promoted the cross-disciplinary element of clinical work. All three changes had a profound impact on how the clinicians’ work unfolded during nursing handovers and team conferences, as exemplified by the ethnographic record. Table 2.1 summarizes the ethnographic record by listing the physicians’

Iterative participatory design

29

Table 2.1 Summary of the mutual learning process conducted by the nurses during their investigation of the patient. The left column represents the physicians’ interventions as recorded in the EPR. The right column represents the main issues and hypotheses discussed Interventions (I) made by physicians as recorded in the EPR

Issues and hypotheses (H) investigated by the nurses

•

• • • •

• • • •

I-1: Sodium chloride was installed for slow infusion over night I-2: Infusion increased because of increasing creatinine I-3: Attempts catheterization, but without success I-4: Catheterization made by physicians from the Gynaecological ward I-5: More sodium chloride installed because of possible dehydration.

• •

Observe little urine out Discuss catheter problems (H-1) Discuss bladder dysfunction (H-2) Investigates stroke scores (challenges H-2) Doubts H-1 and H-2, and suspect a new H-3 (kidney failure) H-3 presented and confirmed at the following team conference.

main interventions, as recorded in the EPR system, and the nurses’ investigations during the nursing handover. The nurses chronologically review the patient by walking through the EPR entries from the preceding shifts and look up additional measurements and data when requested during their discussion. They first observe that sodium chlorine is set up for slow infusion, which is later increased. They notice that only a little urine has been observed and discuss several reasons for this: the patient is hard to scan for bladder content; the catheter might not be in the right position; the patient might be hypersensitive (intolerant) to the catheter; and it might be a case of bladder dysfunction due to the stroke. The catheterization is then redone by specialists from the Gynaecological ward. This moves the focus to the possibility of a bladder dysfunction and whether this could be stroke related. They investigate the SIP scores that indicate a stroke, and they start to question whether they are right: some measurements (a language score) might be biased because the patient has problems pronouncing words, which the nurse at the night shift might have been unaware of. Taking this bias into account, the nurses reach the conclusion that the patient might suffer from an acute kidney malfunction, which is not related to the apoplexy. They forward this hypothesis to the upcoming team conference by means of the new panel for nursing observations. During the team conference, the chief physician recognizes their observations, inspects the EPR system for other possible explanations and concludes by assigning the patient a high priority. The patient is soon after moved to a nefrological ward on suspicion of severe kidney failure.

Conclusion We have described design as a process that aims at anticipated and desired outcomes while acknowledging the emergent characteristics of introducing new information systems to real work practices. Design thus involves a continual relation between achieving planned goals and learning from real-use evaluation.

30

J. Simonsen and M. Hertzum

Design is constituted by mutual learning and by reflecting on this relation – as a collective ‘reflection-in-action’. We have presented a reconstruction of the iterative prototyping approach into a model for sustained participatory design and implementation (Figure 2.2). This model outlines a very specific suggestion regarding how to manage design processes. Our reconstruction of the traditional iterative prototyping approaches emphasizes evaluations based on real use of the designed artefact – in our case an EPR system. Only through real use is emergent and opportunity-based change enabled. We have demonstrated how such unanticipated change can be identified and analysed with ethnographic techniques, hereby informing subsequent iterations. The EPR system had – prior to the trial period – been evaluated through several usability tests conducted in laboratory settings using test data simulating real patients. Although the trial period in our experiment lasted only five days, 183 (38 per cent) of the clinicians’ ideas and requests were recorded in this period, where the system was for the first time exposed to real clinical work. This emphasizes the importance of conducting real-life evaluations as part of a general design strategy. The ethnographic analysis presented in this chapter describes how emergent and opportunity-based change might evolve during real use of a new information system. The unanticipated changes were triggered by making EPR information available on a large, shared display in two situations that demand a high level of coordination: nursing handovers and team conferences. The analysis showed how the clinicians adapted their ways of working as they experienced and incorporated the shared EPR display into their collaborative work practice. We found that the clinicians reduced the amount of oral presentation of patient records in favour of collective reading and assessment of the electronic patient record, which was projected on the wall in the meeting room. The clinicians spontaneously started to engage in collective investigation of patient records. At the nursing handovers, this resulted in the nurses jointly interpreting the status and condition of patients, hereby stimulating a mutual learning situation. The nurses also recognized the opportunity of offering their observations as a prominent, shared resource during team conferences. By having a panel with selected nursing observations added to the EPR display, these observations became part of the shared agenda, resulting in what might be labelled an empowerment of the nurses (Murnane 2005). These findings provide valuable insights regarding new possibilities for anticipated change in subsequent iterations of the design and organizational implementation of the EPR system, as indicated in our model for sustained participatory design. Based on our case example, new anticipated changes could include: • • •

Enabling a different role for the nurse team leader because there is less oral presentation, possibly also reducing preparation time. Enhancing cross-disciplinary information exchange and coordination during team conferences. Designing the user interface to provide specific support for collective investigation of patient records during handovers and team conferences.

Iterative participatory design •

31

Making recordings more structured and thereby improving the possibilities for the different groups of clinician to benefit from each others’ recordings, for example, by means of panels with selected observations.

The model for sustained participatory design highlights the importance of exposing prototype versions of information systems to real-work conditions in order to capture hitherto unanticipated possibilities – and constraints – and incorporate them in the design process. With respect to design research, we suggest that: •

•

•

Design research includes a design process based on mutual learning and on the collective reflection-in-action of multiple actors – including the users’ of the envisioned design artefacts. The improvisational change approach with its notions of emergent and opportunity-based change seems to be applicable beyond configuration of information systems for use in an organizational context. Sustained participatory design with its focus on iterative real-life evaluation may be applicable to a variety of large, experimental and practice-oriented design projects.

As a contribution to a general core of design research we propose our model for sustained participatory design as an inspiration for a general experimental and iterative approach to design.

References Balka, E., Wagner, I. and Jensen, C.B. (2005) ‘Reconfiguring critical computing in an era of configurability’, in Bertelsen, O.W., Bouvin, N.O., Krogh, P.G. and Kyng, M. (eds) Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing. New York: ACM, pp. 79–88. Bansler, J. and Havn, E. (1994) ‘Information systems development with generic systems’, in Baets, W.R.J. (ed.) Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Information Systems. Nijenrode University Press, pp. 707–15. Blomberg, J., Giacomi, J., Mosher, A. and Swenton-Hall, P. (1993) ‘Ethnographic Field Methods and Their Relation to Design’, in Schuler, D. and Namioka, A. (eds) Participatory Design: Principles and Practices. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 123–55. Budde, R., Kautz, K., Kuhlekamp, K. and Zullighoven, H. (1992) Prototyping: An Approach to Evolutionary System Development. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Bødker, K., Kensing, F. and Simonsen, J. (2004) Participatory IT Design: Designing for Business and Workplace Realities. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Carroll, J.M., Kellog, W.A. and Rosson, M.B. (1991) ‘The task–artifact cycle’, in Carroll, J.M. (ed.) Designing Interaction: Psychology at the Human–Computer Interface. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 74–102. Davis, A.M. (1990) Software Requirements: Analysis and Specification. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Floyd, C. (1984) ‘A systematic look at prototyping’, in Budde, R., Kuhlenkamp, K.,

32

J. Simonsen and M. Hertzum

Mathiassen, L. and Zullighoven, H. (eds) Approaches to Prototyping. Berlin: SpringerVerlag, pp. 1–18. Glass, R.L. (1997) ‘Pilot studies: what, why and how’, Journal of Systems and Software 36 (1): 85–97. Hartswood, M., Procter, R., Slack, R., Vo , A., Büscher, M., Rouncefield, M. and Rouchy, P. (2002) ‘Co-realisation: towards a principled synthesis of ethnomethodology and participatory design’, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems 14 (2): 9–30. Hertzum, M. and Simonsen, J. (2008) ‘Positive effects of electronic patient records on three clinical activities’, International Journal of Medical Informatics 77 (12): 809–17. Kensing, F. (2000) ‘Participatory design in a commercial context – a conceptual framework’, in Cherkasky, T., Greenbaum, J., Mambrey, P. and Pors, J.K. (eds) Proceedings of the 6th Biennial Participatory Design Conference (PDC 2000). Palo Alto, CA: CPSR, pp. 116–26. Maulsby, D., Greenberg, S. and Mander, R. (1993) ‘Prototyping an intelligent agent through Wizard of Oz’, in Ashlund. S., Henderson, A., Hollnagel, E., Mullet, K. and White, T. (eds) Proceedings of the INTERCHI ’93 Conference. New York: ACM Press, pp. 277–84. Murnane, R. (2005) ‘Empowering nurses – improving care: nurses’ response to the new Health Services Reform Programme in Ireland’, International Journal of Medical Informatics 74 (11–12): 861–68. Orlikowski, W. and Hofman, D. (1997) ‘An improvisational model for change management: the case of groupware technologies’, Sloan Management Review 38 (2): 11–22. Robinson, M. (1993) ‘Design for unanticipated use’, in Michelis, B.D., Simone, C. and Schmidt, K. (eds) Proceedings of the Third European Conference on ComputerSupported Cooperative Work, 13–17 September, 1993, Milan, Italy, 187–202. Schön, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, New York: Basic Books. Simonsen, J. and Hertzum, M. (2008) ‘Participatory design and the challenges of large-scale systems: extending the iterative PD approach’, in Simonsen, J., Robinson, T. and Hakken, D. (eds) Proceedings of the 10th anniversary conference on Participatory Design. New York: ACM, pp. 1–10. Simonsen, J. and Kensing, F. (1997) ‘Using ethnography in contextual design’, Communications of the ACM 40 (7): 82–88. —— (1998) ‘Make room for ethnography in design!’, Journal of Computer Documentation 22: 20–30. Strange, F. (1996) ‘Handover: an ethnographic study of ritual in nursing practice’, Intensive and Critical Care Nursing 12: 106–12. Suchman, L.A. (1987) Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human–Machine Communication. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. —— (2007) Human–Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Action, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press. Turner, J.R. (2005) ‘The role of pilot studies in reducing risk on projects and programmes’, International Journal of Project Management 23 (1): 1–6.

3

Designing as middle ground Niels Christian Nickelsen and Thomas Binder

The theoretical background in this chapter is science and technology studies and actor network theory, enabling investigation of heterogeneity, agency and performative effects through ‘symmetric’ analysis. The concept of design is defined as being imaginative and mindful to a number of actors in a network of humans and non-humans, highlighting that design objects and the designer as an authority are constructed throughout this endeavour. The illustrative case example is drawn from product development in a rubber valve factory in Jutland in Denmark. The key contribution to a general core of design research is an articulation of design activity taking place as a middle ground and as an intermixture between a ‘scientific’ regime of knowledge transfer and a capital ‘D’ ‘Designerly’ regime of authoring.

Introduction This chapter discusses divisions of knowledge and distributions of authority within design projects. The aim is to contribute to design research by developing concepts and methods for studying designers at work. By drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) we argue that the production of knowledge and authorship in science and design proceed through translation and inscription, though their products differ. Based on a selective review of STS studies of scientific work and studies of architects we develop this point and propose that knowledge and authorship designate two different ‘regimes’, and that the regime of authorship most prominent in the discourse of architects foregrounds narratives of identity and the biographic trajectory of the designer, whereas the knowledge regime closely associated to discourses of scientific work foregrounds knowledge transfer at the expense of subjective involvement. We bring these perspectives to an analysis of a case study of design practice in a rubber valve factory in Denmark. One may query whether our case study is a study of design. It may look more like engineering, or even production. We believe this is not important because clearly, design is being done. The argument in this paper is exactly that design does not appear in pure form, but is embedded in other kinds of activity. The case study thus is an instance of designing as part of product development in industry. We suggest that the case study points to a middle ground of heterogeneity where both regimes of knowledge and authorship are put into play.

34

N. Nickelsen and T. Binder

The chapter ends by discussing how design may be studied from an actornetwork theoretical perspective and how such studies may shed light on designing as a form of heterogeneous engineering, which mixes narratives and practices of creative master designing and the factuality of scientific knowing.

Making the social flat STS explore how scientific facts or technologies are the outcome of practices involving conflict, rivalry and contestation. A core assumption is that these practices have to be studied regardless of whether efforts turn out to be successful or unsuccessful, since success can only be judged in hindsight and what matters are the mechanisms and practices of science or technology in the making. Empirical studies with slogans such as ‘follow the actor’ (Latour 1987) or ‘following traces’ (Latour 2005) have stressed that what is known in these communities of scientists or engineers cannot be assumed up-front, but has to be constructed from how these communities rally, network and instrument themselves in order to become knowledgeable. Akrich (2000), for example, suggests that technology must be studied by contemplating the way engineers build, maintain, and stabilize a structure of links between actors, tastes, styles, machines, technologies, customers and materials. Latour argues that what needs to be done is to study networks as they assemble. In science, stability, commitment, loyalty, recognition and trust are effects of networks that cannot be explained without looking for vehicles, tools, instruments and materials that are able to produce such solidity. The benefit of a performative definition of what is studied in opposition to a static advance definition of the quality of certain elements is that attention is drawn towards the means that maintain ‘rules’, ‘social structures’ and ‘conventions’. Latour argues that one should ‘keep the social flat’ and ‘trace associations’ among elements rather than induce new concepts (Latour 2005: 165). In other texts Latour calls this methodological point ‘the generalized symmetry principle’ (1987). According to actor-network theory (ANT), it is interesting to study how intermediaries are disciplined by mediators and how certain performative actor networks are configured and made solid. The world should not be attributed to human effort alone, that is, to the designer’s choices and, for instance, his or her aesthetic judgments, but rather to the effects of a network consisting of human and nonhuman entities. Agency is thus taken to be a distributed, relational phenomenon rather than a property of human bodies or minds. This may appear to contradict ideas about mind and ‘mindfulness’ that we present later. However, our point is that mind is the activity of acting mindfully as part of a group. Thus our concept of mind does not stand in opposition to a distribution of agency. Some agents act mindfully, while others do not. The idea of ‘keeping the social flat’ and studying associations provides a theoretical vocabulary for studying transformative practices by paying close attention to the processes by which heterogeneous elements are associated.

Designing as middle ground

35

Heterogeneous engineering In the seminal paper ‘Drawing things together’ (1986a) Latour discusses the tremendous significance of texts, graphs, figures as ‘inscription devices’ and ‘immutable mobiles’, that is, entities that can pass across contexts, while they stay relatively unchanged (immutable). They are pivotal in producing stability (ibid.: 7). Texts draw things together and have effects. In the ethnographic study Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar 1979), inscription devices stand in the very centre of the construction of scientific knowledge in the modern laboratory. A scientific paper is produced by juxtaposing literature (scientific papers) with local inscriptions (i.e. data, diagrams, graphs, etc.). Scientific phenomena do not exist without inscription devices. It is, for instance, meaningless to talk about background radiation without a Geiger counter, or of voltage without a voltmeter. When facts are successfully constructed in the laboratory they find their way into text books and are reified in technology. Scientific facts are constructions and a result of work, rather than inventions or discoveries. We find this sensitivity toward the mobilization of inscriptions, people and other entities innovative and applicable to the world of design. By ‘tracing associations in a flat world’ the scientist is revealed as a performer of associations between entities of different qualities. This has become the landmark of ANT. This process has in several STS texts been called ‘heterogeneous engineering’ (see, for instance, Hughes 1983; Law 1998: 12).

Heterogeneous engineering in the design studio The term engineering as it is used in ANT may best be described as the ‘getting something to work’ where the adding of the adjective ‘heterogeneous’ is used to emphasize that this ‘getting to work’ takes hybrid manoeuvres of mobilizing principles and practices, people and things. In the studies of scientific practice, pointing to such heterogeneous engineering is in itself a subversion of the idealized image of science as the mere collection and analysis of observable data. Others have, however, studied actual engineering as a design discipline and have disclosed how, for example, the engineering of complex technology involves an open-ended negotiation between separate object worlds (Bucciarelli 1996). This negotiation is manifested in the mutual appropriation of so-called boundary objects that are shared across object worlds, yet take different meanings in each of the collaborating networks (Star and Griesemer 1989). Unlike the production of scientific facts through the inscription and translation of matter, the design engineer produces a shared image of a prospective factuality. Henderson (1991) studied engineering design conversations through what she calls ‘conscriptions’. Conscriptions are cumulative, but incoherent, additions or annotations of design artefacts, such as assembly drawings, shared by different actors. What results is a mobilization of a persuasive network surmounting the factuality of ‘what is’ and invoking the imagined ‘what could be’.

36

N. Nickelsen and T. Binder

Getting to know designers Compared to other professional groups there are relatively few studies of traditional designers educated in architectural programmes or in design schools. Despite differences, most design education programs have at their core a studio-oriented curriculum where students carry out design projects, which from very early on have a similar structure to professional designers’ projects. The student goes through full cycles of designing under the supervision of tutors, who typically give feedback in the workshop or at the drawing table. Cuff (1993) points out that imitation is pronounced for example in the masterclass format where students are expected to reproduce the style and expressions of a particular master. Though Cuff argues that architectural education neglects the social aspects of architectural work, she shows in her study of American architectural practices how this subordination to acclaimed mastery is reproduced in architectural projects undertaken in a complex and highly hierarchical collaboration between many people as young architects are typically working for years in the professional studio doing fairly trivial tasks with little room for personal expression. Cuff’s study also reveals the importance of negotiation between many stakeholders and the significant impact of the dialogue between client and master architect, and even though Cuff is not influenced by ANT it is easy to see what surfaces in her study as careful negotiations of drawings and models, finances and clients resemble the heterogeneous engineering disclosed in studies of the work of scientists. What from her study appears particular to architectural practice is, however, the exposure of mastery and the emphasis on hierarchy and imitation. Schön (1983) has produced detailed accounts of how what is nurtured in the educational studio of architectural students, is the students’ ability to engage with the assignment in what Schön (1983: 76) has called a reflective conversation with the materials of the design situation. He shows how the architectural students learn to make and appreciate architectural drawings through a concrete a direct ‘mimicry’ of their tutors’ dialogue with the design situation. Schön is not an actor-network theorist either, but as he shows how students and tutors alternate between appreciating the back-talk of drawings and imposing interventions to create a dialogue with the material, one can see the contours of an ephemeral network of mediators and intermediaries probing for stability. The object participates! And the object is, to some degree, articulated as an author of consequences. The moves employed in these manoeuvres of networking are, however, not only objectifications. Just as the scientist in the lab works from inscriptions of laboratory procedures and equipment to make an object of knowledge, Schön’s designers work from the materiality of drawings and models in order to elaborate the object and in this becoming, we argue, a subjectivity of mind is also elaborated.

Networking design Yaneva (2005a) is one of the relatively few authors who have studied architectural practice in an ANT perspective. She studies how architects in the architectural

Designing as middle ground

37

design studio work collaboratively to create and stabilize architectural models. Yaneva addresses how architects deliberately jump between scaling up and scaling down in modelling the envisioned building and how they simultaneously operate on detailed and highly conceptual models. She follows a small group of architects as they elaborate on two architectural models of the same new building. The team works intermittently on both models, and they apply a number of instrumental techniques to inspect particular views. A small conceptual model is explored by an endoscope allowing the inspecting architect to obtain an immersed view of the model. What he sees is reported to the other team members and subsequently leads to changes in the more detailed larger scale model accessible without the instrument. The going back and forth between the two models and the jumping between scales produces a smooth transformation of configurations that are read and re-read until a stabilized gaze is obtained. The one model is not substituting the other. They are developed in parallel, and the links between the models are strengthened as appreciations of one model, lead to changes of the other. In this sense, we cannot say that the models form a chain of mediators, where one is translated in to another. It is rather the case that the architects produce a series of models, which together form a concrete assembly and constitute the design. Yaneva has stressed this non-hierarchical ordering of models in another article where she demonstrates how the architectural project is also at a very practical level displayed and transported through a large number of models (Yaneva 2005a). An interesting observation in Yaneva’s study may further illuminate particularities of architects’ heterogeneous practice: when Yaneva observes the architect inspecting the model with the endoscope, she notes that even though only one person can view the model through the instrument, the other members of the team are not eager to see for themselves. Where one could have expected that several colleagues would have a look and confirm each other’s observations, this is apparently not what happens. They react directly to what their colleague reports, and make changes accordingly. There is no indication in the study that the one person inspecting the model has a special competence in doing this. As we understand it, it is rather the case that the professional gaze is something shared in the group and that it is precisely the nurturing of this professional gaze that is at the core of the model making. The model is not a free-standing artefact to be appreciated by everyone. On the contrary, the model mediates a very particular set of views, which are staged in the architectural display. To perform the architectural design, transparency is not the ideal. Rather, what takes shape here is the enactment of a privileged actor endowed with the capacity to see architecturally.

The studio as node in the biographical trajectory of designers A few years ago one of the authors of this article was part of a study conducting a number of interviews with designers to explore what kind of discourses designers engaged when talking about their professional practice (Binder et al. 2005). The designers covered different areas from traditional arts and crafts to architecture, and were also positioned quite differently in terms of the kinds of commissions and

38

N. Nickelsen and T. Binder

clients they engaged with. We expected that these differences would be reflected in pivotal differences in the way they related to current debates on commercial versus artistic orientations to design – and on broad versus narrow conceptions of design. The designers interviewed produced stories about their professional lives that joined almost any piece of work in a self-portrayal of consistency that gave a clear sense of professionalism, but what was recounted was much less a tale of the peculiarities of what was produced than a narrative of production. Where we expected accomplished work to be a main vehicle for exposing and differentiating the self-representation of the individual designer, the stories about how they had developed and maintained their workshops and studios played a much more pronounced role. The readiness for new challenges clearly dominated over any attempts to push forward the portfolio of past work. The professional biography as an action potential fully equipped with an operable and strongly guarded production process seems to be the modus through which the designers put themselves on stage as acting subjects.

Authority, subjectivities and person making To understand how heterogeneous practices enroll allies and mobilize networks in performing an indisputable solidity of outcome (something that in the ANT tradition is often referred to as ‘black boxing’), the issue of subjectivity and authorship poses itself implicitly both in accounting for the entrepreneurial impulse and in making tangible the actions of dissent empirically evidenced in the failure or erosion of networks. Latour treats the last problem in a response to Collins and Yearley (1992), who query the tendency in ANT to anthropomorphize things and to objectify humans (ibid.: 322). Here Latour (1996) argues for a middle ground between the Cartesian ‘ego cogito’ and the ‘res extensa’: By holding the mediation we do not miss the essential parts – what happens in the mind of the scientist “in there” and what is the real stuff of the world “out there”. On the contrary, by concentrating on the trivial aspects of the cooking of science, we may also end up accounting for its two vanishing points, res and cogito (Latour 1996: 3) So here the ‘purification’ of a token of knowledge, goes along with mediations between people and stuff through translations where: The spread in time and space of anything – claims, orders, artifacts, goods is in the hands of people; each of these people may act in many different ways, letting the token drop, or modifying it, or deflecting it, or betraying it, or adding to it (Latour 1986b: 267)

Designing as middle ground

39

But deflecting or betraying initial entrepreneurial promotion must be performed as the effect of networks. Law (1994) and Law and Moser (2003) discuss how subjectivities are performed in the managing of a research lab. They identify four kinds of subjectivity at work, which they find to be discursively heterogeneous. These different kinds of subjectivity are labeled: bureaucratic/administrative, entrepreneurial, visionary/charismatic and vocational, and the study shows how they are intermittently enacted drawing on the heterogeneous web of discourses. From an organizational perspective, the authors claim that what is performed is an intersection of multiple discourses or logics and that this intersection leads to contradictions, combinations and inclusions. Looking at management practices the authors suggest that they involve multiple subjectivities and slippage between different subject positions. Where Latour and Woolgar’s study of a laboratory follows the traces of actor networks performing durability through translations and inscriptions, Law and Moser’s studies pay attention to the presence and flow of multiple subjectivities in an organizational everyday of co-existing yet heterogeneous discourses. The emphasis in the studies of scientific practice by, for example Latour and Woolgar, is on the production of tokens of knowledge that may travel, yet stay the same through the way they are performed by the network, whereas the heterogeneity of discourses and the multiplicity of subjectivities disclosed by Law and Moser are left in the background of the analysis. Keeping in mind how studies of architects and designers reveal different traits of what is made stable and what fades into the background, we suggest that the intersecting performances of conflict, combination and inclusion may usefully be conceptualized as actor networks producing singular authorities. In other words, we propose and we have argued that not only objects but also subjects are produced during processes of design.

Design and person making That actor networks may perform stability of tokens other than knowledge, is suggested by Latour in a discussion of how mediators of science and art relate. Here Latour argues: Whereas what is produced in the network of science is information transfer, the networks of art may produce something completely different namely, persons (Latour 1996) He takes as an example what is performed as a spectator watches a fresco by Fra Angelico in which an angel points to the empty grave of Christ on Easter morning as compared to what is on display as a biologist points to a map of the Amazon to let her colleagues know where the expedition is heading on the next day. Latour suggests that the art piece makes present both the spectator and the painter in a here and now of mutual presence similar to what lovers experience as they reassure each other of their love. The pointing finger on the fresco does not lead the

40

N. Nickelsen and T. Binder

attention elsewhere, as does the botanist pointing to the map. It does not invoke the availability of information transfer enabling the viewer to get to somewhere else. Instead, it is part of a mediation of the ‘gift of presence’ and ‘presence giving’ in which: the only way [to produce this effect] is to redirect attention by pointing through the cracks into the discourse, to the character in the flesh listening to the story or watching the scene (Latour 1996) To think of person making as an outcome of actor networks hints at a way of re-instating such matters as the identity, the significance of the designers’ career trajectories and the improvisations of the designer so pronounced in the study of designers. Inspired by Weick and Roberts (1996), we draw on the notions of ‘mind’ and ‘subjectivity’. Mind is the disposition to act with heed, thus mind denotes an activity rather than an entity and has to do with something collective rather than something individual. This does not mean that mind rests in the order of things. Rather, it is produced through a career. This is inspired by Asch (in Weick and Roberts 1996), who states that to act mindfully is to act as if you are a part of a group. When we introduce this notion of subjectivity, it is in order to focus explicitly on the choices, improvisations and dispositions to act towards others, humans as well as non-humans. This notion of subjectivity is closely related to the biographical narrative of the designer, that is the career trajectory and the changing sets of relationships during the career. We suggest that what is performed in the actor networks of designing involves authorship and person making as much as knowledge and information transfer, and even though this must at this point be taken only as an attempt to outline what needs further study, we will give a number of suggestions of what constitutes designing. First, we suggest that designing, like scientific work, is the heterogeneous engineering of networks in which people and things are mobilized in performances through an assembly of mediators. Second, we suggest that designing is a weaving of malleable networks that involves the production of the immediate presence of the design display. Third, we believe, what is made stable in the performance of these networks is a specific subjectivity of the master designer made present in mindful engagement with the design commission, and stored as a potential in the biographic narrative of the designer. Before we explore these aspects of design practice further through a case study, we will signpost at this moment what we are doing. We take the discussed suggestions of the production of authority, subjectivity and person making as part of design as indications of a practice that is distinctly different from a practice of science. If designing, like scientific work, is a particular form of heterogeneous engineering, which produces a narrative of master designing, and if the micro processes of designing are the weaving together of subjectivities of appreciation then, at the same time, the designer must also be produced as a professional subject capable of subsuming itself towards objects as well as towards other subjects.

Designing as middle ground

41

Regimes of knowledge and of authorship At this point, we will introduce distinctions between what we call ‘a regime of knowledge’ and ‘a regime of authorship’ as scaffolding for our further arguments. In short, the regime of knowledge denotes the performance of information transfer in line with the analysis of Latour and Woolgar in which knowledge production is taken to be a matter of translating substance into mobile inscriptions. As a (slightly artificial) opposition, we construct ‘the regime of authorship’ which, we argue, can be traced in studies of design. The interest here focuses on evoking certain specifications and aesthetics, i.e. to elaborate the object. Whereas the presumption in science is that everyone can do it if rules of science are followed, the presumption in design is that only the designer can do it since designing is a matter of artistic authorship (the purpose here is not to exclude the possibility that there are rules of art and aesthetics that can be followed by anyone, but this point we will lay aside here). To explore this further we separate and describe those two regimes in equal terms (Table 1). In practice, these regimes are intermingled. Our discussion of design has already queried the rigidity of this dichotomy. Our intention is simply to carve out key differences in discourse around design and science in order to be more precise about the way these regimes interrelate. Science studies have demonstrated the intermingling of substance and inscriptions in scientific work. In our conceptualization of how this intermingling is practiced in design, we will use the two regimes as scaffolds for different readings of the everyday designing in what we will later explore.

Stretching the shrinkage – an empirical study of valve making We now present an ethnographic study of the struggles to construct a valve in LTH RUBBER (LTH RUBBER is a fake name in order to keep the studied Danish rubber producer anonymous). Inspired by actor-network theory (Callon 1986a), we see six critical moments in the sense that these are moments of translation. Table 3.1 Regime of science and regime of designing

What is being constructed?

What is made immutable? What ensures mobility?

Regime of knowledge Translations from substance to text (i.e. scientific knowledge); the making of reliable procedures for information transfer through inscriptions and inscription devices

Regime of authorship Configurations of intermediaries/ mediators producing an imagined design object through the co-presence of spectator and master designer. The making of a particular and singular privileged gaze.

The factuality of the inscription The authorship of the designer; the desirability of the imagined object; the persuasiveness of form Scientific methods and The biographic trajectory of the combinations of inscriptions designer, their ability to persuade

42

N. Nickelsen and T. Binder

Moment 0. Commissioning a Viton valve A Viton valve is a strong quality valve commissioned by a German customer, who applies these valves in pharmaceutical industrial arrangements. LTH RUBBER is a specialist in rubber objects with high technical margins used for food and pharmaceutical industries all over the world. Moment 1. Producing a Viton item in EPDM moulding tool During the first test productions there are problems with the Viton moulding tool (VMT). The problem has to do with the churn that draws the rubber into the VMT. It goes up and down too forcefully and thus damages the moulding tool. In order to prevent this, the company runs a series of test productions on an alternative device called an EPDM moulding tool (a technical name for another moulding tool usually used for the production of other kinds of rubber). After evaluation, it is concluded that this is of no use, because the valves come out too narrow. At a meeting with the customer the technical difficulties are discussed. The customer insists that the designers should use the original VMT. Immediately after the meeting, the chief designer orders a renovation of the VMT pending the customer’s approval of prototypes made in the problematic VMT for this order. Moment 2. Economic estimation of modifying the VMT Customer approval is given and the order is produced using the VMT (accepting damage to the machine). However, when the chief designer and the technical manager subsequently estimate the cost of renovating the VMT, they estimate it at DKK 10.000, a prohibitive figure. They decide instead that all Viton valves must be produced in the EPDM tool, which their current customer had rejected. Moment 3. Stretching rubber The same customer soon after commissions another order of the Viton valve. The manager in the factory sets up the original VMT. He had not been informed about the designers’ decision to produce Viton valves in the EPDM moulding tool. The same problem appears. The engineers quickly decide to set up the EPDM tool again in order to prepare new prototypes for the customer. However, the customer rejects these prototypes because the internal diameter bore is too narrow. The engineers then try to stretch the bore, but several tests lead them to announce that they are not able to stretch the diameter to the specified dimensions. Now it is decided that the chief designer will help with further stretching experiments. He is experienced with this kind of stretching and provides the test manager with precise instructions. His idea is to take the valve out of the EPDM before it is fully moulded (‘under-remould’) which lowers the ‘vulcanization degree’, that is, the degree to which the rubber is fixed in a certain form. This enables items to be stretched. The chemists are apprehensive about the idea since the process may

Designing as middle ground

43

compromise the quality of the rubber. The test manager experiments for some time with different rubber types at different vulcanisation degrees. Moment 4. Persuading the customer After several attempts, the valves can be stretched into dimensions close to the specification, but there is still a gap. The customer is informed by the chief designer that, if these prototypes are not accepted, the customer will have to invest in a new VMT. By squeezing the valves and turning the gaskets inside out, the customer finally accepts the valves.

Analysis of the Viton case After an exhausting product development phase, the firm persuades the customer to accept a too small but, in principle, usable valve by stretching it. The chief designer plays a pivotal role. What first appears to be the making of a simple valve turns out to be a matter of time consuming collaboration across professional groups. Despite his visibility, the chief designer does not do all the work alone. Rather, his actions are effects of associations among numbers of mediators and intermediaries. The design process is a conglomerate of many agencies, but he prescribes roles to a number of participants. Due to his authority and capability he orchestrates the making of the valve through a number of critical moments. Despite the fact that the end of the story could have been a disaster for LTH RUBBER, through sophisticated manoeuvres a number of entities are ordered and put in place (Suchman 1993; Orr 1996). Moment 5. Modifying humans Several weeks later a number of critical issues in relation to the VMT process were openly discussed at a seminar at a local inn and key points were written on the whiteboard. Particularly, three managers appeared offended by the Viton incident because they found themselves to be under-informed and therefore were not able to participate adequately. They blamed the chief designer for deciding too autonomously without informing others. Suddenly the hitherto silent chief designer went to the whiteboard, took the cloth and erased everything written on the board. He then said: This is wrong. It is not what happened! We had some problems in getting the right measures on this valve. Now we have started to stretch and soon we get the right proportions. They had some problems in the technical department and I had to help them. He literally erases the negative narrative and substitutes it with a more positive one in which both he himself and the team are figuring prominently. Nobody contradicted him, and the discussion quickly moved on to the next agenda item.

44

N. Nickelsen and T. Binder

We think the other managers did not contradict him because at this moment they were persuaded that they had to collaborate rather than query the past, but we do not know so this can only be conjecture and we will lay it aside here. Moments 1 to 4 demonstrate the trouble that designers and engineers had in producing a Viton valve to meet their customer’s demands. Hybrid manoeuvres, that is, juxtaposing technical specifications, existing routines, materials and apprehensions in relation to the product in the making have to be made. Moment 5 complicates this endeavour further. It seems that human anger and frustration are also intermediaries that have to be appreciated. We have earlier discussed how a generalized symmetry approach seeks to prevent analysts from deciding too soon what should be given attention: human, non-human or hybrid. Intermediaries are sent into circulation by mediators and have effects. Human emotions can be seen as an intermediary. In this case, anger from key managers has to be appreciated otherwise mindlessness threatens to leave the network in a state of breakdown (Weick and Roberts 1996). By reframing the entire innovation process in a resourceful manner, the chief designer keeps his key managers orchestrated. Objects, customers and managers have to be inscribed into certain roles, and these inscriptions must recursively be negotiated in order to maintain a performative configuration. What surfaces in this last moment is both issues of authorship and struggles for manageable information transfer – a clash of regimes that leads us to a middle ground.

Between regimes – designing as middle ground The Viton valve incidences may be analyzed as a narrative that solidifies through a number of translations and enrolments (Latour 1991), but there are also entities that jump out of their assigned roles (Callon 1986a; Callon 1986b). We are confronted with various elements, such as the moulding tool that will not work; the rubber that will not stretch, and conflicting demands from the customer, the chemists and the managers. Despite these difficulties the Viton valve design is successful due to the emerging narrative and the chief designer’s coercion, which at the end of the day draw resistant actors together and successfully produce a usable valve. In virtue of heterogeneity, incoherence and cowboy heroism (Law 1994) the Viton case draws a picture of a competent and innovative community. This analysis points to the possibility that it is precisely due to the negotiations among designers, chemists, the customer and the managers that it becomes possible to mould the rubber and to maintain a workable and economic routine (Nickelsen 2008). Far from the ideals of the regime of knowledge (Table 2), the chief designer improvises, negotiates and loads statements. And far from the regime of authorship, objectified inscriptions, engineer training, technical courses and a large group of people participate in important ways. With these empirical observations as an example, we argue for a third regime, which we call the middle ground. Actors on the middle ground associate freely and pragmatically, as we have observed, and the combination of the regime of knowledge and the regime of authorship creates a middle ground.

Designing as middle ground

45

Table 3.2 Regime of knowledge, middle ground and regime of authorship Regime of knowledge What is being Translations from constructed? substance to text (i.e. scientific knowledge). The making of reliable procedures for information transfer through inscriptions and inscription devices

What is made The factuality of the immutable? inscription

What ensures mobility?

Scientific methods and combinations of inscriptions

Middle ground

Regime of authorship

Text/practice translations. Objects close to inscriptions and imaginations. Singularization due to material, technological and human capabilities as well as power relations A network of orchestrated people and devices

Configurations of intermediaries/ mediators producing an imaginary design object in the co-presence of spectator and master designer. The production of a particular and singular privileged gaze The authorship of the designer; the desirability of the imagined object; the persuasiveness of form The biographic trajectory of the designer, their ability to persuade

Imagination, persuasion, mindful interrelation, hybrid manoeuvres, improvisation

Our argument is that the regime of knowledge and the regime of authorship come together in multiple hybrid forms. But what can be gained by acknowledging these intermixtures? Our point is that constructive work takes place in the impure middle ground between a regime of knowledge and a regime of authorship. In this middle ground the status of the object is neither simply a product of translations from substance to matter nor is it simply an imaginary design object in the co-presence of spectator and a master designer. Rather, it is singularized and narrowed down to a smaller number of possibilities due to the capabilities of the specific materials, technologies, humans and the power relations between them. The question of procedure is neither simply a matter of training in scientific method nor is it only a question of evocation and interpellation of the present mastery. Rather, as we observe, it is a matter of drawing things together by way of coercion and negotiation. So what can be gained by acknowledging a third regime is a more detailed appreciation of the way designers draw on substance–text translations and at the same time produce a privileged gaze of authorship. They have to be mindful to inscriptions, tools, materials and people and they become successful through mixing these manoeuvres in convincing and mindful ways.

Conclusion This paper explores differences and commonalities in science studies and studies of design. It contributes to design research by developing elements of a methodology for studies of designers at work. By drawing on STS we argue that even though scientific practice and design practice share similar traits of translation, inscription

46

N. Nickelsen and T. Binder

and black-boxing, what is performed is different. Where scientific practice tends to perform reliable information transfer and transparency, design practice tends to perform authorship and presence of the imagined. Based on a number of STS studies and studies of architects we articulate this argument proposing the designation of two different regimes, where the regime of authorship foregrounds narratives of identity and biographic trajectory of the designer. We apply this perspective to the analysis of a case study of everyday designing at a rubber factory and argue that this points to a middle ground where both regimes are put into play. Analysis of the Viton case unravels a composite design practice that is strong in its improvisation and pragmatism. The study defines the chief designer to be of particular importance. He makes himself indispensable, but he is simultaneously producing a strong voice of authorship due to his pivotal role in the making of a successful assembly. He imagines solutions and persuades a number of entities. Latour emphasizes that the appearance of individual agency ought to be slowly disentangled as a network effect. We do not query that point. But we argue that the study of design must encompass sensitivity to the uniqueness of expression, appreciation and continuous dialogue with what is modelled. Imagination and authorship are essential to designing. Therefore, the construction of the designer’s identity ought to be foregrounded in further studies of designing. This hopefully leads to further methodological research on how designers and their interweaving with objects may be traced. In this work, we propose the notions of mind and authority in combination with ANT vocabulary in order to draw attention to particular ways that designers interrelate with instruments, inscriptions, materials and humans. Ethnography of in vivo design is a promising approach for future research and we believe that ethnography that is sensitive to person making is particularly needed.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Monika Büscher and John Shiga for very valuable inputs to the ideas presented in this text.

References Akrich, M. (2000) ‘The description of a technological object’, in Bijker, W.E. and Law. J. (eds) Shaping Technology/Building Society, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 205–25. Akrich, M. and Latour, B. (2000) ‘A summary of a convenient vocabulary for the semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblies’ in Bijker, W.E. and Law, J. (eds) Shaping Technology/Building Society, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 259–65. Binder, T. (ed.) (2005) Designpraksis i Forandring (Design Practice in Transition), Copenhagen: Danish Center for Design Research. Bucciarelli, L. (1996) Designing Engineers, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Callon, M. (1991) ‘Techno-economic networks and irreversibility’, in Law, J. (ed.) A Sociology of Monsters, Sociological Review Monograph 38, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 132–65. —— (1986a) ‘Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of Saint Brieuc Bay’, in Law, J. (ed.) Power, Action and Belief: a new

Designing as middle ground

47

sociology of knowledge? Sociological Review Monograph 32, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 196–223. —— (1986b) ‘The sociology of an actor-network: the case of the electric vehicle’, in Callon, M., Law, J. and Rip, A. (eds) Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: sociology of science in the real world, London: Macmillan, pp. 19–34. Collins, H.M. and Yearley, S. (1992) ‘Epistemological chicken’, in Pickering, A. (ed.) Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 301–26. Cuff, D. (1993) Architecture: the story of practice, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Henderson, K. (1991) ‘Flexible sketches and inflexible data bases: visual communication, conscription devices, and boundary objects in design engineering’, Science, Technology & Human Values, 16: 448–73. Hughes, T. (1983) Networks of Power: electrification in Western society, 1880–1930, London and New York: John Hopkins University Press. Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: an introduction to actor-network-theory, New York: Oxford University Press. —— (2000) ‘Where are the missing masses’ in Bijker, W.E. and Law, J. (eds) Shaping Technology/BuildingSociety, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 225–59. —— (1996) ‘How iconophilic in art, science and religion?’ in Jones, C.A. and Galison, P. (eds) Picturing Science, Producing Art, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 116–29. —— (1991) ‘Technology is society made durable’ in Law, J. (ed.) A Sociology of Monsters, Sociological Review Monograph 38, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 103–32. —— (1987) Science in Action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (1986a) ‘Drawing things together’, Knowledge and Society: studies in the sociology of culture past and present, 6: 1–40. —— (1986b) ‘The powers of association’, in Law, J. (ed.) Power, Action and Belief: a new sociology of knowledge? Sociological Review Monograph 32, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 89–111. Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1979) Laboratory Life: the construction of scientific facts, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Law, J. (2002) Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience, Durham and London: Duke University Press. —— (2000) ‘On the subject of the object: narrative, technology, and interpellation’, in Configurations, 8, London: John Hopkins University Press, pp. 1–29. —— (1998) Heterogeneities. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 23 November 2009). —— (1994) Organizing Modernity, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Law, J. and Moser, I. (2003) Managing, Subjectivities and Desires. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 23 November 2009). Nickelsen, N.C. (2008) ‘The institutionalization of a routine: identity, interaction, and materiality’, in Scheuer, S. and Scheuer, J.D. (eds) The Anatomy of Change, Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press, pp. 181–209. Orr, J. (1996) ‘Sharing knowledge, celebrating identity: community memory in a service culture’, in Middleton, D. and Edwards, D. (eds) Collective Remembering, London and New Delhi: Sage, pp. 169–90. Porter, W.L. (1986) ‘The inner logic of designing’, Design Studies, 11: 128–48. Schön, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action, New York: Basic Books.

48

N. Nickelsen and T. Binder

Star, S.L. and Griesemer, J. (1989) ‘Institutional ecology, translations and coherence: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39’, Social Studies of Science, 19: 387–420. Weick, K. and Roberts, K. (1996) ‘Collective minds in organizations: heedful interrelating on flight decks’ in Cohen, M.D. and Sproull, L.S. (eds) Organizational Learning, London and New Delhi: Organization Science, pp. 330–59. Yaneva, A. (2005a) ‘Scaling up and down: extraction trials in architectural design’, Social Studies of Science, 35: 867. —— (2005b) ‘A building is a multiverse’ in Latour, B. and Weibel, P. (eds) Making Things Public, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 530–36.

4

Designing pathways John Damm Scheuer

The theoretical background in this chapter is organizational studies and especially theories about design and design processes in organizations. The concept of design is defined as a particular kind of work aimed at making arrangements in order to change existing situations into desired ones. The illustrative case example is the introduction of clinical pathways in a psychiatric department. The contribution to a general core of design research is the development of the concept of design work and a critical discussion of the role of technological rules in design work.

Introduction A clinical pathway may be defined as ‘a standardized, prewritten, one- or twopage document showing the interventions of all disciplines along a time schedule. It is a grid, with time as one axis and staff actions as the other’ (Zander, 1995: 9). Clinical pathways were first developed by the nurse Karen Zander and her team of nurses at the New England Medical Center Hospitals in Boston (Garbin, 1995; Hofmann, 1993; Zander, 1995). According to Zander, the idea of clinical pathways soon spread internationally because they were non-conceptual, visually appealing, easy to write and effective in reviewing and decreasing the length of stay of patients in hospitals (Zander, 1995: 11). Clinical pathways are designed along specific timelines to coordinate the ideal sequence and timing of patient care for patients with a specific diagnosis. They are developed by multidisciplinary teams and typically describe what each professional group should do, when they should do it, by whom a specific action should be undertaken and where and when the task should be performed (Hunter and Segrott, 2008). By mapping out a step-by-step, standardized care process, and monitoring deviation – that is (typically) statistically identifiable variation – from this ideal pathway and by implementing relevant interventions if standards and performance indicators are not met, a higher quality and more efficient pathway is supposed to be produced. According to the literature, clinical pathways may be used to pursue different aims (see Hunter and Segrott, 2008). They may be used to create standardized

50

J.D. Scheuer

treatment packages, with uniform lengths of stay and predictable costs, while maintaining consistent standards of care. They may be used to improve the quality of the service offered to patients without increasing costs. Other positive outcomes are associated with employees’ work with clinical pathways, including that they may increase local adherence to national (quality) standards and reduce unacceptable variations in practice, that they help implementing evidence-based practice by translating guidelines and recommendations of research studies into an embodied action plan for practitioners, and that they help improve coordination and communication between healthcare practitioners, which makes the care process more efficient, resulting in cost savings through reduced delays, decreased lengths of stay and removal of task duplication. According to Herbert Simon, ‘everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (Simon, 1996: 111). As he points out, a design approach to organization studies is oriented towards the future; it involves ‘inquiry into systems that do not yet exist’ (Romme, 2003: 558). Defined in this way, employees working on describing, analysing and changing clinical pathways in hospitals do design work and qualify as an object for design research. This chapter investigates what happened with the idea and concept of clinical pathways as it was designed in a psychiatric department at Frederiksberg Hospital, a minor hospital in the Copenhagen Hospital Corporation. We ask what kind of empirical insights might be drawn from this case of design work and use these insights to question the idea of organizational problem solving through the use of scientifically grounded ‘technological’ design rules. Van Aken defines a technological rule as ‘a chunk of general knowledge, linking an intervention or artefact with a desired outcome or performance in a certain field of application’ (Van Aken, 2004: 228). As mentioned above, an intervention such as the introduction of clinical pathways has been associated with many desired outcomes and better performance in health care. It is thus suggested that the idea and concept of clinical pathways may be considered a technological rule about how to achieve certain ‘wished for’ outcomes in health care organizations. Even though several approaches to doing design research exist in organizational studies, van Aken’s approach is important to discuss and critically assess since it is in accordance with what might be labelled the ‘evidence movement’. In Danish health care and elsewhere, the evidence movement builds on ideas of logical positivism which recognizes only scientifically verifiable propositions as meaningful. Randomized controlled trials that study large populations are considered the most reliable form of scientific evidence in health care because they eliminate spurious causality and bias (Goldenberg 2006). Scientific evidence based on qualitative studies and case studies not including randomized controlled trials and large populations of patients are considered weaker forms of evidence. Following this tradition, scientifically grounded ‘evidence’ about the effects and mechanisms related to using clinical pathways may be summarized in ‘reviews’, ‘clinical summaries’ or ‘meta-analyses’ summing up and synthesizing large amounts of clinical and social data which may then be diffused through journals and electronic

Designing pathways

51

databases in order to offer ‘objective’ (design) knowledge that may inform political, managerial as well as clinical decision making. The chapter is organized in three sections. The first section presents the discussion about design that has developed in the area of organizational studies. The second section is an analysis of the design of clinical pathways in a psychiatric ward. A theoretical understanding of design work is presented and episodic description of design work is suggested as an approach to the study of design work. The third section is a discussion of what might be learned about design work and the use of design rules from the case analysis.

Design in organizational studies Organizational studies are historically situated studies of organizations, largely carried out in academic and research institutions where practitioners are in the business of making knowledge claims about organizations. Those knowledge claims are subject to peer assessment, following certain methodological canons and conceptions of truth that prevail at a particular point in time (Tsoukas and Knudsen, 2005: 2). According to McKelvey (2003), organizational studies is a pre-paradigmatic science that includes theories holding very different ontological and epistemological positions. The main themes in organizational studies include the study of organizations’ adaptation to their environments, their social structure, culture, technology, organizational change management, power, conflict, control and more (Hatch, 2006). In organization studies, three generations of design methodologies for organization and management may be identified (Romme, 2003). The first generation was ‘the scientific management’ movement advocated by researchers such as Frederick Taylor (1911). The second generation of design methodologies included socio-technical systems theory, functionalist systems theory and human relations theory. Researchers related to the third generation of design science methodologies focused on design methodologies for organizing education and teamwork, on design methodologies in the area of organizational learning and on development of a system’s design methodology for organizations. More recent research focusing on design includes an alternative histories approach (Sarasvathy et al., 2008) and a scenario planning approach developed by Hodgkinson and Healey (2008). Denyer et al. (2008) suggest that the hyper-diversity in both content and method of organizational studies makes synthesis the key challenge of design research. Building on Denyer and Tranfield (2006), they suggest that the development of customized syntheses can provide an important and effective means of creating practical management knowledge. What is focused upon here, however, is the approach to design research suggested by van Aken (2004). This approach is also discussed in Chapter 5 by Pries-Heje and Baskerville.

52

J.D. Scheuer

Design science as development of technological rules According to van Aken (2004), a design science for management research should focus on the development of tested and grounded design rules developed at the interface between the science and the design science mode. Just as design rules for an aeroplane wing are tested in engineering practice and grounded in the laws and empirical findings of aerodynamics and mechanics, the science and design science mode should be combined in order to develop scientifically grounded and tested design rules for management. Design science focuses on solving construction and improvement problems. In theory development, the key question is whether a particular design ‘works’ in a certain setting. Van Aken (2001) suggests a procedure including alpha and beta testing of design rules of management. Alpha testing involves development of a design proposition by researchers on the basis of different cases. Beta testing is about replicating research done by third parties in order to get more objective evidence and to counteract any blind spots or flaws in the design propositions not acknowledged by the third party researchers (Van Aken, 2004: 232). In beta testing of design rules, one is interested in both driving (generative) and blocking mechanisms – that is instances where the rule succeeds and/or fails in specific contexts and the causes that may explain that outcome. The outcome of this process is a number of tested and grounded technological rules. Van Aken’s definition, used in this analysis, defines a technological rule as ‘a chunk of general knowledge, linking an intervention or artefact with a desired outcome or performance in a certain field of application’ (Van Aken, 2004: 228). Technological rules are not universal laws, neither are they specific prescriptions for specific situations. Rather, they are general prescriptions for how to solve particular types or classes of problems (Van Aken, 2004: 227). They should be used heuristically as design exemplars; that is as general prescriptions which have to be translated to the specific problem at hand. In solving the problem, one has to design a specific variant of the design exemplar. Thus a design rule or prescription may look like this: ‘if you want to achieve Y in situation Z, then something like action X will help’ (Van Aken, 2004: 227). Examples of technological rules mentioned by van Aken include the know-how of making a bow and arrow and the rain dance, general knowledge about how to realize a large-scale, complex strategic change and about realizing outcomes of strategic decision making. If the research literature about clinical pathways mentioned above is translated into a technological rule, it can be summarized like this: use clinical pathways if you want to standardize treatment packages, make pathways more economically efficient by assuring a uniform length of stay and predictable costs, or decrease unacceptable variations in practice and improve the quality of patients’ pathways, or if you want to improve coordination and communication between professionals involved in the pathway.

Designing pathways

53

Design of clinical pathways in a psychiatric ward The case described below is organized in episodes. According to Giddens (1984), ‘to characterize an aspect of social life as an episode is to regard it as a number of acts or events having a specifiable beginning and end, thus involving a particular sequence’ (Giddens, 1984: 244). The case presented involves actors in health care doing organizational ‘design work’. Design is thus theorized as a particular kind of work aimed at making arrangements (Strauss, 1993: 87) in order to change existing situations into desired ones (Simons, 1996). Arrangements refer to the agreements established between actors in organizations. They are made with regard to the actions necessary for carrying out the work, as conceived by the participants. The agreements concern agreements about what work has to be done, by whom, where and for how long, for what purposes, and according to what standards. They may also concern what resources, technology and supplies, information, space and backup services are needed to do the work. Reaching agreement about an arrangement depends on actors being able to ‘work things out’ (Strauss, 1993: 88). This process consists of a series of interactional strategies and counterstrategies taken by participants, in response to what is said or done by others including negotiating, making compromises, discussing, educating, convincing, lobbying, manipulating, threatening and coercing. An actor’s stance is the position taken by each participant toward the process and the work itself. The stance will shift and change during the process in response to stances taken by others. As a first step, participants define what is involved in the arrangement, such as what needs to be done, by whom, what resources are needed, what one has to offer, what one expects from others and who has the power to take what action. Defining gives rise to the stance taken, which is then expressed through interactional strategies. The next step is interpreting the stance of the others as reflected in the strategies used. Actors respond by continuing with or revising their own stances and associated strategies. The process of defining, interpreting and acting in response continues until arrangements are reached (Strauss, 1993: 91). Collecting and organizing data When the Copenhagen Hospital Corporation was formed in 1995, a ‘hospital plan’ was made. At that time, the author was a development consultant at Frederiksberg Hospital, and he took part in all meetings in the subgroup that planned how to introduce clinical pathways in the hospital’s psychiatric ward. He turned this personal experience into data by writing an ethnographic ‘story’ about the work done in the subgroup and by collecting further data. The three-and-a-half-year-long process was carefully documented through written records such as elaborate summaries of discussions at meetings as well as documents presented at meetings. As a former member and secretary of the group, the author also had access to knowledge about other relevant documents and persons involved in the development and innovation process in the group. Documents as well as related reports and archival materials were collected. Once collected, significant events were identified and a chronologically organized complete overview over the change process was written. The

54

J.D. Scheuer

process was then broken down into episodes and the content and development during each episode was analysed in detail. From meeting to meeting, summaries were prepared, which were read and accepted by all members of the group at subsequent meetings, strengthening the credibility of these documents as accurate descriptions of the process. Introduction to the case As a consequence of the hospital plan, an Elective Surgery Centre and a Centre of Medicine was established at Frederiksberg Hospital, one of the smaller hospitals in the corporation. According to the corporation’s quality development plan, all centres and departments were expected to start reorganizing their patients’ pathways and to plan them rationally in order to use resources more effectively and in order to improve the quality of patients’ pathways. As a consequence – at Frederiksberg Hospital – subgroups focusing on quality development and clinical pathways were formed under the project groups planning the establishment of the Elective Surgery Centre and the Centre of Medicine. The subgroup planning clinical pathways in the psychiatric ward had 11 members. It consisted of psychiatrists, nurses, physio- and occupational therapists, psychologists and social workers. Management was represented by the head of department, who was also a psychiatrist, and two nursing officers. The hospital’s Planning and Development Department was represented by a development consultant (the author of this chapter). First episode: April 1997–January 1998 At the beginning, group members were uncertain about what clinical pathways were and what kind of work and arrangements had to be done to implement them. As a consequence, they searched the literature and asked friends and colleagues about it. The psychiatrist who was chairman of the subgroup and the development consultant from the hospital’s Planning and Development Department soon developed a common interpretation of, and took a stance towards, clinical pathways, shaping their understanding of what had to be done. Inspired by the literature about quality development and clinical pathways, they suggested that the aim of the subgroup was to describe an evidence-based clinical pathway for psychiatric patients and to assure and, if necessary, develop the quality of this pathway by measuring performance in relation to preset quality standards. The work with clinical pathways should give an insight into the quality of treatment and care of patients, contribute to improving the quality of pathways and assure that personnel and other resources were used as effectively as possible. Patients were supposed to be included in the subgroup’s work but never were. Instead, patients were represented through the different professionals’ images or constructions of the patients. The subgroup accepted this (translation) proposal and decided to describe an ideal clinical pathway for psychiatric outpatients, rather than groups of patients with specific diagnoses, since approximately 90 per cent of the patients in the psychiatric ward were outpatients.

Designing pathways

55

Deciding upon interactional strategies The group also decided to start out by describing an ‘ideal’ pathway for these patients. In order to do so, the pathway of psychiatric outpatients was divided into phases and the tasks that had to be taken care of in each phase were identified and written down. Thereby they were made into an object related to the interpretation of the concept of clinical pathways. The subgroup’s division of labour into central and peripheral tasks as well as the construction of a written and ‘ideal’ description of the clinical pathway for psychiatric outpatients opened a discussion of the ideal division of labour between professionals involved in the pathway. The effect was that the division of labour, which had until then been black-boxed (Latour, 1987) and represented tacit knowledge, was turned into an object of discussion. Group members now took different stances on which professional groups should meet the patients – for instance, in the acute psychiatric emergency department – to make the pathway ideal for patients. Professionals such as physio- and occupational therapists felt strongly about, and argued for, the importance of their professions’ contributions to the work with the patients and argued for a revised division of labour where they should have more direct contact with the patients during the patients’ pathways. The discussions about the proposed arrangements resulted in a time delay. Conflicts related to different stances A female psychologist in the group thought that the quantitative approach was simply wrong because psychiatric patients could not be standardized in the same way as patients having a knee operation. She also felt that it was ethically wrong to try to reduce the complexity of the illnesses of psychiatric patients to something that might be standardized. Moreover, she felt emotionally touched and disturbed by what she felt was an invasion of her professional domain by public management ideas focusing on economic rather than patient-related gains. The psychologist therefore took another stance in the discussion of clinical pathways and suggested that the quantitative approach to quality development of clinical pathways suggested by the chairman and the development consultant was insufficient in relation to psychiatric patients since psychiatric patients could not be standardized. While a broken leg was easy to diagnose and treat using standard treatments, psychiatric patients had more vague types of symptoms that could at the same time point to different types of psychiatric illnesses, making diagnostic work a more iterative process than suggested by the suggested ‘quantitative’ perspective on clinical pathways. She suggested an alternative ‘qualitative approach’ based on the idea that the quality of psychiatric patients’ pathways could only be improved if diagnostics and treatment of patients were based on shared knowledge about the crossdisciplinary treatment of psychiatric patients. The psychologist also pointed out that the psychiatrists in the ward did not agree on how to treat the patients, making the construction of standardized pathways difficult. Psychiatrists treated

56

J.D. Scheuer

patients according to biological, psychological and environmental therapeutic paradigms but did not have agreements about criteria for choosing between paradigms. As a consequence the chairman informed the project group and the Planning and Development Department that the group needed more time to finish its work. Second episode: January–September 1998 In the second episode, the role of chairman was taken over by the psychiatrist who was head of department because the head nurse and the Planning and Development Department were dissatisfied with the lack of progress in the subgroup’s work. The chairman took a new stance and made a written plan suggesting that quality development of pathways had to be based on a cross-disciplinary perspective on psychiatric illness. This suggestion was based on the view that the psychiatric patient was more complex than suggested by the psychiatrists’ biological, psychological and environmental perspectives on psychiatric illness. The chairman now constructed his own version of the psychologist’s qualitative approach to development of pathways. He focused upon quality development of cross-disciplinary information used in decision making and development of the processes and objects involved in cross-disciplinary coordination and communication between professionals. Since the cross-disciplinary perspective made all professional groups equally important, the effect of this new interpretation was that agreement was reached and discussion of the division of labour between professional groups and the division of professionals’ tasks into main and peripheral tasks was closed down. Another effect was that an alternative perspective on quality development and clinical pathways was developed which was adjusted to local knowledge as well as to professional interests. The objects produced and interpreted as related to the proposed arrangement included descriptions/reports about the information needs of professional groups as well as descriptions of the types of treatments each group could offer the patients. The activities also included a specification of the division of labour between one or two professionals who met the psychiatric outpatient and two cross-disciplinary teams which used the information collected by these persons to decide where to place and how to diagnose and treat the patient in focus. Agreements included the process and criteria to be used when choosing between biological, psychological and environmental approaches to treatment. At the end of the episode, a conflict arose between nurses and other professionals in the working group. The head of department had suggested that other professionals than nurses should be allowed to assist psychiatrists when they met patients in order to diagnose or treat them. The nurses, however, solved the conflict by referring to the law. Since nurses were authorized to delegate work to all other professional groups except doctors, while other professional groups (except doctors) were not, it was agreed that it was not possible for other types of professionals to replace or function as stand-ins for nurses.

Designing pathways

57

Discussion In the following, we explore what kind of empirical insights might be drawn from the case about organizational design work at hand. The discussion is organized around statements about organizational design processes and design work, each of them discussed and explained drawing on the case. Often design ideas are developed by individuals and working groups who also implement them. At other times ideas travel (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996) and are introduced from outside, as it happened in the case at hand. The members of the working group knew a lot about the department’s everyday clinical pathways. They did not know much, however, about how clinical pathways were theorized in the Copenhagen Hospital Corporation or the quality development literature. As a consequence, this incoming idea or label appears without a clear description of its content and in a decontextualized form stripped of all background information about what kind of local conditions might be of importance when introducing and working with clinical pathways. The idea or label thus has to be re-interpreted and recontextualized in the specific socio-cultural and material context of the psychiatric department of Frederiksberg Hospital. This happens through a process where clinical pathways are transformed from ‘the quantitative’ to the ‘qualitative’ version after local needs and conditions have been taken into consideration. The concept of clinical pathways is introduced top-down. The decision is taken by administrators and board members in the Copenhagen Hospital Corporation. The introduction of the concept in the psychiatric department, however, depends on someone ‘picking up’ the concept and starting doing something with it. The concept thus does not move ‘by itself’ but only through the work of people. At the beginning of the design process, the participants in the work group try to figure out what a clinical pathway is and what needs to be done, by who and how. Thus they try to work things out in order to make future arrangements. The process that follows is characterized by co-production, translation and bricolage, as explained below. The design process evolves as a co-production of actors rather than as a topdown implementation process where clinical pathways are somehow implemented in accordance with a specific plan or a specific blueprint or ‘rule’ describing what a clinical pathway is. All actors take their stances on, and participate in the discussions about, what a clinical pathway is or should be in relation to psychiatric patients. The word ‘clinical pathway’ may be the same at different places in the Copenhagen Hospital Corporation but the content associated with the word as it moves form one time–space context to the other becomes different. Thus the idea or concept of clinical pathways is translated as it moves. A translation is one of several possible ways of associating an idea or word like clinical pathways with human and non-human elements (Scheuer, 2008:113). In the process, participants take two different stances on and make two different translations of what a clinical pathway is or should be. The one stance and translation is labelled the ‘quantitative approach’, the other the ‘qualitative approach’.

58

J.D. Scheuer

While the first translation is suggested by the psychiatrist leading the group and the development consultant, the second translation is suggested by a psychologist and then by the psychiatrist who is head of department and who takes over the role as chairman for the working group in the second episode. The qualitative approach appears through a process of bricolage where people and materials that happen to be available in the working group are drawn upon, just as different interpretations of local contextual conditions and needs are presented and taken into consideration when working out the alternative ‘qualitative’ version of clinical pathways. The quantitative approach focuses on creation of insight into the quality of clinical pathways in order to improve quality, effectiveness and utilization of resources by construction of and measurement in relation to evidence-based standards and goals. The qualitative approach focuses on creating insight into the information needs of employees and opportunities for sharing knowledge in order to improve continuity as well as the quality of clinical pathways. As the design process unfolds and develops into two translations, different types of objects are attached to the label of clinical pathway that is related to the specific interpretation/translation made of the concept. In the quantitative approach, evidence-based standards and goals are especially important objects that should be produced. In the qualitative approach, reports about all professional groups’ information needs and types of treatments are considered important objects since they make knowledge sharing possible. The case illustrates that designers become designers and powerful by making translation proposals that mobilize and make agreements possible among participating actors. The psychiatrist and the development consultant in the first episode did not succeed while the psychiatrist and head of department who took over the role as chairman in the second episode did. When the psychologist argues that a ‘qualitative approach’ is more appropriate than a ‘quantitative approach’ to clinical pathways she makes the judgement on the basis of rational, ethical as well as emotional criteria. She first of all thought that the quantitative approach was simply wrong because psychiatric patients could not be standardized in the same way as patients having a knee operation. Moreover, she felt that it was ethically wrong to try to reduce the complexity of the illnesses of psychiatric patients to something that might be standardized. Finally, she felt emotionally touched and disturbed by what she felt was a ‘foreign’ invasion of her professional domain by public management ideas focusing on economic rather than patient-related gains. Thus as demonstrated by this case as well as by other casestudies in this book (Chapter 6 by Olsen and Heaton, Chapter 10 by Ingemann, and Chapter 11 by Christrup), human actors who are designing may take their stances and make choices about arrangements on the basis of rational, ethical, aesthetical, emotional, bodily and material criteria. Human actions have intentions behind them, whereas the performances (behaviours) of non-humans such as chronological descriptions of clinical pathways on paper or lists containing employees’ information needs in relation to diagnosing and treating patients do not. In this case, such objects were made into objects that related to the interpretation or translation made of the concept of clinical pathways.

Designing pathways

59

As mentioned, the concept of clinical pathways is introduced top-down. The decision to implement them is taken by administrators and board members in the Copenhagen Hospital Corporation. The introduction of the concept in the psychiatric department thus had a deliberate and an intentional element. However, the introduction of clinical pathways depended on people ‘picking up’ the concept and starting to work things out which resulted in the emergence of a new and alternative translation of clinical pathways suggesting another arrangement: ‘the qualitative’ approach to clinical pathways. The design process thus had both deliberate and emergent elements influencing the arrangements that resulted in the design being realized by the participants in the workgroup. This corresponds well with Henry Mintzberg and James A. Waters’ work (1985), who suggest that organizational strategies may be identified as patterns or consistencies in streams of behaviour in organizations. They suggest that realized strategies in organizations result from a process influenced by deliberate as well as emergent behaviour. Deliberate strategies are patterns or consistencies in behaviour that occur because of actors’ (e.g. designers’) intentions. Emergent strategies, in contrast, are patterns or consistencies in behaviour realized despite of, or in the absence of, intentions. Since design work involves ‘inquiry into systems that do not yet exist’ (Romme, 2003: 558) and thus uncertainty about what ‘will work’ in a specific problem situation, emergent behaviours are especially important when doing design work. Following Mintzberg and Waters (1985), emergent strategy does, however, not mean that designers are out of control, only that they are open, flexible and responsive, that is, willing to learn. Openness to emergent strategy enables designers to act before everything is fully understood – to respond to an evolving reality rather than having to focus on a stable fantasy. Emergent strategy or design implies learning what works – taking one action at a time in search for a viable pattern or consistency (Mintzberg and Waters, 1985: 15). This was what happened in the working group in the psychiatric department. As demonstrated earlier, design rules have to (re-)enter organizational practice in order to make a difference. They have to be translated and produced through a work process of bricolage and co-production resulting in the general design rule being recontextualized in a specific time–space context. What seems rule-like from the science perspective turns out heterogeneous and complex when studied in detail. Rules as well as translators of rules change as they move from one time–space context to another, changing the status of rules from strong evidence-based rules to weak preliminary heuristics. The universal stability of rules and the cause and effect relationships built into them may thus be questioned. Thus effects of using concepts suggested by rules to obtain certain aims imagined in those rules will not occur with certainty. Design rules may result in (development) activities being started up in certain areas (as the area of clinical pathways). But the outcomes of these activities will be uncertain. The case suggests that qualitative context-related case stories represent a stronger evidence base than general evidence-based design rules in relation to problem solving in specific problem situations and time–space contexts. It also suggests that the important types of knowledge when doing design work are knowledge about

60

J.D. Scheuer

the design process and the context in which the designing takes place rather than general and abstract rules that may or may not apply in the particular context in focus. In the case at hand, it is the second chairman’s deep insight into, and understanding of, the various professionals’ different approaches to doing psychiatric work that makes it possible for him to work things out and finally assure agreement and acceptance of what should be done. The working group’s division of labour into central and peripheral tasks as well as the construction of a written and ‘ideal’ description of the clinical pathway for psychiatric outpatients in the first episode thus open a discussion of the ideal division of labour between the professionals involved in the pathway. This conflict is solved by the chairman in the second episode by making an alternative, ‘qualitative’ translation of clinical pathways that suggests that all professional groups’ work contributions are equally important. The translation is also an answer to, and partly an acceptance of, the critique of the ‘quantitative’ approach put forward by the psychologist, which makes the second translation more acceptable to her. Technological rules may be useful as preliminary templates, ‘design exemplars’ or ideal types (Weber, 2007) to think more systematically about the types of interventions that might be relevant in different types of problem situations in organizations, especially when local actors are inexperienced with the type of organizational problem solving situation that they engage in. Technological rules may, however, be criticized for being Taylorist and forcing people to follow rigid standards. They thus disregard professionals’ intuitive and holistic as well as locally grounded knowledge types and approaches to making design decisions and design. They may, moreover, be criticized for directing the resources and attention of people doing design work away from the processes and local context so important for doing that type of work.

Conclusion Design work is a particular kind of work aimed at making arrangements in order to changing existing situations into desired ones. Design work in organizations is about negotiating arrangements and is characterized by co-production, translation and bricolage. Design work often includes recontextualization of decontextualized ideas. Human actors may make choices about arrangements on the basis of rational, ethical, aesthetical, emotional, bodily and material criteria. Outcomes of design work result in arrangements or ‘patterns in actions’ that may be theorized as a realized design. The realized design is an outcome of planned as well as emergent activities. Rules, as well as translators of rules, change as they move from one time–space context to another, changing the status of rules from strong, evidencebased rules to weak, preliminary heuristics. Research findings such as design rules or densely written case stories increase the density of the background knowledge from which practitioners and researchers in organizations can draw in making judgments about what to do. The analysis suggests that detailed qualitative and context-related case stories may represent a stronger evidence base than general evidence-based design rules when solving

Designing pathways

61

problems in specific organizational time–space contexts. The analysis thus questions the idea that scientifically grounded and decontextualized ‘evidence’ and knowledge about the effects and mechanisms related to using clinical pathways may be summarized in ‘reviews’, ‘clinical summaries’ or ‘meta-analyses’ which may then be offered as effective ‘objective’ (design) knowledge or rules that may inform and improve political, managerial as well as clinical decision making. The analysis at hand rather points out that what might be most important in design processes and when doing organizational design work is to focus on how local humans and non-humans in specific organizational socio-cultural and material contexts may be mobilized in order to achieve wished-for goals. The important type of knowledge in this connection is knowledge about the organizational design process and the context in which the designing takes place, rather than knowledge about general and abstract rules that may or may not apply in the particular context in focus.

References Czarniawska, B. and Joerges, B. (1996) ‘Travels of ideas’, in B. Czarniawska and G. Sevón (eds) Translating Organizational Change, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Denyer, D., Tranfield D. and van Aken J.E. (2008) ‘Developing design propositions through research synthesis’, Organization Studies, 29: 393–413. Garbin, B. (1995) ‘Introduction to clinical pathways’, Journal for Healthcare Quality, 17: 6–9. Giddens, A. (1984) Constitution of Society: outline of the theory of structuration, Cambridge: Polity. Goldenberg, M.J. (2006) ‘On evidence and evidence-based medicine: lessons from the philosophy of science’, Social Science & Medicine, 62: 2621–32. Hatch, M.J. (2006) Organization Theory: modern, symbolic and postmodern perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hodgkinson, G.P. and Healey, M.P. (2008) ‘Toward a (pragmatic) science of strategic intervention: design propositions for scenario planning’, Organization Studies, 29: 393–413 Hofmann, P.A. (1993) ‘Critical path method: an important tool for coordinating clinical care’, Journal of Quality Improvement, 19: 235–46. Hunter, B. and Segrott, J. (2008) ‘Re-mapping client journeys and professional identities: a review of the literature on clinical pathways’, International Journal of Nursing Studies, 45: 608–25. Mintzberg, H. and Waters, J.A. (1985) ‘Of strategies, deliberate and emergent’, Strategic Management Journal, 6: 257–72. McKelvey, B. (2003) ‘From fields to science: can organization studies make the transition’ in R. Westwood and S. Clegg (eds) Debating organization: point-counterpoint in organization studies, Oxford: Blackwell. Romme, A.G.L. (2003) ‘Making a difference: organization as design’, Organization Science, 14: 558–73. Sarasvathy, S.D., Dew N., Read S. and Wiltbank R. (2008) ‘Designing organizations that design environments: lessons from entrepreneurial expertise’, Organization Studies, 29:331–50. Scheuer, J.D. (2008) ‘Convergent and divergent processes of change in organizations:

62

J.D. Scheuer

exploring change as translation in the encounter of idea and practice’ in S. Scheuer and J.D. Scheuer (eds) The Anatomy of Change: a neo-institutionalist perspective, Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Simon, H.A. (1996) The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd edn, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Strauss, A. (1993) Continual Permutations of Actions, New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Taylor, F.W. (1911) The Principles of Scientific Management, New York: Harper. Tsoukas, H. and Knudsen C. (2005) The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory: metatheoretical perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Aken, J.E. (2001) ‘Improving the relevance of management research by developing tested and grounded technological rules’, Working paper 1.19, Department of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. —— (2004) ‘Management research based on the paradigm of the design sciences: the quest for field-tested and grounded technological rules’, Journal of Management Studies, 41: 219–46. Weber, M. (2007; originally published 1904) ‘Objectivity in social science’ in C. Calhoun, J. Gerteis, J. Moody, S. Pfaff and I. Virk (eds) Classical Sociological Theory, Oxford: Blackwell. Zander, K. (1995) Collaborative Care: two effective strategies for positive outcomes, Chicago: American Hospital Publishing.

5

Design and management Jan Pries-Heje and Richard L. Baskerville

The specific approach developed in this chapter is design science research and technological rules as management heuristics. We use the concept of design in its broadest sense both as a noun (a plan for a solution) and a verb (generating/developing such a plan). We provide an illustrative example of how management planning can be improved by involving design concepts, based on management technological rules for process improvement. The chapter contributes to the general core of design research through developing technological rules as design heuristics.

Introduction In this chapter, we discuss a specific approach to design research that is characterized in the information systems discipline as ‘design science research’ (March et al. 1995). Design science research is a generative mode of research in the sense that scientific discoveries are developed through the design and creation of artefacts, that is, models, maps, plans and rules to inform, for example, organizational change, and the evaluation of these artefacts under practical use. Design scientists learn by designing these artefacts and positioning them in the real world, studying their impact on the world. Because the nature of design is action oriented (form and design indicate function and how we might use an artefact), design science operates with prescriptive rather than descriptive theories. Such theories often relate a class of design problems to a general design solution. Design science research is regarded as having great potential value in the disciplines of management and information systems. In particular, there has been considerable debate over its usefulness of research for management. This is, in no small part, motivated by the act that some management researchers and practitioners argue that ‘academic management research has a serious utilization problem’ (Van Aken 2004: 219). This viewpoint holds that management research results are most often descriptive and historical. The direct usefulness of such reflective studies for managers facing newer and more current problems seems questionable. It is argued that managers need help and advice for the issues they face, rather than post mortem analyses of last year’s decisions. Thus the utility of management research

64

J. Pries-Heje and R.L Baskerville

could be increased dramatically if management research became less descriptive and more prescriptive, less historical and more design oriented. Van Aken’s work, in particular, has shown how research can lead to a new form of theory, a design theory consisting of ‘field-tested and grounded technological rules’ (Van Aken 2004) – a design science research approach to management (see also 2005b). Van Aken’s design rules operate in the following manner. In a management vision of design science, there are two possible outputs – artefacts or interventions – and there may be three kinds of design in a professional episode: 1 The object design defines the artefact or intervention. 2 The realization design is the plan for implementing the artefact or intervention. 3 The process design is the plan for the design process itself. In this sense, designing is similar to developing prescriptive knowledge. Van Aken suggests expressing a design in the form of technological rules: ‘A technological rule follows the logic of “if you want to achieve Y in situation Z, then perform action X”. The core of the rule is this X, a general solution concept for a type of field problem’ (Van Aken 2005a: 23). However, van Aken warns that technological rules need grounding (2005a: 25): ‘Without grounding, the use of technological rules degenerates to mere “instrumentalism”, that is, to a working with theoretically ungrounded rules of thumb’. And he continues: ‘In engineering and in medicine, grounding of technological rules can be done with the laws of nature and other insights from the natural and the life sciences (as well as from insights developed by these design sciences themselves). In management, grounding can be done with insights from the social sciences’. Thus it is not enough to identify technological rules per se, no matter how helpful they may be to managers. The rules need to be grounded in a way acceptable from a social science perspective. In the following, we first discuss in general what design science could bring to management. Then we discuss design science research in management and demonstrate its value through three examples. We conclude that it is possible to help managers approach complex, strategic decisions by using the concept of technological rules.

What design science could bring to management Simon defined the science of design as the study of the artificial and ‘the way in which . . . adaptation of means to environments is brought about’ (1996: 113). In information systems, Vaishnavi and Kuechler (2004: 1) define design science research as ‘the analysis of the use and performance of designed artefacts to understand, explain and very frequently to improve on aspects of Information Systems.’ Central to these notions is the design of an artefact that is meant to have a presence in the real world. This artefact could be conceived as a construct, a model, a method, or a material instantiation (March et al. 1995). The relationship between science and design is complex and contentious. For some, design is generative production, one in which the faculties of reason align

Design and management

65

differently to the analytical productions that are prized in science (cf. Kant 1908). For others, melding science with design provides a means for designing at higher levels of abstraction, designs that are more universal and address a general class of problems rather than a single, unique design problem. Central to this notion of generality is the notion of a design theory. Design theories are sometimes regarded as a unique class of theories that share particular characteristics such as principles of form or function, principles of implementation, and so on. (Gregor et al. 2007; Walls et al. 1992). Design science has been drawn into many diverse professional areas such as architecture, design, performance, information systems, computer science, engineering, and so on. In the management professions, design science has arisen mostly in behavioural and decision sciences. As mentioned earlier, proponents such as van Aken (2004, 2005a) argue that the utility of management research could be increased dramatically if management research became more prescriptive and design oriented. While van Aken has proposed using technological rules for designing organizational decisions, we believe these can also be used to express a design theory, a design science research approach to management. We have chosen an example to demonstrate that it is in fact possible to increase utility and help managers in a way that makes it possible and plausible to make better decisions in complex and/or strategic organizational decision situations. The example we use is process improvement. We show how a new design theory appears using ‘technological rules’ as suggested by van Aken. At the end of the example, we also discuss the grounding in social science as well as the (potential) application by managers and some practical implication(s).

The process improvement example Improving organizational processes and managing product and process quality is a particular area where advice for managers is urgently needed. The basic assumption made in this arena is that the quality of products and services is a direct result of the quality of organizational processes. The principle is simple and proven: improve the organization’s processes, and the goods and services it produces will also improve. Here design theories could prove highly practical as well as academically novel. The ‘big three’ approaches to process improvement are the general International Standards Organization (ISO) standards for quality management systems (ISO 9000), the more technical and product-development oriented Capability Maturity Model (CMM), and the more specific ISO standards for process improvement and capability determination (ISO 15504/SPICE) (Hunter and Thayer 2001). There are also many variations, enhancements, proprietary alternatives and opportunities to adapt general quality management models, specifically for software quality improvement (for example, Six Sigma and Juran). Here, as in more general organizational quality improvement approaches, there is little work that provides helpful guidance about which approach to choose for which kinds of software organizations. Management not only involves administering process

66

J. Pries-Heje and R.L Baskerville

improvement efforts, but also deciding which of these myriad approaches should be used to frame the effort within the organization at hand. This approach selection process can be viewed as a design problem because it is concerned with the adaptation of available means to an environment (Simon 1996). However, it is a managerial design problem. The analysis A literature survey identified seven normative models for process improvement to be used in IT-developing organizations: Balanced Scorecard, ISO 9000, Business Excellence, Six Sigma, Juran, CMM and Bootstrap. There is substantial research on each of these approaches, and thus we tried to identify core writings by looking at citations (via www.scholar.google.com). After having identified core writings for each of the approaches we coded them according to grounded theory criteria. Grounded theory coding techniques highlight structures and patterns internal to a phenomenon. According to Strauss and Corbin (1998), a grounded theory approach is composed of three coding procedures called open, axial and selective coding. These procedures do not usually occur separately and as a sequence, but overlap and iterate in the process of research. The coding procedures are introduced below together with examples of findings from our review. The goal of open coding is to identify key ideas expressed in the data. Open coding involves two tasks. The first task is to label phenomena. This task involves decomposing an observation into discrete elements or ideas. Each discrete element or idea receives a name or label that represents this aspect of the phenomenon. These names represent a concept inherent in the observation. As a result of this first coding, we identified and labelled the following key elements shared across the different approaches: • • • • •

Name and origin of process improvement approach Empirical background – how is this approach’s utility proven? Who collects data in an organization and how is data collected? How is data analysed? How is advice to an organization generated?

The second essential open-coding task is discovering categories. Categorizing is the process of finding related phenomena or common concepts and themes in the accumulated data and to group them under joint headings and thus identifying categories and sub-categories of data. In our analysis, we found more than fifty key concepts, including: measurement, empowerment, quality, regulating process and elimination of defects. Developing a better and deeper understanding of how the identified categories are related is the purpose of axial coding. Axial coding involves two further tasks developing the categories and properties. The first task connects categories in terms of a sequence of relationships. For example, a causal condition or a consequence can connect two categories, or a category and a sub-category. The second task turns

Design and management

67

back to the data for validation of the relationships. This return gives rise to the discovery and specification of the differences and similarities among and within the categories. This discovery adds variation and depth of understanding. Together, the two authors completed the first part of the axial coding. Similarities and differences were noted and discussed. Categories and relationships were identified, discussed, corrected and changed, until a common understanding of the categories, sub-categories and their relationships was reached. In Figure 5.1, we show the whiteboard at a point where relationships between the categories mentioned before are discussed. Selective coding involves the integration of the categories that have been developed to form the initial theoretical framework. First, a story line is made explicit from the analysis. A story is a descriptive narrative about the central phenomenon of study and the story line is the conceptualization of this story in abstract terms. When analyzed, the story line becomes the core category, which is related to all the categories found in axial coding, validating these relationships, and elaborating the categories that need further refinement and development. The definition of only one story line and core category is usually recommended in grounded theory analysis, so as to maintain clarity and precision and to achieve a tight integration of categories. However, the authors found that the analysis of the data led to two storylines, one about the ‘agenda’ or objective of organizational change and the other about the ‘process’ – from observation through analysis to synthesis. Both stories were equally important in the data. However, instead of choosing either one story or the other we grouped them together in an new category we called the ‘recommendation process’, shown in Figure 5.2. Figure 5.2 shows four common elements that could be used to distinguish and characterize different types of models. The major common element identified we called ‘agenda’, and it was characteristic that the content of the ‘agenda’ differed

Figure 5.1 Whiteboard from discussing relationships.

68

J. Pries-Heje and R.L Baskerville

Figure 5.2 Overview of the general improvement recommendation process.

among the different models. We defined the agenda as the perspective on outcomes or objectives (of improving the organization) that drive the entire process improvement effort. Second, normative process improvement models share knowledge generating activities similar to those of research methods namely, ‘Observation’, ‘Analysis’ and ‘Synthesis’. These three are common elements, but they follow after (or in relation to) ‘Agenda’.

Process improvement theory Process improvement theories draw both directly and indirectly from an extensive conceptual backdrop of quality management and improvement (Hunter and Thayer 2001). While it is impossible to provide a complete history of such an extensive field within this chapter, we can sketch several pivotal developments from which process improvement draws many of its assumptions, principles and practices. In doing so, we also give an overview of the ontology and epistemology of process improvement thinking. Statistical process control The importance of statistics and quantitative measures for quality management has a long history. A landmark is the work by Western Electric engineer Walter Shewhart, who published Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product in 1931, followed by his Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control. Shewhart distinguished two classes of quality variability. Controlled variability was internal to the manufacturing process, and uncontrolled variability was external to the process. Shewhart demonstrated that the quality management orientation for the each of the two classes were completely different. Deming and TQM Early in his career, W. Edwards Deming worked with Shewhart and developed a strong appreciation for Shewhart’s statistical reasoning. Deming was one of

Design and management

69

a number of business and manufacturing experts who were invited by General MacArthur to postwar Japan to advise Japanese government agencies and companies as they reconstructed the devastated Japanese industrial base. In 1950, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) invited Deming back to Japan. His ideas about quality management had an incredible impact on Japanese industry, and a quality revolution was born in Japan (Neave 1990). Deming had significant influence in transforming ‘quality control’ to ‘quality management’. He promoted a 14-point business philosophy that contained many key ideas in software process improvement, for example: a constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, improve forever, remove barriers that prevent ideas from flowing, promote employee learning and selfimprovement, innovate to improve processes, and promote transformational leadership (Deming 1982). Deming’s ideas made their way to the USA, where they were labelled ‘Total Quality Management’ (TQM). The term was first coined by the US Naval Air Systems Command to describe their ‘Japanese style’ management approach to quality improvement. Feigenbaum (1951) is known as the father of Total Quality Management, having published his landmark book Quality Control (later retitled Total Quality Control) by 1951. TQM was seen as an extension of statistical quality control to include quality assurance and other quality activities. By 1959, the US Department of Defence had published a military standard, MIL-Q-9858, that defined quality programs for defence related organizations. This standard was de-activated in 1995 and replaced with ISO 9001. Deming’s original point about ‘improving forever’ began to appear in the TQM literature as ‘Continuous Quality Improvement’ (CQI). By the time ISO 9000 was revised in 2000, continuous improvement was institutionalized as a central principle in the standard and improvement program standards were established as ISO 9004:2000 (see below). Balanced Scorecard Balanced Scorecard (BSC) originated as a metrics-based management approach in which a manager has precisely the right information at hand for making decisions related to implementing strategy (Kaplan and Norton 1996). Like a pilot in a cockpit, a manager needs a console with the proper gauges and readouts that measure organizational position and progress. It implements the notion that ‘what you measure is what you get’ (Kaplan and Norton 1992: 71). While BSC is more than a quality improvement approach, it has been proposed as a focal point for an organization’s total quality improvement programs by defining and communicating priorities to all organizational stakeholders (Kaplan and Norton 1993: 135). ISO 9000 ISO 9000 is a family of standards for quality management, that is, activities to satisfy customer needs for quality, meet regulatory requirements and continually improve performance in pursuit of quality (ISO 9000: 2005). The standard includes

70

J. Pries-Heje and R.L Baskerville

‘guidelines’ and ‘auditable standards’. The main standard, ISO 9001:2000 regards quality assurance in various phases of product development, production, test and application. In its original 1994 version, ISO 9000 had a reputation for being oriented toward quality assurance rather than quality improvement (Pande et al. 2000). But the 2000 as well as the 2005 revision (ISO 9000:2005) was expanded to more prominently focus guidelines for quality management on performance improvements and to add an auditable standard in this area (ISO 9000: 2005). Important for software process improvement, ISO 9000 demonstrated that a general standard for quality processes could reach across a broad range of organizations and cultures and achieve adoption on a massive scale. It also provided a set of measures that engaged software process improvements as one of myriad kinds of products to which quality standards might apply. ISO 9000 is discussed in more detail below. Business Excellence Several major awards have been created to recognize the achievements of organizations in improving the quality of goods and services. One of the oldest is the Deming Prize in Japan, created by JUSE in honour of Deming’s important contribution to Japanese quality management. Two other prominent awards are the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award in the USA, created by public law in 1987, and the European Quality Award, created by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) in 2002. Together with the drive for ISO 9000 certification, broad discussions about the criteria for these awards have increased the focus on what quality really means. The Baldridge and EFQM awards shape their criteria based on rather different models of quality processes (cf. EFQM 2003; Tingey 1997). The scope of the EFQM model is to achieve Business Excellence by following nine specific criteria. Six Sigma The Six Sigma approach to quality management adds an emphasis on executive activity that is present in most of the other quality programs. This activity is necessary because the program uses integration of organizational functions as an avenue to quality improvement. Not surprisingly, it is defined as ‘a business system for achieving and sustaining success through customer focus, process management and improvement, and the wise use of facts and data’ (Pande et al. 2000: 43–44). It is, among other things, a blend of business process re-engineering and TQM. It contrasts with a typical and popular aim of having Zero Defects by setting a believable goal (see the discussion of Six Sigma on p. XX), and remaining focused on achieving this goal. An important idea for software process improvement is the benefit from rethinking and reforming software organizations for higher quality.

Design and management

71

Juran’s quality improvement process Juran is less of a quality program or methodology than it is an institutionalization of a detailed quality culture. Juran’s Quality Handbook (Juran and Godfrey. 1998) and the Juran Institute (http://www.juran.com/) are encyclopaedic resources for establishing quality in organizations, products, processes and human activities. While sometimes regarded as a concise program or methodology, Juran broadly encompasses many other distinct quality elements such as TQM and ISO 9000. Well-defined quality management is the essence of Juran’s view of any quality improvement program. Drawing from the basic tenets of financial management, quality management consists of a quality planning process, a quality control process and a quality improvement process. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) Integrated (CMMI) CMM is a framework characterizing a 5-step path for process improvement (Paulk et al. 1995). The path describes key processes at each of five levels. The description includes a number of goals at each level. An organization has to meet the goals at one level to reach the next. The CMM became so popular that a large number of other models using the same 5-step path have been invented. After some years, a large number of the CMM models were combined in CMM Integrated, or just CMMI. The major difference between CMM and CMMI is that CMMI includes systems engineering. This means that there are more key processes in CMMI, which makes it more useful in companies that are not only developing software but also combining software with hardware (for example, mechanics or electronics) (cf. Ahern et al. 2001; Chrissis et al. 2003). Bootstrap Within the world of software development the issue of improving software development took two directions around 1990. In Europe, software-developing companies took the ISO 9000 standard and adapted it to be used in a software world. In this adaptation, companies use ISO 9000-9003 which describes how to use the ISO 9001 standard for software. Simultaneously in the USA, softwaredeveloping companies chose to use CMM. Subsequently, a European research project developed Bootstrap (Kuvaja et al. 1994). Bootstrap combined the features of both ISO 9000 and the CMM. Furthermore the Bootstrap model was extended and adapted to include guidelines from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) PSS-05 software development standard. The major difference between Bootstrap and CMM (besides having other processes in the model) was that the step-wise improvement used in CMM was replaced by a continuous model. The continuous model unbundled key processes so that these do not have to move in groups to a given level. For example, under CMM, the six key process areas between level two and three should attain level three as a group. In Bootstrap, each process is

72

J. Pries-Heje and R.L Baskerville

Figure 5.3 Four agenda types: the perspective on outcome that drives the entire process improvement project.

measured and improved on a one-to-five scale, and an organization can improve those discrete processes that are most needed from a business perspective.

The agenda After having presented the process improvement approaches we now return to the core object of our analysis as represented in Figure 5.2. We start with the agenda. Agendas are set according to the process improvement goal and the general management viewpoint of an organization. Goals vary: some managers seek to achieve a balance in the organizational activities and resources for an optimum performance. Other managers seek to provide a direction for the organization, a path to a future, a desirable state. Organizational viewpoints also vary. Some managers see software organizations as quite similar and believe a set of universal solutions can be applied in most organizations. Others see organizations as highly unique instances, intersections of very particular resources and people (see Figure 5.3). Specific agendas ISO 9000 has a very simple agenda: OK or not OK. The organization is measured against a standard. Deviations are recorded and documented. The deviations then have to be corrected before an OK (that can lead to an ISO 9000 certification) is issued. In principle, analysts can view ISO 9000 as a binary process with two steps: Zero and OK. However, when an organization reaches ‘OK’, the process is not complete. In the most recent version of ISO (2000), the focus is on continuous improvement. This means that organizations go from a direction, from ‘not OK’ to ‘OK’, and to a kind of balance where they continuously improve what is found to be most urgent. The agenda in CMM is to improve an organization’s processes by moving them up to the next step on a five-step scale. If the organization fulfils the goals of all the six key process areas at level two then they are advised to undertake activities that will lead to fulfilment of the seven key process areas at level three.

Design and management

73

The agenda in Bootstrap is partly the same as for CMM; the organization is measured against a number of processes. But rather that just recommending that the lowest scoring processes should be improved, it is recommended to take business goals into account: ‘Business goals can be kept as the main push for process improvement’ (Kuvaja et al. 1994: 106). The Six Sigma agenda is focused on five sets of deliverables that correspond to the five steps in the Six Sigma roadmap. On the Six Sigma agenda we find the following five criteria: 1 An inventory of value-delivering activities. 2 Output and service specifications or requirements that closely track the factors that drive customer satisfaction. 3 Specific measurements that describe the current organizational performance baseline, the capability of each process, and descriptions of new or enhanced measurement methods and resources needed to support continuation of organizational process improvement. 4 An unstructured set of new designs or redesigns of processes in need of improvement. These process improvements regard new demands, new technologies, or increase speed, accuracy or cost performance. 5 A continuing organizational improvement program. There are process controls, clear statements of process ownership, response plans to adapt strategies and an organizational culture for improvement. The exact nature of each of these deliverable sets, and consequently the agenda for Six Sigma is context driven. Those involved in the improvement project have considerable leeway to define these deliverables according to the nature of the organization and its stakeholders. The agenda in EFQM is to strive for Business Excellence (EFQM 2003). The EFQM framework has nine criteria. Five of them are so-called enablers: 1 2 3 4 5

Leadership driving Policy and Strategy People Partnerships Resources and Processes

The other four criteria are commonly called results: 6 Customers 7 People 8 Society Leading to: 9 Key performance results

74

J. Pries-Heje and R.L Baskerville

Figure 5.4 Agenda examples.

Excellence is defined as outstanding practice in managing the organization and achieving results, all based on a set of eight fundamental concepts (one to eight above) leading to results (numbered nine above). The model recognizes that there are many approaches to achieving sustainable excellence in all aspects of performance. But at its core the model suggests that the eight–nine criteria should be balanced. The agenda in BSC embraces a pronounced vision, mission and strategy for the organization. Beyond this the BSC process seeks to set concerted objectives, measures, targets and initiatives in each of the four perspectives: learning and growth, business process, customer and financial. Finally, the agenda in Juran is to bring processes under statistical control. There is no specific direction, and it is contingent on what processes that are selected for control (see Figure 5.4). From agendas to technological rules Based on the analysis of each approach mentioned in Figure 5.3, we were able to formulate the following technological rules for ‘agenda’: If an organization wants to improve software processes in a situation where they: • • •

believe that ‘Best Practices’ for an improvement area can be identified trust the usefulness of practices from another organizational or national setting agree that their organization’s improvement effort will be similar to processes in companies,

then they should choose a universally applicable model, such as CMM or Bootstrap. If not, then they should choose a situated model, such as Juran or Six Sigma. If an organization wants to improve software processes in a situation where they: •

need a vision to motivate and give direction to their improvement effort

Design and management • •

75

believe that there is one and only one path to a future desirable state agree that their improvement effort should be directed by one single vision,

then they should choose a directing model, such as Six Sigma, or ISO 9000. If the answer to the third bullet point is that their effort should balance many organizational activities and resources so as to optimize performance, they should choose a balancing model such as Juran or Balanced Scorecard. In formulating the technological rules we took our core story (as represented in Figure 5.2) and tried to follow the general format by van Aken (2005a: 23): ‘if you want to achieve Y in situation Z, then perform action X’. Our analysis makes it possible to develop similar rules for the observation, analysis and synthesis processes (the other common elements in Figure 5.2). Observation is characterized as either detached or participatory, while analysis is characterized as either statistical or interpretive. In terms of modes of synthesis, we found that the various process improvement approaches either confined developers to a finite recommendation set, or allowed an open ended, generative style for recommendations. Some approaches used a synthesis approach that involved a distinct model for synthesis. Other approaches had less-defined synthesis stages that were dependent on the tacit knowledge or know-how of the developers.

Discussion It is important to note that technological rules are not rules per se. They do not have to be followed strictly. Rather, they can be used as design exemplars. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, exemplar means ‘the model, pattern, or original after which something is made; an archetype whether real or ideal’. Thus a design exemplar is a good general prescription, which has to be translated to the specific problem at hand; in solving that problem, one has to design a specific variant of that design exemplar (Van Aken 2004). Grounding the process improvement example in social science In terms of social science research methodology, this chapter reports work that is conceptual in nature; it theorizes design for the purpose of improving management of process improvement. The theorizing is grounded in an analysis of key published process improvement models, and the theoretical results are expressed as models and technological rules. The analysis of the published models was done following grounded theory coding techniques (Glaser et al. 1967, Strauss et al. 1998). Grounded theory is a qualitative social science research methodology that takes its name from the practice of discovering theory through grounding analysis in data. Grounded theory is best used in research where one has relatively ‘uncharted territory’, as is the case with the identification of technological rules implicit and embedded in process improvement models. Grounded theories are inductively discovered by careful collection and analysis of empirical data. That is, this method does not begin with

76

J. Pries-Heje and R.L Baskerville

a theory, and then seeks proof. Instead, it begins with an area of study and allows the relevant theory to emerge from that area through a three-step process of open, axial and selective coding (Strauss et al. 1998). Figure 5.2 is a pictorial representation of what emerged from our analysis. Practical implications of the process improvement example The set of matrices, technological rules and underlying principles exemplified here form a framework that can help organizations make sense of different normative models, and link them to their organizational and improvement goals. Our framework distinguishes between four significant dimensions: agenda, observation, analysis and synthesis. These dimensions can be used to examine an organization’s needs and then select an appropriate improvement model in an informed and systematic way. In practice, managers should try to place their own particular organization, its values and beliefs within the framework. Let us take ‘agenda’ as an example. A universal perspective embeds trust in maturity models such as CMM and Bootstrap, and more generally focuses on models of best practices and, consequently, models of general process problems. A situated perspective, in contrast, focuses on what software practitioners and their managers perceive as problems in their processes. Furthermore, the manager should consider their end goal. Is CMM level five regarded as an attractive state-of-the-practice in the organization? In general, models having a cosmopolitan vision provide an organizational direction toward better and better development. Such models assume that the organization is in a development ‘state’ and has the opportunity to change to an improved state. Usually, this goal also assumes that there will be further opportunities to improve, so the improvement process is seen as progressive. In contrast, harmonious standard models have a clear aim toward building a value system for quality among other important organizational values. A balancing strategy assumes that something is missing in the development organization: some activity, value, or element that must be added or restored in order to improve the software process. Testing with practitioners An earlier version of our analysis was presented at the European SPI Conference in 2003 (Pries-Heje et al. 2003). Further, approximately 25 practitioners from 25 different companies tested the model in a professional course on IT quality offered by The Danish Leadership Institute (DIEU). The evaluation of using the model was very good and the utility was judged to be very high (more than four on a scale from one to five, where five is best) Building on this by developing the idea of technological rules, we tested our analysis at the design science research conference (DESRIST) in Philadelphia in May 2009. One manager from Siemens tried the model and found it very useful. Another anonymous reviewer, however, pointed out that the technological rule’s recommendation for ‘agenda’ in his case pointed to an approach that was different

Design and management

77

from that proposed for ‘process’ (observation, analysis and synthesis). Our interpretation of this case is that the two candidate core stories that we put together in Figure 5.2 may not be seamlessly linked. Probably there is a hierarchy, so that the overall ‘agenda’ points to a set of approaches that become relevant after employing the technological rules underneath (for process), which should help re-negotiate the placement of the organization. But that is an open question, calling for further research.

Conclusion This chapter contributes a new and alternative perspective on how design science based management planning can be improved by involving design concepts. By applying design science research as a guide for designing general frameworks for decision making, that is to say, heuristics, we help managers (in their own perception) to approach complex, strategic decisions in a more circumspect and controlled manner. The approach is built on the concept of technological rules, a simple expression of a practical design theory that relates a general organizational situation to a general course of action. The concrete example, process improvement, illustrated and validated the approach. Our process improvement example also demonstrates a contribution to the perception of the managers themselves, and, more generally, the design science approach to designing management decisions highlights that design concepts have value for improving management activities, a field of work that is not usually associated with design. This strategic framing of organizational design decisions contributes to the general core of design research by demonstrating that technological rules are an operational form of managerial design theory.

References Ahern, D.M., Clouse, A. and Turner, R. (2001). CMMI Distilled: a practical introduction to integrated process improvement, Boston: Addison-Wesley. Chrissis, M.B., Konrad, M. and Shrum, S. (2003) CMMI: guidelines for process integration and product improvement, Boston: Addison-Wesley. Deming, W.E. (1982) Out of the Crisis, Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study. EFQM (2003) ‘EFQM: introducing excellence’, Eindhoven: European Foundation for Quality Management. Feigenbaum, A.V. (1951) Quality Control: principles, practice and administration: an industrial management tool for improving product quality and design and for reducing operating costs and losses, New York: McGraw-Hill. Glaser, B.G. and Strauss, A.K. (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory, Strategies for Qualitative Research, Chicago: Aldine Publishers. Gregor, S. and Jones, D. (2008) ‘The anatomy of a design theory’, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 8 (5): article 1. Available HTTP: .

78

J. Pries-Heje and R.L Baskerville

Hunter, R.B., and Thayer, R.H. (2001) ‘Introduction’, in R.B. Hunter and R.H. Thayer (eds) Software Process Improvement, Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society Press. ISO 2000 (2005) ‘Quality management principles – fundamentals and vocabulary’, Geneva, Switzerland: International Organization for Standardization. Juran, J.M. and Godfrey, A.B. (eds) (1998) Juran’s Quality Handbook 5th Edition, New York: McGraw-Hill. Kant, I. (1908) ‘The critique of pure reason (1781)’, in B. Rand (ed.) Modern Classical Philosophers, Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Kaplan, R.S. and Norton, D.P. (1992) ‘The balanced scorecard – measures that drive performance’, Harvard Business Review, 70: 71–79. —— (1993) ‘Putting the balanced scorecard to work’, Harvard Business Review, 71: 134–47. —— (1996) The Balanced Scorecard: translating strategy into action, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Kuvaja, P., Similä, J., Krzanik, L., Bicego, A., Saukkonen S. and Koch, G. (1994) Software Process Assessment and Improvement: the BOOTSTRAP approach, Oxford: Blackwell. March, S.T., and Smith, G. (1995) ‘Design and natural science research on information technology’, Decision Support Systems, 15: 251–66. Neave, H.R. (1990) The Deming dimension, Knoxville, TN: SPC Press. Pande, P.S., Neuman, R.P. and Cavanagh, R.R. (2000) The Six Sigma Way: how GE, Motorola, and other top companies are honing their performance, New York: McGraw-Hill. Oxford English Dictionary (1989) 2nd edn, OED online: Oxford University Press. Available HTTP: . Paulk, M.C., Weber, C., Curtis, B. and Chrissis, M.B. (1995) The Capability Maturity Model: guidelines for improving the software process, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Pries-Heje, J., and Baskerville, R. (2003) ‘Improving software organizations: an analysis of diverse normative models’, paper presented at the 2003 EuroSPI conference, Graz, Austria. Shewhart, W.A. (1931) Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company. pp. 501. —— (1939) Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control, ed. W. Edwards Deming, Washington, DC: the Graduate School, the Department of Agriculture. p. 155 Simon, H.A. (1996) The Science of the Artificial, 3rd edn, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Strauss, A. and Corbin, J. (1998) Basics of Qualitative Research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory, 2nd edn, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tingey, M.O. (1997) Comparing ISO 9000, Malcolm Baldrige, and the SEI CMM for Software: a reference and selection guide, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, Vaishnavi, V. and Kuechler, W. (2004) ‘Design research in information systems’, updated 16 August 2009. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 November 2009). Van Aken, J.E. (2004) ‘Management research based on the paradigm of the design sciences: the quest for field-tested and grounded technological rules’, Journal of Management Studies, 41: 219–46. —— (2005a) ‘Management research as a design science: articulating the research products of mode 2 knowledge production in management’, British Journal of Management, 16: 19–36. —— (2005b) ‘Valid knowledge for the professional design of large and complex design processes’, Design Studies, 26: 379–404. Walls, J.G., Widmeyer, G.R. and El Sawy, O.A. (1992) ‘Building an information system design theory for vigilant EIS’ Information Systems Research, 3: 36–59.

6

Knowing through design Poul Bitsch Olsen and Lorna Heaton

This chapter views design research as a process of knowing, and the design perspective as a social process of knowing. The disciplinary perspective is interpretive sociology, as applied to organizations particularly through Weick’s concepts of sensemaking and enactment. We illustrate our argument through a study of design processes in management activities, using quotations from interviews with two safety managers in very different fields. This text contributes to an understanding of design as an ongoing, collective activity of improvement.

The choice of a design configuration is also the choice of the team that will develop it. (Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons 2001)

There are almost as many definitions of design as there are designers. For example, we can read that design is ‘a goal-directed problem-solving activity’ (Archer 1964), ‘a creative activity [which] involves bringing into being something new and useful that has not existed previously’ (Reswick 1965), ‘the imaginative jump from present facts to future possibilities’ (Page 1966), ‘the human power to conceive, plan, and realize products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of any individual or collective purpose’ (Buchanan 2001), and so on (see Hubka and Eder [1996] for a review of definitions of design). Rather than try to produce a new or composite definition here, we prefer to highlight some recurrent, central elements that appear to characterize design across disciplines. First, if we return to the Latin roots of the words ‘design’ and ‘research’, we see that designare means ‘to designate’; this suggests a forward-looking, prospective activity. Cicare means ‘to go around’, from circa. With time, it has come to refer to a methodical or systematic way of acquiring knowledge. This accent on the process and practice of knowing, rather than on the result, is the first element in our characterization of design research. Leading design thinker Nigel Cross has been instrumental in establishing design as a discipline over the past 40 years. He notes that there is a lot of art in the practice

80

P.B. Olsen and L. Heaton

of design and warns against trying to make design into an exact, replicable science (Cross 2008). Nevertheless, he is a strong proponent of design research that, he argues, can be useful in three forms (Cross 1995): • • •

research into design, by various kinds of observation, e.g. protocols research for design, to create tools (especially computer-based), design methods and forms of modelling research through design, e.g. abstraction from self-observation and other observations during designing, hypothesizing and testing.

All these types of design research imply an understanding of design as a process. This chapter addresses the ‘research through design’ approach, in the sense that here we have the engine of not only application of new and better knowledge but also the ‘subtle context of implication’ (Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons 2001: 97) into the area where design knowledge is relevant. It illustrates how trust is a precondition for design in organizations, and introduces a distinction between contexts of application and implication in the study of design. This allows design research to be more than copying, planning and counting, or the construction of theories that claim to correspond to objective methods of design. It reveals intentional, radical changes in knowledge through designing activity.

Design as process What characterizes the design process, or designing, as we will call it? Attempts at definition across fields as varied as engineering, architecture, fine arts or management generally agree that designing, as a process is creative. This creative process is often described as imaginative, intuitive, interactive, recursive, opportunistic, innovative, ingenious, unpredictable, refined, striking, novel, reflective. Designing is also goal-directed, a response to a perceived need. It is a pragmatic activity intimately related to the world around us. This response is often productive – to build or produce something. Alfred Schutz (1964: 75) reflects on the use of ‘modo future exacti’, where active people act on the basis of projects that they imagine as accomplished, as a part of their organizing of world order. They act and learn that something different happened, and then reformulate their project on the basis of the new worldview and act again. There are goals and intentions, but limited ability to predict, so acting is more like a series of social experiments. This is similar to the notion of enactment as acting that accomplishes the organizing process, where people design their practical world (Weick 1979: 130). Goaldirected designing may also be formulated as an attempt to make up for lack or absence. Whether formulated as a positive production or as a compensatory activity, designing has a connection with the world. This means that experience – past and in the moment – is important. This leads to another characteristic of designing: it is, to some extent, idiosyncratic. There may be a variety of personal solutions to a given problem. None is necessarily the best, all are possible, and some are better than others. Schutz

Knowing through design

81

(1964: 64) reflects with Mead how worlds are experienced in immediate contact (‘zuhanden’ in Heidegger’s term) and beyond reach (‘vorhanden’ in Heidegger’s term) and can thus exert influence directly or indirectly. One aspect of designing is to bring the world within reach, and therefore to bring oneself into direct contact with persons and things that are involved in this particular project. If a variety of responses or solutions are allowable in any given context, this implies the presence of multiple perspectives. Perspectives are the result of different experiences and life worlds, which are produced in and through interaction. While all may share the goals of a project, the different individuals involved may have different approaches to the situation. What is more, these perspectives are not fixed and may change and evolve over time as conditions (and experience) change. Longino points to plurality as a feature of contemporary Western science and argues for local epistemologies rather than a single unifying model or methodology, suggesting that a shared standard of empirical adequacy is sufficient: ‘If methodological rules and procedures are not claimed to be self-evident and contextindependent, then their rationale . . . must lie in the aims and goals of the inquiring community (or in its traditions)’ (2002: 187). Gherardi and Nicolini (2002: 434) point to the necessary integration of different epistemic practices through discursive practice, which results in an actual decision, which may not be canon, but eventually prevail as one decision among a cacophony of views. Designing has been characterized as knowing through making or doing. It happens only as it is instantiated in the moment. While it may be possible to build up a bank of design knowledge through experience, this experience does not take the place of designing. Although designing is informed by awareness of previous, related research, design knowledge is useful only when it is enacted. The process of designing involves a nonlinear response to a complex, relevant problem. This nonlinearity may be iterative, as when designers go through different moments of exploration with periodic returns to reflect, review and readjust. An iterative model suggests a sort of spiral in which the design takes form progressively and comes closer and closer to the set goal. Opportunistic actions can be taken when a likely avenue opens, but designers do not normally go off at any tangent. We suggest that designing is not necessarily iterative in the progressive sense, however. In our view, it may involve a series of jumps that participants hope will move things along but without certitude as to where the end may lie. Trust is, in this sense, a precondition for designing. Finally, designing can only come about within a field of constraints, both social and technical. If there are no limits to locate a potential design – the problem, the resources available, the goal – there will be no design. Here again, the social nature of the process is vital. Nowotny and others have expressed the changed conditions for creating quality by innovation in a ‘fragile future’, a reasoning that relates also to the complete sense of doing design and design research: ‘Driven by the capacity to aspire, it [innovation] does not predetermine either content or goal. Instead, it promises to provide new experiences that must measure themselves against and hone themselves on an equally changing reality to lead to robust results’ (Nowotny 2008: 9).

82

P.B. Olsen and L. Heaton

A short example may help clarify these different characteristics of designing. We draw on the field of safety management (described in more detail later), in which the design of rules and procedures is intimately caught up with how they are used in social situations. Suppose there is a problem with the speed of machinery creating hazards and stress for workers on the factory floor. The safety manager needs to change organizational practices in such a way that organizational productivity concerns are reconciled with the organization’s responsibility for maintaining wellbeing in the workplace. He must take into consideration the physical characteristics of the factory, the forecast work flow, safety requirements and regulations, characteristics of materials used, cost considerations, and so on. All these constraints will influence the direction of his actions. The safety manager may typically visit the site, and talk to various employees. He may draw on elements of his previous work in other contexts (bank of experience) in elaborating a plan. He will then have to discuss the plan with management and refine it. The safety managers know to some extent what must be done to change old habits and produce a serious improvement in organizational behaviour, particularly in management attention and strategies. Still the means to that end are uncertain. The activities must be constructed along the way, and they must all have the support from the peers and top management. The design process is systematic in that it follows a general pattern from definition to conception to realization within an envelope of possibilities. The actual path that is taken within this zone is infinitely variable, however, and does not follow a rational plan.

A few words on theoretical assumptions and method We view design as a product of human activity. In this interpretive, phenomenological perspective, both theoretical and methodological reflections can improve the quality of knowing. Following the reflection provided by Schutz (1967: 72, 76), the perspective that frames a situation is produced by the user of knowledge, whether that person is a researcher, manager, architect or other participant. Intentionality is a key element of designing activity. Rather than staying in people’s minds, however, we argue that these frames are actualized as activity in social context, resulting in goods and standards created in the social world. This links with Weick’s work on sensemaking and enactment as acting that accomplishes the organizing process (1979). In this sense, the lens we apply in our work is both phenomenological and sociological. In terms of method, we are guided by an assumption that all general theories and phenomena are constructed by micro situations in which the phenomenon is enacted. (Collins 1981: 81) (Knorr-Cetina 1981: 25). Though we do not observe and interpret micro situations, we assume that this is the construction process of designing activity. Design has to happen somewhere, and it is generalized through the influence of repetition or dominance in other situations. We assume, consequently, that changes are produced when micro situations are aggregated into time, space and numbers. This in turn implies that radical design has occurred. As part of a project studying new directions in safety management, we interviewed a number of safety managers about how they participate in the creation of

Knowing through design

83

new standards for safety management. In the rest of this chapter, we quote from interviews with two safety managers who have an understanding of their work as transformative and radical. One manager works in a serial production manufacturing company with international units in Europe and China (Coloplast Inc.), while the other works for a financial service firm, with 4,400 employees in several offices (Nykredit Inc.). In both cases, the safety managers were responsible for safety development throughout their organizations. The managers were interviewed about how they participate in a particular practice – top safety management – and their standards of organizing, and how they consider aspects of significant quality improvement activities for safety and well-being in the workplace. The interviews focused on actual processes, organizing and practising new goods, and new standards that developed in practice, that is they have taken steps to advance the practice of safety management, and thereby created more productive management activities that improve welfare in their companies. Trust and robustness were not addressed specifically but they emerged in the managers’ discourse of use and meaning. We use quotations from the interviews to support our theoretical argument. We view them as reports from the field on actual practices of organizing, not as expressions of intentions.

Safety management as a design activity Safety management has its roots in institutionalized obligations for safety and mental health at work. For several decades, it has been structured by legal demands and external involvement in problem identification and control. The internal motivation for safety management was strongly influenced by external stakeholders, who contributed to the specification of risk categories and organizational activity and formal structure. Since the 1980s, stronger emphasis has been given to the maintenance of well-being at the workplace, supported by stronger understanding of risk factors created by work organization and management behaviour. In this perspective, where risk and diseases are undesirable by-products of organizing activity, management decisions sometimes produce illegal situations (most often neglect, which results in illness, invalidity and death). In short, efficient, ethical management must incorporate mindful attention to safety and well-being in the organization. They must maintain ongoing reflection about the relationship between organizational activity and the employees’ and managers’ mental health. Far from being a successful and well-established competence in advanced companies, this is an activity gradually finding its way into management discourse. Examples of relevant discussions are presented by Heckscher (2007) about managing speed and complexity in knowledge-based businesses. Over time, safety management has developed into a particular management field that may be described as a practice with its own goods and standards. We are interested in safety management because it is a process of defining health and safety. This definition is new and original; it is integrated into the companies’ worlds at the management level, and explained as management and leadership objectives, whereas it was previously marginalized in collective management discourse.

84

P.B. Olsen and L. Heaton

The safety managers we refer to are active at the top management level and their actions affect their entire organizations. Some safety managers are in the midst of a change process, where their points of reference move from an institutionalized, rationalizing, planning and apparently predictable perspective to a perspective where they must create and design a valid understanding of their task, based on internal reasoning – moral, ethical, rational and appropriate for the relations that the company wants to develop. Their responsibilities also extend to things such as the relationship between work and family obligations. While not all safety management work is design activity, we argue that their creation of new standards and procedures is design. The safety managers must construct organizational understandings and procedures that change old habits and make sense of aspects that managers did not need to care about before. In that situation, the safety manager may contribute to the change process, that ends up with results in a better coexistence between business and management practices and the producers’ well-being and safety. The product is a changed organization and a new definition of safety in a particular context. Safety managers design the safety in their organizations by designing epistemic structures and cultures. An institutional perspective sees safety and welfare as a planned, predictable and foreseeable phenomenon that can be constructed on the basis of experience and solutions that have worked in other situations. A more radical perspective approaches safety and welfare organizing as a dynamic, ongoing accomplishment based on steps that involve top management because they can include radical reformulations of how to understand the well-being of the firm with its employees and tasks. It may be a dangerous activity, because convergent sensemaking is a difficult task. Top managers must be convinced, and peer managers must accept. It is easy to make enemies among peer managers, and all managers are also dependent on strong support among top management, and resourceful organizing activities, that make sense for all involved: managers and employees. Our look into radical safety management design activity relies on the premise that an unfolding situation cannot be managed as a rational system, but must rather be enacted by involving considerations of an experimental process, which can be influenced but whose outcome cannot be predicted with certainty. Purpose and intention are important elements that are actualized by active leadership. This leadership includes active and, to some extent, creative work on the process, in order to overcome path-dependency in organizing processes. Safety managers maintain their preparedness for enactment and for dealing with uncertainty by being active in situations where trust is the mediating tool for decisions. This supports the ‘willingness to forego planning and rehearsing in favour of acting in real time’ (Weick 1999; 2001: 299) that is a condition for radically influencing in the future. Safety managers’ activities always involve intersubjective negotiations and processes based on acknowledgement that different participants bring different perspectives to the situation. They are embarked on a process of continuous learning, punctuated with some remarkable points.

Knowing through design

85

Implicit judgement A key element of design is the implicit judgment of quality attached to it. Not all products qualify as design objects and not all processes are design. Designing requires an element of mindfulness, the thoughtfulness based on cues signalling that one’s frame and theory of the situation should be altered (Olsen 2008: 296; Weick et al. 2001: 42). In the remainder of the chapter, we will elaborate on three concepts with which to reflect on how quality is produced and what it means. We will address notions of quality, robustness and trust and relate them to a detailed example of safety management. We use the term quality to refer to improvement of standards in a field, while designing is defined as creating better organizational understanding. Robustness refers to effective knowing – better integration of the new understanding. Quality is, as mentioned, the orientation that participants have when they create new perspectives and accomplish enactments of them. The creation of significant powerful new microsituations, imply trust between the involved managers.

Slow design – designing to know The safety managers see the contextualization of knowledge as a very difficult as well as very important part of their activity, since the design of safer behaviour is a constantly unfolding process that always involves active contributions from others. ‘The choice of a design configuration is also the choice of the team that will develop it’ (Nowotny et al. 2001: 155) is one of the many formulations about design that expresses its social and personal character. Within our one-hour interviews, both safety managers make several references to the micro-social character of the establishment of better social structures (Collins 1981: 81). They design an ‘ongoing social improvement without end’, together with some more or less convergent co-managers and producers, and in doing so, they create remarkable milestones in the organization. Trust is a precondition for socially integrated improvements. Swift trust, as well as a generalized climate of trust, allows the safety managers to imagine new and improved configurations, so that the entire organization is enabled to care about particular aspects of relevance for safe organizing. The trusting expectation of other participants’ approval of the general aim and experiments towards it, and work on trusting relations, enable the safety managers to see opportunities for improvements throughout the organization. This is slow design. Each remarkable milestone has a long and complex history, which involves several agencies and many different types of interactions. Each develops because of the safety managers’ goal-directed orientation and the whole organization’s ability to develop in this process. Convergence is established through a process of understanding and enacting possible steps. After the milestone is noticed, it illustrates cultural achievements that will form the grounds for new designing activity.

86

P.B. Olsen and L. Heaton

The safety managers are in some respects more concerned about implication than application. They try to create initiatives that will solve quite abstract problems, like consequences based on new business activities and future organizational constructions. They are not always looking back to exemplary experiences they can copy, but to examples they can imagine meeting in the future, such as organizational activity in China and upgrading of management’s understanding of future safety issues outside the institutionalized idea of safety and welfare at work. For both the manager and the civil engineer, working in the future is not an issue of planning, but of making things real for other managers and producers. At the same time, they design the foundation for future safety activity. They see themselves as contributors to processes where they have an opportunity to formulate the idea of safety, if they are good enough and pay attention to tools that are available for them. The collective aspect becomes very real, when they talk about how they see the position that has been given to them in relation to others. The safety manager in the finance company knows that the other managers depend upon him, and that he has a tremendous and in some respects unframed responsibility for formulating management’s understanding of safety and consequently the ways safety can be managed. The other manager tries to understand and explain the situation for safety policy in an internationally expanding company. Nobody tells her what to do, but she is responsible for creating safety in the expanding company. The former designs the idea of welfare in the financial company, and the latter formulates the idea of a humanist perspective in a manual, highly repetitive production system. Both are working from the perspective of implications, while the milestones are what appear to be the actualizations of these implications.

Trust and radical designing We noted earlier that designing, although goal-directed, is a non-linear process fraught with uncertainty. Trust is an element that describes how people relate to each other, when they act ‘in order to’ (Schutz 1932: 86) achieve something in contexts where rational knowledge, well tested routines and relations, and calculated risk-taking are insufficient to predict what will happen. Möllering ‘prefers to speak of “suspension” as the process that enables actors to deal with uncertainty and vulnerability’ (2006: 110). Trust is a state of positive expectation of others that can only be reached when routine and reflexivity are combined with suspension. Studies of ‘swift trust’ by Meyerson, Weick and Kramer suggest that ‘the trust that unfolds in temporary systems is more accurately portrayed as a unique form of collective perception and relating that is capable of managing issues of vulnerability, uncertainty, risk and expectations’(1996: 167). They reason that these issues can be managed by variations in trusting behaviour. Their methodological point is that trust is produced through the use of it, which brings us back to Möllering’s reasoning (ibid.: 196), that the ‘leap of faith’ is a significant way to be active in the social world, and to create relations – both trustworthy and those that will be avoided. This openness and the leap of faith are illustrated in the actions of the managers when they strategize on behalf of others, and establish robust ideas or theories

Knowing through design

87

where they were not before. For instance, one manager explained how he threw himself into a radical activity. In the beginning of working with this, I had to “kick in some doors”, that is, there was no doubt that it was not a high status area in any way. It has been built from the ground and what we have done is well documented. This manager refers to a trustful openness that cannot be secured by guarantees, but is helped along by the collective formulation of what Simmel termed ‘a hypothesis certain enough to serve as a basis for practical conduct’ (Simmel 1950: 318). The manager makes several references to his experience of organizing without a previous, competent organizing plan, such as when he reflects on the designing work of giving ideas to managers and workers at the top and bottom levels of the organization, as one step in creating a new value system, and in particular in influencing top management’s perspective on their obligations: Another thing is the whole attitude in the company, how do we change that into what we want it to be? So a big part of my job is the thing about influencing the organization both upwards and downwards, influencing in order to reach a different point of view regarding some of these elements. The process included several new, radical and unforeseen activities, such as management replacement, new spaces for work norms and so on, that were not an implemented strategy, but rather the product of learning and reflection, created experiment after experiment. This leap was supported by what Simmel termed the ‘affective, even mystical, “faith” of a man in man’ (1950: 318). The safety manager says: [I]nstead of us spending a lot of time on having safety groups in each local department, as you are supposed to according to the legislation because we are a clientele company, we made a company agreement with the professional organizations . . . where we organize differently with the aim of strengthening the safety and health work in the group. One of Schutz’ students, Harold Garfinkel, views trust as something that is required to maintain interactional reciprocity, something stronger and better than shared beliefs that supports social life in situated action. The term trust refers to the need for participants to maintain a commitment to coordinate the background expectations of situations. It includes the idea that people tend to assume that all parties in an interaction use the same strategies and tactics for producing order (Garfinkel 2006: 30). These are not rules but methodologies in use (ibid.: 94), and they are preconditions for reciprocity in the relationship (ibid: 88). People must work on congruence, in order to create collective and appropriate goal-oriented activity (Caroline Nevejan [2007: 23, 237] uses this idea of trust, when she assumes that trust is ‘the qualitative standards for settings of social interaction’, when she in

88

P.B. Olsen and L. Heaton

her study tries to establish the connection between the design of presence (which is a material virtual construction) and the design of trust. The safety managers use trust as they collectively work to understand the future of their projects. They often refer to their achievements and communications as something that must create congruence. He (the head of HR) gets a briefing on what we are working on at the moment, where we are going and what are the long term goals that we are working towards. Then we discuss different topics, so we have a weekly meeting where we sit down and say, ‘how does the world look right now? What kind of things are ahead right now in the near future? What kind of contributions are we to make in different places? Which articles are we to write? What kind of research do we need in this process? Trust is an important element in establishing commitment to background assumptions and expectations, even in the face of disagreement on the details. We had a fun talk, probably one and a half years ago, where I and some people from human resources said: Well, who is in charge of the psychological work environment? The people from human resources thought that it was definitely me, because it had to do with work environment. But who is in charge of wellbeing? That was a human resource thing. But is that not the same? . . . So that was quite a fun dialogue finding out: okay if we do not even agree on who has the overall responsibility of creating systems and setting directions and limits of acceptance – then we indeed have a job to do. I work very much on the basis that what we do have to make sense [. . .] and that it improves our company.

Quality improvement in design When we see design as a process, quality is something that is always in the making. Stable quality in a design makes no sense, whereas quality improvement is something that is always at the core of value creation and designing. Karl Weick discusses this in relation to organizational design (Weick 2000: 171) and improvization (Weick 1999; 2001: 299). He employs a definition of the designing activity, which relates to quality improvement: ‘To design is to notice sequences of action that are improvements, call attention to them, label them, repeat them, disseminate them, and legitimize them’ (Weick 1993; 2001: 88). He notes that improvement includes several epistemological aspects. Some are about the iterative aspect of the process, namely that thrownness – a term from phenomenological philosophy that describes how actors are embedded in a world that precedes them – must be considered as a circumstance, caused by the necessity to act. All managers, including safety managers, live with the need to act without appropriate knowledge. In these situations, it is better to accept things and make do, than to try to control or do

Knowing through design

89

symbolic management (which is about to use the formal information systems that are in the hands of managers, sometimes without legitimacy among the productive crowd, and often without appropriate relevance). In the face of uncertainty, experimenting with theorizing between elements is necessary. Experimenting implies that acting accompanies experience and reflection in the research and design process. An unknown or ambiguous environment calls for continual adjustment in order to continue to relate authentically to the issue, context and theory. To notice and be critical to experiences, ‘mindfulness’ (Weick 2001: 42; Olsen 2008: 300) is the managers’ most important tool during the designing process. As the project progresses, they enact possibilities that were not there before. Our interviews with safety managers illustrate all of these epistemological conditions, and the managers formulate integrated strategizing methods they use for creating improvements throughout their design process. We mention some of them here. Thrownness: ‘I took it all from scratch, took it all and threw it into the air and said “can any of this be used at all?” – there was not really much.’ To discover instead of structuring: ‘Those management values . . . were adjusted with some of the things that we discovered in connection with the psychological work environment survey, so as to say here are some new dimensions that we have to teach our managers to relate to.’ Sensemaking is about plausibility: ‘For example, in the merger between trade and farming that we made last year, it would be interesting to say up front: what work environment consequences will this have for the people sitting in the two areas and how can we initiate activities which can counteract [problems]?’ Looking back is relevant: ‘That is what we have to get better at is working with behaviour, with safety management as a kind of behaviour, as a part of the company and to render visible the safety work – that is something that we are not that good at in the Company.’ Develops over time: ‘So this is very much an area [work environment] where I see that you have to be very active. You need to be very forthcoming all the time to change and get that understanding through [in the company] and that does not happen after one meeting – it happens after many long meetings or over a longer period of time.’ General orientation rather than specifics, specifically where identity is about continuity: ‘If we are to do something and we are to do it purposefully and it has to be consistent then we must have some kind of nationwide coordination’. Every manager is an author: ‘Top management [. . .] is one of the places where we definitely have had a more vivid debate over the last years, which has made it necessary for me to develop my way of communicating and explaining these things.’

Safety designing for robustness Suchman (2000) describes the multiplicity of perspectives and the negotiations involved in building a bridge in the San Francisco area. Deciding on which type of

90

P.B. Olsen and L. Heaton

bridge to build requires persuasive storytelling about the future, and the alignment of a large number of actors, from engineers, to city governments to local citizens with sometimes very different requirements and frames of reference. Suchman also illustrates how material artefacts such as technical drawings or environmental impact statements are brought to bear in shaping the choice of the ‘preferred alternative’. A durable solution is one which best responds to the ‘inevitably hybrid, practical, political, technical, contested, negotiated and situationally specific character of organizing a large modern project’ (Suchman 2000: 322). Just as a bridge should be designed in a particular way if it is to be built in an area that is earthquake prone, designing safety must reflect the heterogeneity of the context that characterizes its social environment. This is the point that Nowotny (1999, 2000, 2004; Nowotny et al. 2001) develops using the concepts ‘robust’ and ‘robustness’. Robustness is a relational concept, which refers to an important problem about knowing, namely that knowledge must suit the location and context in which it is used. This constraint is so powerful that even [s]cientific objectivity will have to become localized and contextualized, fitted into the specificities of each case in which it might be and most likely will be challenged. It will succeed, if the outcome is more robust knowledge – robust also in view of the many heterogeneous factors, expectations, challenges and contestations which are now, wrongly, labelled non-scientific. (Nowotny 1999: 16) Knowledge that is socially robust is significant for the understanding of social situations. Not only is it appropriate in a given context of application, it is also robust in its context of implication. This refers to the qualitative change that occurs when we question the implications of formulating a problem in a particular way, and how it might affect the ability of this knowledge to be robust beyond the present situation. When new designing is meant to develop and make sense in the future, one has to be aware of implications for all possible related parts that will influence how the design will be integrated into future processes, be they organizational or about safety and welfare. If the aims and goals of a design are to be successful, they must have some kind of relevance for the actual users. For example, if one sees a company as dependent on many stakeholders, among them both employees and managers, then the relevance of the idea of well-being becomes obvious for the practical manager and employee. From this perspective, implication becomes both important in terms of outcome and a condition for high quality management and business stability. The problem in itself represents risk of many kinds if its consequences (implications) are ignored. (Nowotny et al. 2001) In our view of ‘research through design’, we want to understand how safety managers solve problems that they cannot predict. We want to know how they make important aspects of working life easier to relate to for top managers and for the productive employees, and how they try to relate the urgency for stability and bottom-line results. Each must be understood on its own qualitative basis.

Knowing through design

91

The safety managers organize their interventions based on their understanding of the situation. They evaluate any number of factors – economic, human, psychological – and take into consideration, not only the immediate situation but also the larger environment. For instance, this manager refers explicitly to the surrounding society and colleagues: After having spent six months discussing this in-house we said, “well we simply need to get a hold of [. . .] research based in this field” and we also had a very strong wish to get an input meaning some way of measuring the company with the surrounding society and our colleagues. . . . You have to have great understanding of the environment that you are working in and that can be a bit different from country to country [. . .] and then you have to be a pioneer, but you also have to believe in it, [. . .] believe that it has an effect, believe that work environment is important, you have to have a fundamental belief that you are making a difference. This belief in the mission of safety management and the relevance of their work is a driving force for the managers (robustness of problem orientation) and they hold to it even when others may not agree: ‘[I]n many places, [safety] is an area of low priority – it is not that much in focus.’ Of course, they appreciate recognition by others, either in their companies or by external agencies. ‘We just launched a new strategy that runs until 2012 [. . .] and here I have not at any point been asked “But what does it cost?”’ ‘[The work environment] has changed from being something that you – by the way – also had to remember being part of the agenda.’ They are careful to think about the potential consequences of possible actions on various levels, for their companies’ profitability and work environment, as well as for workers’ quality of life. ‘[F]irstly we think of business and when we have thought about business then we look at what kinds of work environment consequences this will actually have.’ Another manager notes: ‘We can, for example, see connections between a high work pace, high quantitative demands and the “workfamily conflict” and the fact that you can start shedding light on these connections makes it possible for us to plan our future efforts and our future management development accordingly.’ While the managers must develop robust knowledge that is useful in the immediate context of one branch or another of their companies, they also seek to develop tools and models that will enable them to apply what they learn in one situation to another. What is missing in my opinion is [. . .] that [we] are able to add some financials to why it is reasonable to work with this [work environment]. We see that there is a clear connection between sales figures in the centres and the psychical work environment survey. The concern for transferability and comparability between contexts using some kind of metric is a recurrent theme.

92

P.B. Olsen and L. Heaton What I have very much learned is finding methods in which I can show how things are in a good way, and make sure that it is mapped in the same way on all sites. The problem earlier on was also that they mapped in one way in Thisted and in another way in Hungary.

The safety managers also appreciate the difficulty of sharing their deep contextual knowledge. One manager explains the importance of providing a detailed portrait to management. ‘Top management would have preferred to get four bullets rather then a 30 page report, but on the other hand, I know that they are not sufficiently familiar with it and they would not have understood it if they did not read the explanations . . . . ’ They must walk a line between providing detailed information and providing the background that will enable interpretation. I have learned that it is important to be able to give [top management] an overview that shows: Are we on the right track? . . . Ideally there has to be some kind of model or method – something engineer-like. Here again, the managers seek to go beyond the individual situation to find knowledge that will be robust in its context of implication. When asked if there are approaches which are the same for safety management – and selections of safety managers – in different countries, a manager answers by referring to attitudinal characteristics rather than specific processes: Yes [. . .] to be persistent that is an absolute must and to be innovative. Independence is extremely important, because you are very much alone in this job on the site. Managers do feel that they are participating in one integrated practice. They find the internal value from the conviction that their work is relevant and that they are solving important problems locally. Their production of robust design knowledge brings them external validation. ‘I can see that we are put on the map. Quite a few articles are written about us [. . .] in connection with work environment.’

Conclusion The terms that explain the need to conceive of design as a process use elements of phenomenology and collective coexistence. These include the social, enabling trust work that provides designers with the impetus to go beyond what is taken for granted and incorporated in the organizational and societal culture. Trust is performed wherever improvement is tested in everyday organizational life. Major improvements are designed in micro-social situations with the participation of resourceful, oriented participants such as reflexive and socially oriented managers. The designing process includes the creation of better knowledge and framing of the object, which establishes a changed knowledge culture with certain

Knowing through design

93

new openings to epistemic judgements based on revised priorities and assumptions. These radical developments become real when they are shared by the participants. In this chapter, we have elaborated on notions of quality and robustness, where robust design is based on better knowledge in the sense of local understanding and social efficiency. Relevant understandings of context are fundamental to designing, in particular when the design is related to social activity like organizing and management. In their interplay between attachment to a goal and ongoing reflection on robustness and context, organizational designers deal in particular with implications of organizing activities, more than with the application of single pieces of better knowledge. Their trust in co-participants’ aptitudes for social orientation enables them to undertake radical designing in unforeseeable situations. In demonstrating how designers are more concerned about the implications of their radical experiments in the present than with the application of past experience into the future, we have drawn attention to the distinction between contexts of application and implication in the study of design, arguing that the implication perspective supports a better contextualization into the future activities, while a focus on application results in decontextualized problem-solving. The design process is established as a knowing process, where redefinitions of the field in question become the major activity, related to collective sensemaking and organizing. Robust designing is a radical change that is well integrated through widespread improvements on the basis of local conditions, such as understanding improved health and welfare in the workplace.

References Archer, L. B. (1964) Systematic Method for Designers, London: Council for Industrial Design. Buchanan, R. (2001) ‘Design and the new rhetoric: productive arts in the philosophy of culture’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 34 (3): 183–206. Collins, R. (1981) ‘Micro-translation as a theory-building strategy’, in A. Cicourel and K. Knorr-Cetina (eds) Advances in Social Theory and Methodology, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 81–107. Cross, N. (1995) ‘Editorial’, Design Studies, 16 (1): 2–3. —— (2008) in ‘Interview with Nigel Cross’ by Neeraj Sonalkar, Ambidextrous, Issue 9. Online. Available HTTP: < http://ambidextrousmag.org/issues/09/cross.html > (accessed 20 May 2009). Garfinkel, H. (2006) Seeing Sociologically: the routine grounds of social action, Anen W. Rawls (ed.), Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Gherardi, S. and Nicolini, D. (2002) ‘Learning in a constellation of interconnected practices: canon or dissonance’, Journal of Management Studies 39 (4), 419–36. Heckscher, C. (2007) The Collaborative Enterprise, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hubka, V. and Eder, W.E. (1996) Design Science: introduction to the needs, scope and organization of engineering design knowledge, London: Springer. Knorr-Cetina, K. (1981) ‘The micro-sociological challenge of macro-sociology: towards a reconstruction of social theory and methodology’ in K. Knorr-Cetina (ed) Advances in Social Theory and Methodology, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 1–47 Longino, H. (2002) The Fate of Knowledge, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

94

P.B. Olsen and L. Heaton

Meyerson, D., Weick, K.E. and Kramer, R.M. (2006) ‘Swift trust and temporary groups’ in R. Kramer and Tom R. Tyler (eds) Trust in Organizations: frontiers of theory and research, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Möllering, G. (2006) Trust: reason, routine, reflexivity, Amsterdam: Elsevier. Nevejan, C. (2007) ‘Presence and the design of trust’, PhD Dissertation, University of Amsterdam. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 29 May 2009). Nowotny, H. (1999) ‘The need for socially robust knowledge’, TA-Datenbank-Nachrichten, no. 3–4 (December 1999): 12–16. —— (2000) Unsaubere Schnittstellen: Ein Gespräch über Transdisziplinarität, Zeit und Komplexität’, questions from Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Otto Smerkar, GAIA: ecological perspectives for science and society, 2 (June 2000): 93–100. English preprint online. Available HTTP: (accessed 7 December 2009). —— (2004) ‘The potential of transdisciplinarity’. Online. Available HTTP: (accessed 25 May 2009). —— (2008) Insatiable Curiosity: innovation in a fragile future, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2001) Re-Thinking Science: knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity Press. Olsen, P.B. (2008) ‘Mindful innovation’, in Fuglsang, L. (ed.) Innovation and the Creative Process, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 295–310. Page, J. K. (1966) Contribution to Building For People, Conference Report, London: Min. of Public Buildings and Works. Reswick, J. B. (1965) Protspectus for an Engineering Design Center, Cleveland, OH: Case Institute of Technology. Simmel, G. (1950; first published 1908) The Sociology of Georg Simmel, New York: The Free Press. Suchman, L. (2000) ‘Organizing alignment: a case of bridge building’, Organization, 7 (2): 311–27. Schutz, A. (1964 [1976]) Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, and the German translation 1976, same publisher. —— (1967) The Phenomenology of the Social World, a translation of Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sociale Welt published in Vienna 1932, Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, —— (1972) Hverdagslivets Sociologi (The Sociology of Everyday Life), Volume 1, Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel, pp. 3–48, 207–66. —— (1976) Hverdagslivets Sociologi (The Sociology of Everyday Life), Volume 2, Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel, pp. 64–120, 169–79. Weick, K.E. (1969; 2nd edn 1979.) The Social Psychology of Organizing, New York: McGraw-Hill. —— (1993) ‘Organizational redesign as improvization’, in G.P. Huber and W.H. Glick (eds) Organizational Change and Redesign, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 346–79 (also in Weick 2001). —— (1999) ‘Improvizations as mindset’, Organization Science, 9 (5): 543–55 (also in Weick 2001). —— (2000) ‘Quality improvement: a sensemaking perspective’, in R.E. Cole and Scott, W.R. (eds) The Quality Movement and Organization Theory, London: Sage, pp. 155–72. —— (2001) Making Sense of the Organization, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Weick, K.E. and Sutcliffe, L.M. (2001) Managing The Unexpected, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

7

Makeshift users Julien McHardy, Jesper Wolf Olsen, Jen Southern and Elizabeth Shove

This chapter draws on thoughts from user-centred and participatory design and participatory art as well as ideas from practice theory, actor-network theory and material semiotics to investigate the conceptual status of users in the process of designing. Designing is understood as a distributed process of drawing together and stabilizing otherwise fluid objects, systems and interactions between many different actors. We investigate the role of users through three case studies from the NEETs public service design, PalCom pervasive computing and Running Stitch participatory art, chosen to illustrate a broad range of methodological approaches and applications. The contribution of this chapter is to explore the proposition that thinking of users as make-shift and processual entities, rather than as preconstituted figures that actually exist in the ‘real’ world provides a method of integrating concepts of user, utility and users with dynamic accounts of design.

Introduction Techniques for user involvement are increasingly popular in research and design, partly because they promise to enhance relevance and legitimacy, especially in relation to interactive products such as services, software and installations. This generates questions about exactly how concepts of the user feature in the processes and products of design (see also Chapter 2 by Simonsen and Hertzum). Meanwhile, the figure of the user is rarely questioned and often simply taken for granted. This chapter explores methods of representing users in three cases, from user-centred design, participatory design and participatory art. It does so in order to show how the conceptual status of the user changes when we understand design and art as ‘relational’ practices. Relational means that practices, instead of entities of their own, are distributed among many actors and many kinds of actors and these are only held together through the relational practices we investigate. While using and use obviously go on beyond the sphere of design, in this chapter we focus on the user as mobilized and understood during the design process. Our departure point (which we share to varying degree with Chapter 8 by Lindstrøm, Chapter 9 by Holm, Søndergård and Hansen, Chapter 12 by Samson and Chapter 13 by Haldrup and Bærenholdt) is that the world is constantly brought into being through the reciprocal relation of things and people, people and people

96

J. McHardy et al.

as well as things and things. In such a distributed model of becoming, design and contemporary art are relational interventions that cannot be reduced to processes of giving form to matter. We return to this idea of designing towards the end of the chapter, having first investigated the figure of the user, having considered intrinsic tensions surrounding this ‘character’ and having commented on how processes of use and using could be reconceptualized in a more dynamic manner. This enquiry moves in three steps from a static to a progressively more dynamic, relational account of users. First, we argue that users never equal people but are better understood as representations of people from a particular perspective and for a particular purpose. Users and their representations are not out there to be discovered by designers. Rather, they are assembled through the process of design in relation to different actors, ideas and constraints. Having deconstructed the user as a preassembled and singular figure we suggest that people, users and user representations are altogether different creatures. Second, we turn to our three case studies to show that singular representations of the user clash with the ‘real’ diversity of people. This leads us to suggest that a clear division between people, users and their representations cannot always be sustained in practice because each concept partially contains the other. Third, we suggest that users are not monodimensional characters, nor are they readily distinguishable from people. Instead, they flicker between and thus bridge these conceptual differences. In conclusion, we present the concept of make-shift users as a means to propose that user representations could be employed like prototypes and used to make visible and negotiate tensions, constraints and possibilities between those involved in a design project as it evolves. In the following section, we draw on three examples from our work in service design, pervasive computing and participatory art to investigate how users are conceptualized in these fields. Our account of these cases and the traditions on which they draw is deliberately simple: in generalizing we necessarily leave out subtle interpretations and the situationally specific complexities, limitations and challenges of the user figure.

How users were invented In the early 1980s, the idea that the mutual interplay of people and things had an impact on the ongoing making of the world became prominent in parts of social sciences, computing, design and contemporary art practices. Although this conceptual move took place at about the same time across several fields, it still plays out differently. In many areas of design, the shift of focus from the object to the user gave rise to user-centred design. In software development, around the same time, participatory design methodologies spread, as it became obvious that the design of meaningful systems required an understanding of human activities (Bødker et al. 1991: 140–52; Floyd 1987: 192–209; Greenbaum et al. 1991: 45–91; Kyng 1994: 3–9; Kyng 1998: 15–40; Mogensen 1994). Participatory design methodology focuses on interaction, experience and user involvement whereas other approaches to system development focus on automation and rationalization. The idea is that software and technology are co-developed by possible future users, and that this

Makeshift users

97

allows developers to gain a richer understanding of the practices for which they are designing. The consequences of employing such a methodology are explored through our example of pervasive computing. In parts of contemporary art, meanwhile, concepts of participation developed from their early roots in the happenings, situationist events and the avant-garde theatre of the 1960s (Bishop 2006: 10–13), and have subsequently given rise to practices described as new genre public art (Lacy 1995: 19), relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 2002: 14–19) and dialogical art (Kester 2004: 9–10). Bishop identifies three central themes in these developments that to some degree also hold for the neighbouring fields of participatory design. These include: a desire for empowerment of the audience; a sharing of authorship; and a concern for community and collective responsibility (Bishop 2006: 12). In this setting, the relationships between artist, audience and communities are the subject and material of the work, as the audience become participant, collaborator, contributor or even co-author. Our example of participatory art demonstrates these relationships. In very different environments, including those of public service provision such as health and education and in academic research funding, providers have been encouraged to engage with users, understand users and involve users in setting agendas at every level (Caswill and Shove 2000). In situations in which some people make decisions on behalf of many unknown others, the rhetorical figure of the ‘user’ comes into view. This use of users is undoubtedly associated with neoliberal regimes of accountability and with a general unease about the power of professional service providers. This aspect is made clear by Tony Blair (the former British prime minister) who demanded that public services be ‘redesigned around the needs of the user’ including various sub-tribes such as ‘the patients, the passenger, the victim of crime’ (Burns et al. 2006). How users are understood is thus of political and practical relevance. Our example of a public service design project illustrates such power relationships. The question of how people and things are mutually constituted in and through day-to-day practices is a topic of some importance, particularly in science and technology studies and in some forms of practice theory. While such ‘relational’ approaches have yet to filter through to design on other scales, we argue that they have the potential to do so. The following represents a modest attempt to link these related, but so far disconnected ways of conceptualizing use, people and their representation as users.

Knowing the user To know your users (consumers, clients, voters, readers) is the first demand of user-centred design. In response, a wealth of participatory design methods are put forward as tools for gaining knowledge of the user. The call to ‘get out there’ to observe real users in the wild implies that the world is inhabited by pre-constituted users who exist independently of the designer’s intervention. Assuming that this is so, the only difficulty is to find the right user representatives and to interpret their latent and hidden needs accurately so that they can be addressed and met by

98

J. McHardy et al.

design. This understanding of users as figures that inhabit a world outside of design is problematic because, as the design theorist Redström puts it, ‘People, not users, inhabit the world. A “user” is something that designers create’ (Redström 2006). User-centred design tools such as the ‘persona’ are used to create distinct and specific user profiles that serve as a point of reference for design, discussion and decision-making processes within a design team (Cooper 2004; Pruitt and Adlin 2006). Such rhetorical tools can be useful in focussing a design process. However, their limitations become obvious in the design of complex products such as services and software where multiple and temporally specific users continually compete with one another; and in cases where no pre-constituted user can be identified because entirely new use practices have yet to emerge. Static conceptions of the future user are especially inappropriate where the framing of a problem (and the consequent user) is the main concern and where ‘the user’ simply cannot be known in advance. Much the same applies in pervasive computing where the users are as ubiquitous as the technology. In participatory art, the impossibility of fully knowing the audience has provoked dialogical works where engagement with audience as co-author happens throughout the entire project (Kester 2004: 24). In these and other cases, exactly how future users are represented is of political and practical relevance, because it influences who comes to speak for whom and with what consequences for the making of artefacts, artworks and services. As these initial observations indicate, users, as representations, are intertwined with questions of power and it is hardly surprising that the specification and involvement of ‘users’ often leads to tensions in practice. These tensions can be partly understood as conflicts between a necessarily singular and static model of a user with the multiple people and realities involved in the making of work in practice, which the figure of the user supposedly represents.

Putting users into practice In the three examples considered throughout the chapter, we investigate these tensions and the multiple and shifting processes involved in doing design. In the process, we make the case for a more relational concept of the user. We begin with an investigation of a public service design project, in which we argue that users are never straightforward images of situated people but are better understood as politically framed representations established in relation to a specific task or set of relations. The consultancy project sought to improve the ‘unsatisfying service delivery’ of a public service program designed to bring young people back into the labour market. The project consisted of a series of workshops with ‘management’, ‘front workers’ and ‘users’. It quickly became obvious that the young people enlisted as ‘users’ resisted their role as such and that there were, in any case, multiple, often conflicting notions of what being a user entailed. Following the investigation of the service design project, we continue our discussion with a study of a pervasive computing project and its multiple and temporarily bound user populations, the complexity of which is barely captured by the image of a user. The large scale European Union funded PalCom project (PalCom 2008),

Makeshift users

99

sought to develop an open software architecture for pervasive computing that allows end-users to configure applications according to their specific situations and practices. Since the overall design was not created for a particular setting, a more general understanding of the strategies people employ to make sense of technologies in use had to be achieved. This led to considerable tensions between specific and generic conceptions of users because participatory design processes tend to work with models of users in a specific context. Finally, we touch upon the participatory artwork Running Stitch by the artists Hamilton, Southern and St Amand (2006) which provides an alternative account of how a thing and its audience are mutually produced.

Rejecting and dealing with multifaceted user roles The focus in our first example is not on who assembles the seemingly homogeneous groups of key stakeholders within a specific site, even though this is often a key aspect of service design, but on how the concept of the user relates to the appearance of many different actors on the stage of design. A first view reveals that the boundaries between different groups are not at all clear-cut and, on closer inspection, the groups themselves prove to contain different and conflicting voices. Additionally, designers can never fully know all those involved and therefore do not deal with ‘stakeholders’ as such but with their representatives and spokespersons: with those who come to stand for certain groups that come to stand for the diversity of actors involved. Tensions between multiple, imagined and performed user roles dominate the following observations from a consultancy project relating to a work reintegration program for young people categorized as NEETs – ‘Not in education, employments or training’. The brief of the project was to improve the service delivery of the NEETs program. The design consultancy was brought in to facilitate discussion about the future direction of the program between senior managers from the public service agency in charge, social workers from the various and partly competing providers and their ‘clients’ through a series of three workshops. Workshop participants were chosen to represent the different stakeholders: management, front line workers and clients. Individual participants were selected for reasons of convenience and more often than not because they were considered particularly innovative or articulate. Not all providers were invited but only those the management considered especially innovative and in turn those ‘NEETs’ who were invited were especially capable young people who were likely to contribute, stand the pressure of a cooperative workshop and show their providers in a good light. Although the cast of characters that came together was selected according to mixed and improvised criteria, this group was still taken to represent the ‘key stakeholders’ – despite excluding other key people such as parents. Before they even turned up at the workshop the ‘young people’ participating had already gone through a range of translations and displacements in order to be constructed as NEETs representatives (for the concept of translation see Callon 1986).

100

J. McHardy et al.

Tensions between the NEETs constructed in preparation for the workshop and the young people who appeared to represent them became obvious when the question was raised of how they should be addressed. Neither the term ‘user’ nor the unlucky abbreviation ‘NEET’ with its doubly negative connotations, first with the defamatory Glaswegian term ‘Ned’ (Non Educated Delinquent) and second with the idea of being needy, seemed like a suitable form of address. It is in the confrontation of users with those they supposedly represent that the rhetorical nature of ‘the user’ as an interested and situated framing of ‘the other’ becomes apparent. A present person always extends beyond their necessarily restricted role as a user: as we all know, such clear boundaries are lost and dissolved in individual life stories. No wonder, then, that the young people participating shyly insisted that their situated stories were not captured or that they refused to fully sign up to their role as NEETs. This resistance to being represented as one-kind-of-user with one set of needs and desires can be read as a resistance to the symbolic violence that singular representations do to the multiple realities they supposedly represent. People resist being defined in terms of a single category, this being one reason why it felt wrong to address the ‘young participants’ as NEETs, users or clients – categorizations that help to navigate and order relations and accountability but that never fully represent those to whom they refer. A different aspect of the ‘user’ role is revealed by the Running Stitch artwork where visitors to an exhibition take a mobile phone and GPS for a walk. Their co-ordinates are sent live to the gallery where they are visualized as a projected line, which is stitched by hand into a large canvas, contributing to an evolving

Figure 7.1 Detail of stitchers – Running Stitch, Hamilton, Southern & St Amand, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden. © Jen Southern 2009.

Makeshift users

101

map based on movement (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2). This participatory method can be seen as an ‘open work’ (Eco 2006: 21) and involves an invitation to contribute within a system devised by the artists which defines the overall structure, but leaves the specifics of the final visual outcome to the audience. This process is not necessarily dialogical in Kester’s terms in which artists might establish an ongoing relationship with a place and a community involved in the actual artwork (Kester 2004: 22–25), but it does offer an open mode of participation that allows for an audience to experience the work through their actions which affect and contribute to the way that the work evolves. In this case, it is not only that there are many users, but that they simultaneously figure as consumers and co-producers, and illustrate that users’ roles are not only multiple but also change dramatically over the duration of a project. The PalCom project illustrates both of the aforementioned features at once in that it suggests that users have multifaceted as well as constantly shifting roles. The project was characterized by a high degree of uncertainty between various professions. Moreover, from the very beginning of the project, present users, domain professionals and possible future users were heavily involved in the design process. The constituted users ranged from police inspectors, fire department officers, doctors, nurses and application designers to software architects. It was primarily through this continuous interplay between a wide spectrum of actors that multiple modes of user involvement came into view.

Figure 7.2 Running Stitch – Hamilton, Southern & St Amand, Fabrica, Brighton, UK. © Jen Southern 2006.

102

J. McHardy et al.

In theory, a key strength of the participatory method adopted in this project has to do with the way future users and their needs are co-shaped and governed by a diverse set of resources and parties. The first main party, the researchers and designers, contribute to the shaping of (future) user representations through their knowledge of novel technologies, software and their capabilities as well as their possible effect on the use practice in question. Furthermore, they drew upon sociological theories of human and non-human relationships and on knowledge of large-scale ethnographic field studies of similar work practices. Constructed from these materials, the future user is shaped from a ‘standpoint’ where the researchers and designers ‘look at’ an imagined user. The second main party, professionals and clients bring highly situated experiences and in-depth knowledge of technologies and software currently used in their work practices to the site of software design. Typically, professionals and clients shape the future user figure by ‘looking out’ from the perspective of a future self. These twin tracks give a sense of the complexity of relationships between and among the participants involved and of the ways these play out in ‘making’ future users. In reality, the overall conception of the problem area changed, and the common understanding achieved between the developers and the other participants was not necessarily shared by anyone else. Even though the development of participatory design over the last twenty years has shown it to be a very effective technique for empowering both users and developers, (Büscher et al. 2004: 194–200; Kristensen et al. 2006: 162–65; Kyng et al. 2006: 301–10; Shapiro 2005: 30–35) this is perhaps only so when designing for known contexts and specific users. As we have seen, such methods are limited when dealing with pervasive technologies that have the potential to migrate into every aspect of our daily lives, and that keep accelerating such that we can no longer be certain of how use and context will be defined. Through the lifespan of PalCom we have realized and shown how the project was populated by many different representations of users the characteristics of which changed over time. We have argued that these figures are conceptualized in relation to the specific perspectives of different project collaborators and their understanding of the task at hand. In the project itself, the multiplicity of users, all claiming to be true representations, led to various tensions and posed questions about how any one representation could ever be meaningful when designing for non-task directed end-user programmable software. In the following section, we return to the NEETs example in which we find a possible solution to the challenges described above.

Users as creative devices What if we were to take a specific and clearly constructed user as a catalyst for discussion and not as a matter of fact: would this be a method of working with singular ‘user’ representations and of using them to reveal rather than hide the multiplicity of people typically involved in complex design projects? If so, decisions could be negotiated with reference to the partial understandings that different participants bring to a project. Although this would not resolve all tensions, it might avoid

Makeshift users

103

some of the more extreme forms of reduction that arise when monodimensional user representations stand for multiple people and realities and consequently limit possible design interventions. The clichés that lie at the heart of any user representation were made obvious in the representation of NEETS in the form of life size spray-painted cardboard silhouettes complete with the obligatory cap, bling and tracksuits that marked these characters out as lazy-violent-drugged-with-noexpectations-for-the-future. However, these cardboard figures were not treated as ‘users’ as such, but were instead employed as props to provoke discussions and to explore ways in which individual ‘NEETs’ perceived themselves in relation to these cliché figures. These user caricatures catalysed a negotiation of multiple and partial perspectives precisely because they were not viewed as an accurate representation of what the user is like. Rather, these were clearly constructed rhetorical devices against which possible future identities could be discussed. Working back from these users-in-progress, workshop participants talked about what services might help to make specific and desirable future selves possible. The cardboard figures were not so much a representation as a stereotype through and against which a diverse range of situated and necessarily partial perspectives were negotiated and partly aligned. Equally, they mattered as things and not simply as abstract concepts: their reduced graffiti-like style made it obvious that they were not meant to be real and thus opened them up for contestation. The cliché of a user in this case proved to be more than capable of revealing and giving voice to some of the multiple hidden people and tensions. To make differences and tensions visible is of specific relevance in a relational understanding of design in which user roles are not clearly assigned but are instead understood to be multiple and distributed. From this perspective, any of the stakeholders in the NEETs workshops could be defined as a user in relation to some other stakeholder. For example, the provider is a user of the infrastructure of the organization, which in turn is a user of the provider’s services that are used by the young people. The negotiation of user roles in relation to other people and things becomes an important part of design precisely because the user-producer relation is blurred. The PalCom and the NEET stories demonstrate, in their different ways, that users can never fully represent ‘the other’: in effect the ‘user’ is a fictional construct useful in coordinating and sometimes stabilizing effort in a design project, but not to be mistaken for an ‘accurate’ representation of a person. The lesson from the NEETs project is that users might be deliberately designed as rhetorical devices and redefined as props for the negotiation of emergent relations between people and things. The way in which participatory art reflects on the evolution of audiences through participation provides another angle on this topic and helps to show how such ideas might be translated into practice.

Audience and artwork as co-evolving In the art installation Running Stitch, the artwork and the audience were mutually constructed and constantly evolving. The observation that things and those who use them are reciprocally produced is central to the ‘relational aesthetic’ debate in

104

J. McHardy et al.

fine art (Bourriaud 2002: 25–29) but has yet to be discussed in the field of design (Julier 2009). The collaborative team in the participatory art work Running Stitch, including artists, programmers, designers, curators and audiences, followed an iterative development process involving repeated cycles of user testing, exhibition and evaluation to develop the software for mobile phone, GPS and visualisation necessary for the exhibition: all of which formed a protracted network of activity (Suchman 2000: 3). The meaning of the work was not simply in the final stitched canvas, but developed through interactions within this network of activity, which often included a situated audience. The degree of ‘openness’ in this process varied at each of these iterative stages of development. In effect, the relational emergence of the user and the object were not directly translatable to any one single moment of ‘design’. In participatory art, both the work and the situated audience as a group come into being in relationship to each other in a live context. Before that time, a general description of the audience is never complete because it only exists in the specific circumstances and conditions of engagement with each work: who it attracts, the context, the content, what is demanded and offered, constructs a situated audience. Running Stitch was originally commissioned by Fabrica Gallery in Brighton, UK, and in part grew out of the relationship between artists and gallery and the efforts the gallery invests in creating a strong dialogue with its audience. The success of Running Stitch relied on the situated knowledge of the curator and gallery staff to conceptually frame the work and to begin to construct a specific and informed audience for it as it went along. When the exhibition opened, this partially constructed audience became a situated audience of two kinds: individuals who actively participated and inscribed themselves and their sense of place into a communally made work, and a secondary audience who merely viewed the process in the gallery, but who were often drawn into conversation with the primary audience on their return from a walk. The open nature of the work allowed for multiple interactions and interpretations in action. In this activity, the role of an individual member of the audience flickers between that of a subjective walker experiencing the work, and of expert user producing a visual experience for the next participant (Hayles 1999: 25–30). We made a similar observation that the role of users also ‘flickers’ in the PalCom project, however, this process is clearer in the Running Stitch project in that significant aspects of the work were revealed and created by the participants. Through their participation the audience transformed the artist’s intention to create an experience into an object, the final stitched canvas that has both personal and collective significance. Throughout the iterative and open process of development and in an exhibition, which is framed, yet flexible and open, the participant or user is integral to a network of activity that produces the work. The audience remains provisional in nature as its members feel their way through the experience of the work. We suggest that this open model of working, in which the user is continually moving between roles, can be used reflectively in the development of other design processes.

Makeshift users

105

Make-shift users We began by discussing ‘the user’ as a figure that helps to hold socio-material relations together in the design process. We then suggested that the move towards a more relational understanding of products, services and practices challenges this conventional understanding. If design is viewed as a relational process, control does not lie in the hands of a single actor, but is instead distributed between multiple participants, including things and people, all of whom are continuously changing. The proposition that accountability is distributed is incompatible with a representation of the user as a self-contained figure whose needs can be assessed and catered for in advance. The mantra of ‘knowing your users’ prior to an intervention no longer rings true because users in a sense come into being through design interventions. This is not to say, that people do not exist independently from design and art interventions but to stress the point that people are only rendered users in relation to a specific intervention and cannot be known as such prior to it. Thus static concepts of use are of little value in projects where outcomes and users are unknown and where they evolve throughout the project. To identify or maybe better to produce a user is thus as much a part of doing design as is the creation of the artwork, the service, or the software. In addition, this argument suggests that designed objects and services are partly produced by their users – this is so to the extent that software, services and participatory art only ‘exist’ in their use. Participation remains important in relational understandings of design and art, but for different reasons. Instead of viewing it as a means of identifying the needs of pre-constituted individuals it figures instead as a site of struggle, and as a process that is relational and therefore made and remade in its negotiation. As such, it is not intrinsically democratic or good but only has the potential to become so. To be clear, we do not argue against the use of users but stress the point that attempts to be true to the user ironically obscure the diversity of situated people and divergent interests. This simple conclusion brings us back to the question from which we set out: can users be designed and used to facilitate on-going negotiation between different perspectives? In replying to this key question, we begin by briefly recapping the figures we have encountered so far. Our analysis has brought to the fore a diverse set of terms that are related to, or categories of, the user such as situated people, involved professionals, stakeholders, user spokespersons, actual users, end-users, co-participants, co-producers, test-users and future users. Initially, we tried to distinguish people (as others not framed as users but still ‘out there’), users (these being people framed as users in relation to a specific task or object) and user representations (as placeholders and translations of users). Similar attempts to hold users and people apart can be recognized in common propositions such as real or actual users versus mere representations. The cases discussed above show that while users do not translate into people in any straightforward way, the categories of users and people cannot be neatly separated. The figure of ‘the user’ has different but co-existing conceptual status, sometimes featuring as an actual person – a real user participating in a design project – and as a

106

J. McHardy et al.

spokesperson taken to represent all the other users ‘out there’. As they slip between these positions, users are gradually and continuously established, but never entirely or finally defined. Users may thus be understood as actors that translate in a makeshift and more explicit fashion between different assumptions of what people and things are like in relation to the project in question. Explicit understanding of users as necessarily and continuously constructed would bring the hidden and tacit assumptions of which users are formed out into the open, making them available for contest and negotiation by and between all those involved. Free from the constraint of being real and stable such make-shift users could be employed in much the same way that prototypes are used – that is as idea triggering artefacts that help to incrementally fathom and negotiate the potential forms and configurations of an evolving design (similar ideas are developed in Chapter 12 by Samson in regards to urban planning). As well as opening ‘the user’ up for debate, this idea of a make-shift figure breaks up rigid and directional design processes that advance from stable representations of need to finished products: as such, it allows for a more playful and creative approach in which the making of prototypes and users develops reciprocally. Although this chapter focuses on processes of design it is important to remember that similar relations unfold beyond the point at which design is ‘done’. In other words, tensions between people and users, and between ever-evolving reconfigurations and necessarily constraining scripts give form and stability to possible futures beyond and probably even without design.

Conclusions In the cases discussed, just as Ingold (2000: 205) suggests in relation to the production of wheat, ‘production is tantamount to dwelling: it does not begin here (with a pre-conceived image) and end there (with a finished artefact), but is continuously going on’. In keeping with this idea, we have argued that the three examples of NEETs service design, PalCom software and Running Stitch participatory art can be understood as relational interventions into networks of activity that involve both people and things – they are not simply about giving form to matter. In the NEETs example, a single stereotypical version of a user is pushed so far that it becomes an obviously constructed caricature, a move that helps break up the singular figure of ‘the user’ and that reveals diverse and until then hidden user roles. In the Running Stitch project, participation was seen as an end in itself rather than the means, and in the PalCom project the various prototypes were designed with a certain user in mind even though the underlying software framework was open enough to admit, permit and discover multiple users. In neither of these cases are users taken to be real – in all they are continuously developed in a make-shift fashion. The multiple user roles encountered are continuously switching back and forth as people, things and their representations mutually evolve. We have also shown that user representations have the potential to disguise or to engender negotiation of multiple perspectives depending on whether they are taken to be real or makeshift constructions.

Makeshift users

107

In response and conclusion, we introduced the concept of make-shift users – an idea that highlights the continuously constructed and dynamic character of user representations, and that opens these up to debate and negotiation between the different parties involved in a design project. The idea of make-shift users does not resolve the intrinsic tensions at stake, but in making the emergent nature of ‘use’ and ‘the user’ more explicit it helps avoid some of the violence that singular and static user representations do to the multiple and dynamic realities they represent and enact.

References Bishop, C. (2006) Participation, London: Whitechapel. Bødker, S., Greenbaum, J. and Kyng, M. (1991) ‘Setting the stage for design as action’, in Greenbaum, J. and Kyng, M. (eds) Design at work: cooperative design of computer systems, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 139–54. Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Les Presses du Réel. Burns, C., Cottam, H., Vanstone, C. and Winhall, J. (2006) RED PAPER 02: Transformation Design, London: Design Council. Büscher, M., Eriksen, M.A., Kristensen, J.F. and Mogensen, P.H. (2004) ‘Ways of grounding imagination’, in Clement, A., de Condio, F., Ostveen, A., Schuler, D. and van den Besselar, P. (eds) Eighth Conference on Participatory Design: artful integration: interweaving media, materials and practices, New York: ACM Press, 193–203. Callon, M. (1986) ‘Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of Saint Brieuc Bay’, in Law, J. (ed.) Power, Action and Belief: a new sociology of knowledge?, London: Routledge, 196–223. Caswill, C. and Shove, E. (2000) ‘Introducing interactive social science’, Science and Public Policy, 27: 154–57. Cooper, A. (2004) The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Indianapolis, IN: Sams. Eco, U. (1962) Opera aperta, Bompiano, Milan; trans. Anne Cancogni (1989) The Open Work, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; reprinted in Bishop, C. (ed.) (2006) Participation, London: Whitechapel. Floyd, C. (1987) ‘Outline of a paradigm change in software engineering’, in Bjerkness, G., Ehn, P. and Kyng, M. (eds) Computers and Democracy: a Scandinavian challenge, Aldershot: Dower Publishing, 192–210. Greenbaum J. and Kyng, M. (eds) (1991) Design at Work: cooperative design of computer systems, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hamilton, J., J. Southern and C. St Amand (2006) Running Stitch. Online. Available online at: (accessed 29 September 2009). Hayles, N.K. (1999) How we Became Posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill, London: Routledge. Julier, G. (2009) ‘Value, relationality and unfinished objects: Guy Julier interview with Scott Lash and Celia Lury’, Design and Culture, 1: 93–103. Kester, G.H. (2004) Conversation Pieces: community and communication in modern art, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kristensen, M., Kyng, M. and Palen, L. (2006) ‘Participatory design in emergency medical service: designing for future practice’ in Grinter, R., Rodden, T., Aoki, P., Cutrell, E.,

108

J. McHardy et al.

Jeffries, R., Olson, G. (eds) Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 06, New York: ACM Press, 161–70. Kyng, M., Nielsen, E.T. and Kristensen, M. (2006) ‘Challenges in designing interactive systems for emergency response’, in Amowitz, J., Gaver, W., Mackay, W., Sutcliffe, A. and Verplank, B. (eds) Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems DIS 06, New York: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 301–10. Kyng, M. (1994) ‘Scandinavian design: users in product development’, in Adelson, B., Dumais, S., Olson, J.(eds) Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: celebrating interdependence CHI ’94, New York: ACM Press, 3–9. —— (1998) ‘Users and computers: a contextual approach to design of computer artefacts’, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 10: 7–43. Lacy, S. (1995) Mapping the Terrain: new genre public art, Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Mogensen, P. (1994) Challenging Practice: an approach to cooperative analysis, PhDthesis, Daimi PB-465, Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University. PalCom (2008) Palpable Computing: a new perspective on ambient computing. Online. Available online at: (accessed 29 September 2009). Pruitt, J. and Adlin, T. (2006) The Persona Lifecycle: keeping people in mind throughout product design, Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Redström, J. (2006) ‘Towards user design? On the shift from object to user as the subject of design’, Design Studies, 27: 123–39. Shapiro, D. (2005) ‘Participatory design: the will to succeed’, in Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing: between Sense and Sensibility CC 05, New York: ACM Press. Suchman, L. (2000) Located Accountabilities in Technology Production, Lancaster: Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University. Online. Available online at: (accessed 29 September 2009).

8

Deep translations Maria Duclos Lindstrøm

Actor-network theory and expert studies comprise the theoretical background of this chapter. The concept of design is defined in actor-network theoretical terms as shaping knowledge by ‘drawing things together’, that is, as the continuous re-shaping and co-production of knowledge, relations and artefacts. The illustrative case example introduces a design problem about communication of economic expert knowledge related to the work of the Danish Welfare Commission. The case illustrates how economic expert knowledge moves from an economic specialist context to a public and political context through a series of important translations or re-shapings. The contribution to a general core of design research is to introduce actor-network theory as an analytical and conceptual approach to investigate problems of translation and knowledge transfer in design.

Introduction Today, issues of communication and presentation of expert knowledge have grown to be a central part of the work of the modern economist engaged in public expert advice. Contemporary economic experts are not only expected to be specialists within their field of expertise, but also increasingly to engage in making their expert knowledge available to a general public. This new public role of the expert frames what in expert studies and Science, Technology and Society Studies (STS) is called a ‘third wave’ of science studies (see Collins and Evans 2002; Maasen and Weingart 2005; Irwin and Wynne 1996). The central focus of the chapter is to look into the multiple transformations which expert knowledge undergoes as it interacts with political decision making as well as with a general public. In this particular context, design processes are broadly understood as the technologically mediated processes of translation by which expert knowledge makes it way into political decision making and meets the general public. This understanding of design processes is deeply rooted in actor-network theory, also called the sociology of translations, which is an interdisciplinary research field originally located within Science, Technology and Society Studies. The central aim of the article is to contribute to a general core of design research through introducing

110

M.D. Lindstrøm

actor-network theory as an analytical and conceptual approach to investigating problems of translation and knowledge transfer in such design. This is important because design research needs to qualify the ways a design concept differs from the rationalist idea that controversies over legitimacy, disagreement over values and uncertainty about futures can be overcome through an accurate, thoughtful and (rational) action. The chapter proceeds in the following way: the first section discusses what design means in the context of expert studies. Then the chapter presents how actor-network theory – focusing on translations, technological mediation, and hybridization – can contribute to the conceptualization of design as well as to the understanding of how economic expert knowledge enters the public realm. Following these theoretical specifications, a case is presented in order to illustrate how knowledge transfer involves a series of important translations. The chapter ends by concluding that as such issues as technology, rhetorics, uncertainty and controversy are conceptually integrated into design theory, design research has much to contribute to our understanding of knowledge transfer.

Design and expertise New ideas do not fly solely on their own wings; the scientist is a communicator as well as a discoverer – sometimes even a missionary. Herbert Simon (1991: 63)

Economic experts can be said to be designers in two rather different ways: as shapers of futures and as shapers of knowledge. As shapers of futures, economic experts take their expert role as social engineers, applying their understanding of economic mechanisms and their mastering of econometric models of measuring, ordering and foresight to make political decision making seemingly more rational. It is this understanding of design which applies to the idea of the social engineer or the social designer. The field of expert studies has largely developed in opposition to this overly rational and technocratic ideal of the relations between economic expert knowledge and public policy expressed in the idea of scientific management (Hoppe 1999; Albæk 1995). But the purpose of this chapter is not to engage in a general critique of the relations between science, expertise and political decision making. Instead, the purpose is to look at the concrete practices of selected economic experts working to communicate economic expert knowledge. As we heard, economic experts are today expected to be more than expert advisors, qualifying political decision making with scientific input. They are not only expected to talk to policy makers, but also to engage in dialogue with a general public (Irwin and Wynne 1996). This is to secure transparency, but also as it has been quite frankly formulated by the Danish Welfare Commission: ‘To prepare the ground for future welfare reforms’ (Gjerding 2006: 2–3). As a consequence, issues of communication and presentation have become a central part of the work of the modern economist engaged in public

Deep translations

111

policy. In this sense, the economic expert today is not only a shaper of futures, but also a shaper of knowledge. We can qualify the meaning of this second role of the expert by means of a design vocabulary. At its most general level, design is about giving form. Design is about finding an appropriate and appealing form to serve a particular function. This most general understanding of the concept of design can easily be applied to what economic experts do as shapers of knowledge: Economic experts serve as designers when they give their economic knowledge a particular, appropriate and appealing form to further public understanding of economic problems. To be sure, the two different meanings of design – the shaping of futures and the shaping of knowledge – cannot be clearly seperated. In a social scientific context like expert studies, design is obviously not merely about imposing form on matter – posters, visualizations, knowledge items, social meetings and so on. When experts shape knowledge, they always also participate in shaping particular relations between science, politics and citizens. French sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour has argued that such processes of ‘drawing things together’ by which the social develops into a particular form, can be understood as design (Latour 2008: 12). Although this chapter shares this understanding of design as shaping of the social, we will, for analytical purposes, continue to define design rather more case-specific as shaping knowledge. And we will do this in order to investigate some of the processes and problems involved in designing for knowledge transfer. But before we continue to give this conceptualization of design and the problems of translation a more precise, actor-network theoretical meaning, I wish to present some background for the empirical case.

Background: the Welfare Commission The Welfare Commission was set up by the Danish Liberal-Conservative government in autumn 2003 with the purpose of analysing future challenges for the Danish welfare system, but also with the specific demand that the commission should conduct their work in an open fashion and thus ‘prepare the grounds for a thorough public debate about future welfare reforms’ (Gjerding 2006: 2–3). The Welfare Commission was therefore explicitly commissioned to work under a twofold job-description which goes beyond the traditional notion of expert committees. This makes the case interesting as an example of the shaping of expert knowledge. The Commission was comprised of nine members from universities, the state, organizations and private companies: each was a prominent economic expert in his or her field. At the time, the Welfare Commission was highly controversial. Not just because of its purpose and its implications for the Danish welfare system, or because of its composition with only economists on board. The usage of the economic DREAM-model was subject to discussion not only within and across scientific communities, but also in the general media. The DREAM-model (Danish Rational Economic Agents Model) is a dynamic general equilibrium model with the capacity for long-term evaluations of fiscal policy especially in relation to

112

M.D. Lindstrøm

demographic changes. With its general equilibrium assumptions, long forecasts and rational assumptions, the DREAM-model was a controversial tool for many researchers, economists, as well as other social scientists and experts (Gjerding 2006: 4–6). The background for the commission’s inquiry into the future challenges of the Danish welfare system had three elements: First, the increasing ageing of the population combined with a decreasing workforce; second, the so-called welfare paradox, where an increasing level of wealth creates higher demands for public services, and makes people choose leisure over work. The third challenge to the Welfare State – according to the Welfare Commission – was and still is to secure Denmark as a strong competitor in an increasingly global economy (Gjerding 2006: 1–3). These three challenges were the official background for appointing a welfare commission. Obviously, there is more to the story. For instance, it was quite implicit that any discussions of future welfare reforms would necessarily include discussions of the very popular right to early retirement. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to go deeper into the appointment of the Welfare Commission. The purpose of this article is rather to inquire into how relations between economic expertise, modern mathematized model making, politics and the general public are woven together in this particular case of economic advice in politics. Here, the Welfare Commission is an interesting case as it simultaneously reveals the controversial role of highly advanced economical calculation software in the practice of providing economic advice to the political process – and the open and public character of expert committees.

Design and actor-network theory Designing is the antidote to founding, colonizing, establishing and breaking with the past. It is an antidote to hybris and to the search for absolute certainty, absolute beginnings and radical departures. Bruno Latour (2008: 5)

The problem of knowledge transfer and translation of knowledge is central to design research. But despite the fact that knowledge transfer is the prerequisite of scientific knowledge and expert knowledge being applied to practical problems, systematic discussions about how knowledge travels are very often not placed centre stage in design discussions. We may even say that there arguably seems to be a normative and epistemological tension within design research itself. The tension lies in the fact that although knowledge epistemologically in design research is understood to be far more complex, hybrid and negotiable than the traditional understanding of Science with a capital S will allow, the design concept simultaneously tends to hold a strong normative belief in the good things we can achieve in all aspects of life if research is put into practice effectively. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce an actor-network approach to design research, and thereby to suggest, that actor-network theory – as a sociology of

Deep translations

113

translations (Latour 2005: 106) – might be useful in developing design research as a research field dealing with the multiple problems of knowledge transfer. Actor-network theory1 arose in conjunction with constructivist science studies in the 1980s (Latour 1987; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Callon 1986). In a series of so-called laboratory studies, Latour, Woolgar, Callon, Hacking, Knorr-Cetina, and others examined in detail the practices and cultures of scientific work, and the production of scientific knowledge. Actor-network theory departed from this more cultural and social constructivist cultural approach of laboratory studies in order to develop a focus on the laboratory as socio-technical networks – emphasizing that humans, technologies and other materialities co-produce reality. This movement from social constructivism to material semiotics opened up a research field which has inspired many empirical studies with the field of design research – notably within studies in architecture (for example Yaneva 2005); IT studies (Suchman 1987) and transport (for example Latour 1996). For more examples, although not all actor-network theoretical, see the book Networks of Design (Hackney et al. 2009). These studies are often inspired by ethnographic studies, and focus on complex processes of socio-technical assemblage taking a particular interest in the models, operations and technologies. This promotion of material artefacts from passive tools to active shapers of reality required an intensive deconstruction of much of social theory. Most strikingly, of course, the concept of agency as solely a human property becomes dismantled (see Latour 2005: 53) This move has been very controversial in sociology and wider social sciences, and obviously it is no less radical from the perspective of design research. Here goes, for instance, the concept of the human designer, and the centrality of human creativity! An actor-network theoretical approach to design thus represents what has been called a distributed sense of design (see Chapter 7 by McHardy, Olsen, Southern and Shove for a related, relational approach). In the process of understanding how these socio-technical assemblages come into being, the notion of translations becomes central.2 Translation here refers to how particular networks of knowledge emerge, expand and differentiate through processes of ‘displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before that to some degree modifies the original [goals]’ (Latour 1999: 178; Callon 1998: 248–52). As the quotation suggests, translation in the actor-network theoretical understanding comes close to being the direct opposite of any understanding of translation as a process of mediating knowledge without changing and deforming the content. Rather, translations in the actor-network theoretical meaning of the word are series of changes of perspectives, redefinitions of actors and unexpected consequences (Latour 2005: 106–9; Latour 1999: 15). Translations are in this sense performative; they give the network its particular form. They are so to speak ‘design moments’. We will come back to this in the methodology paragraph. Combining this focus of translation, drift and uncertainty with the idea of design without a designer leaves us close to saying that actor-network theory is a philosophy of anti-design. However, in a now-famous speech at the Design History Society in Cornwall (Latour 2008), Latour introduces some ideas about how to

114

M.D. Lindstrøm

understand the design concept from an actor-network theoretical perspective. He identifies five characteristics which allow the concept of design to address objects and artefacts in a multifaceted way, and not just as tools and objects. These are: a radical break with the modernist – ‘Promethean’ belief in planning, control and foresight, attention to detail, attention to the symbolic content of artefacts, the concept of redesign as different from creation, and lastly an inherently ‘ethical’ dimension related to the questions of good or bad design (Latour 2008: 4–5). After we have looked at an empirical example of how economic expert knowledge indeed seems to work in this amodern, changeable way, we will return to discuss the implications of this way of grounding design research philosophically.

Method: follow the actor – trace the translations The analytical procedure related to actor-network theory involves describing the networking activities pertaining to, for example, knowledge propositions. Since we have conceptualized design as ‘shaping knowledge’, we must identify as our unit of analysis the particular chains of translations whereby knowledge is redesigned in particular ways. Therefore, to put it simply, the analytical procedure will be to ‘follow the translations’ (appropriated from Latour 2005: 68). Or, more precisely: we will be following the artefact under continuous redesign, thereby retrospectively identifying moments of translation. I will now proceed to the empirical example to illustrate how a particular knowledge item moves from an economic specialist context to a political context through a series of translations and re-shapings (Latour 1999: 15). Empirically the analysis is primarily based on in-depth interviews with members of the Welfare Commission as well as the general secretary. As supplementary data, reports and background material of the Welfare Commission (figures etc.) have been included. In order to reduce the complexity of the case, I will emphasize three particular moments of translation. Each highlights particular aspects of relevance to the design theoretical approach developed above: design as shaping knowledge, design as socio-technical and co-produced, and the aspect of non-control and unpredictability.

Case: the Welfare Commission and the ‘reference course’ Walking the thin line between science, politics and communication is something any expert does in his or her practice of engaging with a public of non-specialists. The ‘reference course’ of the Welfare Commission is here exemplary in its almost chameleon-like ability to change its shape as to whether it is an analytical construct, a real prediction of the future or a political scenario. It is also a central example, since the very idea of suggesting how to make the economy balance is at the very core of the Welfare Commission’s mandate. The reference course is a line chart illustrating the balance between income and expenses in the Danish welfare state over a 40-year period (2000–2040), taking into account projected demographical changes and assuming that the level and character of welfare service should remain the same.

Deep translations

115

We will follow the series of translations by which this reference course becomes redesigned and we will make three stops on the way. First, we will quite simply demonstrate the notion of ‘shaping knowledge’ in some more detail by noticing how the formal-mathematical notion of general equilibrium in the context of the Commission’s mandate is translated into a composite goal – a new version of the reference course. The next stop will pause to remark on the independently evocative powers which the reference course is able to express not least simply by means of its visual (graphical) appearance. This stop will demonstrate the design theoretical point about humans’ ‘relative’ size in the network, since we see how an artefact is designed which may speak more directly and with greater force than the skilled economists, would him- or herself be willing to. The third and last stop develops this issue of non-control further and addresses the design theoretical problem about how actor-network theory may or may not be directly useful in the sense of giving guidance to practitioners working with economic expert knowledge. A composite goal This first example serves to exemplify in some more detail the way in which the shaping of economic expert knowledge may rightfully be understood as the design of a new artefact. In particular, the example shows how this new artefact develops through the weaving together of the economical-technical function of general equilibrium and the political-everyday understanding of financial balance. In this sense, it illustrates how technologies and artefacts do not ‘act’ in the same way as humans do (intentionally, by language and so on), and also not merely as objects (by mediating humans’ intentionality). Rather, one way which complex technologies like the DREAM-model act is exactly through processes of translation and redefinition. ‘Techniques act as shape-changers’, Latour (1999: 189) says, with a choice of words particularly interesting in this design context. As we recall, the basic idea of the reference course is that we must find ways to make income and expenses balance in a timeframe going to 2040. Obviously, this is a political framing. It makes use of the rhetorical possibilities of producing narratives under the headline of ‘financial sustainability’ by comparing the Danish national economy with a household economy. Also, this very literal interpretation of the economic notion of general equilibrium is rather different from a technical economic understanding of general equilibrium as a member of the commission describes: Economically speaking, it was not important if incomes and expenses would balance perfectly by the year 2040. Not at all, in fact, for even if we had seen a marginal deficit or a surplus, the policy recommendations would have been the same. But at the same time, we needed to be able to present a general picture to demonstrate that what we offered was a coherent and comprehensive proposal to solve these problems. Fundamentally, that was the assignment.

116

M.D. Lindstrøm

In an actor-network-theoretical reading, we see the creation of what Latour calls ‘a composite goal’ (Latour 1999: 179), and what we previously have defined as redesign. We just heard it described as ‘the assignment’. This composite goal is no longer strictly economic – because the balancing of incomes and expenses is accentuated somewhat differently than in the technical meaning of equilibrium. But at the same time, we hear, it would be of no use, if the Welfare Commission at its final presentation put forward an assemblage of proposals, which they believed were the right economical tools to solve the problem, but which did not succeed in making income and expenses even out. Obviously, the pragmatic-political vision of gaining financial sustainability and the technical operation of creating general equilibrium is not the same. But through the translations and interactions in the Welfare Commission they tend to acquire rather similar meanings and applications, and are thus redesigned into one new artefact (Latour 1999: 185). The reference course as a rhetorical technology We have seen how the two different understandings of financial balance and general equilibrium are redesigned into one artefact – the reference course. In this section we will follow the translations one step further – focusing this time on how the reference course when subject to the requirements of broader communication is translated from its scientific context (prognosis, academic abstraction, uncertainty) to a more journalistic and evocative context (‘a look into the future’, ‘certainty’). For an economist, there is never simply one result, or just one answer. [In the analytical process] we conducted large numbers of what in economics is called sensitivity analyses. What if the interest rate turns out differently than we have stipulated? If more babies are born? Or fewer? If there is more immigration or shorter life expectancy? And so on. We perform all these exercises, but although we as economists would like to report many of these, we know that we just cannot do that. The logic of communication dictates that you can only put forward one conclusion. And that conclusion is what we have named the reference course In understanding how knowledge travels from science to public contexts, we must notice to how the reference course changes character as such provisos, sensitivities and presuppositions are left out. It becomes less of an estimate, less the result of projections into an uncertain future and more a prediction of the future to come. These transformations are something that happens in order to allow knowledge to travel – and the making of these transformations is therefore something experts do in their practice of providing economic advice to the political process. Often in a highly reflexive manner, as expressed in the following interview excerpt: What is important [in economics] is not the exact number we come up with, but the fact that they all show the same tendency, the same profile. The economy goes off the rails! But we cannot know with great precision whether the exact

Deep translations

117

profile is very steep or maybe less steep. That brings us to a very classical problem in economics communication, because it will inevitably sound as if I offer a precise number about how things will be in the year 2040. And really, I wouldn’t claim to be able to do that. But again: The logic of communications demands that I don’t go too much into that. What is important here is to pay attention to how the visual impact of the reference course may be independently evocative – even to the point where its impression may challenge and supersede the intentions of the human actors involved. We hear about the steepness of the reference course: How it must represent that ‘the economy goes off its rails’ but also ‘that we cannot know with great precision whether the exact profile is very steep or maybe less steep’. The expert economist addresses this as a classical problem in economics communication. He also points to a central thematic in actor-network theory where diagrams, graphs and other visuals means of representations of economic relations are considered not as representations but as ‘rhetorical technologies’, a wording which points to the independently evocative qualities which graphical representations may hold (Law and Whitaker 1988: 169; also Elam 2004: 233). Where the traditional ideal of science communication is neutral translation, rhetorics is about convincing by addressing not only intellect, but also the senses and passions, for example, by raising a sense of urgency. According to this idea, the reference course not only addresses us on an intellectual level by providing us with knowledge and information, it may also affect us visually and emotionally through its steeper or less steep profile. Thus we see how the numbers and curves may speak more directly and with greater force than the skilled economists would him- or herself be willing to. From knowledge transfer to deep translations Above, we have followed two examples of how economic expert knowledge is translated from its scientific context (prognosis, general equilibrium) to a more political or evocative context (a look into the future, financial sustainability). This has exemplified some of the elements of the performative understanding of translation as ‘displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies the original [goals]’ (Latour 1999: 178). In a final example, I will illustrate how ‘deep’ in the sense of almost in-escapable these translations become. This will be done by presenting a last example, this time from the press release of the Welfare Commission. This example shows how the chain of translations which we have followed, now suddenly challenges the expert members’ explicit intention of being neutral expert advisors. What happened was this: only a few hours after the launch of the final report with its 1000 pages and 44 policy recommendations, the report was denounced by prime-minister Rasmussen on the grounds that the commission had been ‘politically tone deaf’ in proposing tax reforms as necessary tools. According to the prime minister, the commission should have respected its mandate which was that tax

118

M.D. Lindstrøm

reforms should not be a part of the catalogue. It is actually far from rare that expert reports are being denounced without time for a thorough discussion of the propositions, and we should not let this drama divert our attention. What is interesting in this context is how members of the commission reacted to this criticism by arguing that the package was ‘all or nothing’, and also how an expert analyst with hindsight rather regrets this strong identification: If I could do just one thing differently, I would choose to phrase that in another way. Because it was to a great extent misunderstood. What we attempted to say was this: “Here, we present a package which overall solves the problem of financial sustainability, and at the same time addresses a host of other problems. Here, we present a package, which means that we no longer have to worry about whether or not we can afford our welfare services in the future”. So what we intended to explain was that if you take something out, then you need to put something else in, to fill out the void you’re creating. But of course, the decision makers are free to take something out, and replace it with something else. We do not demand that politicians should simply accept all 44 propositions – as one! But now, at hindsight, I realize that that message did not get through. Instead, people thought, that we talked about all or nothing. We hear that the intended message ‘did not get through’. From the perspective developed in this chapter, we might rather say that the particular way in which the Welfare Commission tried to design their economic expert knowledge in order to appeal to the general public’s understanding of the problem of financial sustainability ‘now suddenly will not let their intended message get through’. As we will see, this idea of ‘all or nothing’ and ‘a full package’ is tied to the specific fusion of the technical notion of general equilibrium and the political/everyday idea of financial sustainability into one, which we have in the previous described as the composite goal. This composite goal has been strengthened with the heavy technological apparatus of the DREAM-model, and the steepness of the curve and the sense of urgency this may evoke, has further served to shaped this artefact in a way designed to speak in the unequivocal way which ‘the logic of communication’ demanded. But what we see at the end of this line, is that the two levels of design collide. The Welfare Commission is no longer able to uphold a separation between design in the sense of being shaper of knowledge, and design in the sense of being shaper of futures. Or rather: by means of being a shaper of knowledge, the economic expert ‘unintendedly’ has become a shaper of futures instead – a role, which she or he explicitly asked not to apply to the expert; but to the political decision makers. The expert has a problem. Since this situation calls for some kind of action, intervention, improving or resolution, it is a good time to leave our empirical example behind and discuss at a more general level in what ways an actor-network theoretical design approach is applicable to the experts practical design problem of ‘getting the message through’ in the intended way. The final, concluding part of the chapter will, therefore, return

Deep translations

119

to a design theoretical level and consider again how actor-network theory contributes to a core of design research.

Conclusion After this brief presentation of actor-network theoretical analysis we are now in a better position to discuss the proposition that problems of knowledge transfer and shaping of knowledge are indeed design problems. We can discuss meta-theoretical design problems about the status of knowledge, of the relative importance of human actors and of control, as well as practical design-problems about how to balance the diverse demands of communication, the claim for scientific integrity and the necessity for political relevance in concrete decisions about shaping knowledge. On the design theoretical level (or ‘meta-level’), the chapter began by proposing that the work of the expert economists in the Welfare Commission can be understood as design work since they are engaged in ‘shaping knowledge’ in a particular way. This bold statement was then qualified by means of Latour’s concept of design as ‘drawing things together’. We were told that in order to understand design processes, we must follow the translations by which knowledge acquires a particular social form. And we were asked to accept a particular, active understanding of translations as design moments – moments by which new artefacts are created. Such an actor-network theoretical approach can be useful in order to emphasize how the process by which knowledge is communicated to a general public is by no means characterized by simple translations or reformulations. Rather, we have seen in the analyses, entirely new knowledge objects were created. This is exactly the idea of Latour’s conception of redesign, and of his view that design never comes ex nihilo, that design is not ‘creation’ but translation (Latour 2008: 5). Empirically, the chapter introduced a design problem from the world of economic expert advice – the problem about communication of economic expert knowledge. Throughout the analyses it became explicit that while the hybridization of economic expert knowledge and political and communicational framing allows economic expert knowledge to travel beyond the limits of an expert community, it also opens up an array of problems. We have seen how an actor-network theoretical analysis works by opening the black box of expert advice, revealing how these destabilizing issues of communication, translation, technological mediation and bounded rationality come through in many concrete detailed practices of organization, communication and (political) decision making (see Zuiderent-Jerak and Bruun Jensen 2007 and Vikkelsø 2007 for a discussion of the usefulness of this in itself). In this sense, actor-network theory can be very useful in developing design research as a research field dealing with the multiple problems of knowledge transfer – also outside this particular empirical field of research. From the perspective of design research as a research field adressing the practical design problems of knowledge transfer, it becomes very clear, that actor-network theory is not a theory about how to act in the grey zones of modern, controversy laden knowledge societies. It gives some, but highly abstract and quite radical guidance on how to develop the relations between science, publics and political

120

M.D. Lindstrøm

decision making (Latour 2004) and gives no guidance whatsoever to experts seeking to improve their ‘interactional expertise’ (as this competence to translate scientific language is called by sociologists of science Collins and Evans 2002). In this sense – we may stress – actor-network theory is so uncompromising in its nonsubjectivity that it not only makes explicit the problems which translation creates, but it also insists on the impossibility of solving them in any easy way. In other words: we cannot analyse situations as socio-technical networks and identify problems in this context, and then hope for the answers to these problems to lie in improving for instance the communication skills of the human subjects involved. Like other actor-network theoretical analyses, this chapter therefore must end with a quite stubborn silence – abstaining from jumping to giving advice on how to act and improve. At this point, I wish to return to Bruno Latour and his vision of design science as the cautious Prometheus (Latour 2008). By now, we may be more able to appreciate how Latour does not say that actor-network theory is a design science able to deal with practical design problems. Rather, he shows the impossibility of the modernist project of control and foresight, and the limits of human intentionality and creativity. And then – from there – he invites design science to take up the torch. Not to deal with the fire in the same ‘heroic, hubristic’ way as Prometheus brought the fire from the sky (Latour 2008: 3–4) but rather dealing with the fire in a cautious and pre-cautionary way (2008: 7–8), paying attention to details, acknowledging our limits and acting on the basis of understanding that our knowledge is uncertain, risky and ripe with hard-to-control meaning. If accepting this shaky foundation, design research will have much important work to do since we have only just commenced to understand the rhetorical and performative effects of expert knowledge as an important dynamic of the social.

Notes 1 To be sure, there are other ways to present the conceptual, thematical and methodological development of actor-network theory. For instance, space does not allow us to explore the influence of techno-feminists like Donna Harraway, symbolic interactionists like Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey C. Bowker, or the semantics of Michel Serres and A. J. Greimas. In Bruno Latour’s introduction to actor-network theory Reassembling the Social (Latour 2005) these strands of influence are presented. Also, it is far from correct to present actor-network theory as merely the work of Bruno Latour (just like Latour is not merely an actor-network theorist (see Hartman 2009). Among others, Michel Callon and John Law continue to be very important in the development of actor-network theory, and the philosopher Anne-Marie Mol is very influential. The design discussions in this chapter are developed with reference to Bruno Latour in particular, and do not cover all the various positions within the field of actor-network theory. 2 Since Herbert Simon’s general understanding of design as ‘building systems that do not yet exist’ (Simon 1981: 129–30) is very influential in design research, a few comments on the relations between Simon’s conception of design and actor-network theory might be relevant (see ibid.: 157–71). The difference may be exemplified by the different metaphors of the network and the maze (ibid.: 180–88). Both metaphors are employed as a critique of formal rationality. But contrary to the actor-network theoretical view that the network and the actor is one and the same, Simon’s maze serves to evoke the image of a world, in which humans navigate with bounded rationality in order to shape

Deep translations

121

things and make projects. Simon’s concept of design therefore relates strongly to human creativity, ingenuity and sense of meaning as dimensions of bounded rationality: ‘The proper study of mankind is the science of design’, he writes (1991: 159). For a critique of Simons connection between design and bounded rationality see Hatchuel (2004).

References Albæk, E. (1995) ‘Between knowledge and power: utilization of social science in public policy making’, Policy Sciences, 28: 79–100. Callon, M. (1986). ‘Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’, in Law, J. (ed.): Power, Action and Belief: a new sociology of knowledge, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —— (1998). ‘An essay on framing and overflowing: economic externalities revisited by sociology’, in Callon, M. (ed.) The Laws of the Markets, Oxford: Blackwell. Collins, H.M. and Evans, R. (2002) ‘The third wave of science studies: studies of expertise and experience’, Social Studies of Science 32 (2): 235–96. Desrosières, A. (1998) The Politics of Large Numbers: a history of statistical reasoning, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Elam, M. (2004) ‘Contemporary science communication as a world of political invention’, Science as Culture 13 (2): 229–58. Gjerding, A.N. (2006). The Danish Welfare Commission. Main assumptions and overall proposals. Conference paper. ‘Welfare state change. Conceptualisation, measurement and interpretation’, for Centre for Comparative Welfare Studies, Aalborg University. 13–15 January 2006. Online. Available online at: (accessed December 2009). Hackney, F., Glynne, J. and Minton V. (eds) (1999) Networks of Design Proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society (UK) University College Falmouth, 3–6 September. UK: Universal-Publishers Hartman, G. (2009): Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and metaphysics, Melbourne: re.press. Hatchuel, A. (2004) ‘Towards design theory and expandable rationality: the unfinished program of Herbert Simon’, Journal of Management and Governance, 5 (3–4): 260–73. Hoppe, R. (1999). ‘Policy analysis, science, and politics: from ‘speaking truth to power’ to ‘making sense together’’, Science and Public Policy, 26 (3): 201–10. Irwin, A. and Wynne, B. (eds) (1996) Misunderstanding Science? The public reconstruction of science and technology, 1st edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (1996) Aramis, or the Love of Technology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (1999) Pandora’s Hope: essays on the reality of science studies, 1st edn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (2004) Politics of Nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy, London: Harvard University Press. —— (2005) Reassembling the Social: an introduction to actor-network-theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2008) ‘A cautious Prometheus? A few steps toward a philosophy of design (with special attention to Peter Sloterdijk)’. Reprinted in Hackney, F., Glynne, J. and Minton V. (eds) Networks of Design, UK: Universal-Publishers.

122

M.D. Lindstrøm

Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1986/1979) Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Law, J. and Hassard, J. (eds) (1999). Actor Network Theory and After, Sociological Review Monograph, Oxford: Blackwell. Law, J. and Whittaker, J. (1988) ‘On the art of representation: notes on the politics of visualisation’, in Fyfe, G. and Law J. (eds) Picturing Power – Visual Depictions and Social Relations, London and New York: Routledge Maasen, S. and Weingart, P. (2005) ‘What’s new in scientific advice to politics? Introductory essay’, in Maasen, S. and Weingart, P. (eds) Sociology of the Sciences, 24, Netherlands: Springer. Simon, H. (1981) The Sciences of the Artificial, 2nd edn, London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. —— (1991) Models of My life, New York: Basic Books. Suchman, L. (1987) Plans and Situated Actions: the problem of human-machine communication, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vikkelsø, S. (2007) ‘Description as intervention: engagement and resistance in actornetwork analyses’, Science as Culture, 16 (3): 297–309. Yaneva, A. (2005) ‘Scaling up and down: extraction trials in architectural design’, Social Studies of Science, 35: 867–94. Zuiderent-Jerak, T. and Bruun Jensen, C. (2007) ‘Editorial introduction: unpacking ‘intervention’ in Science and Technology Studies’, Science as Culture, 16 (3): 227–35.

9

Design and sustainable transition Jesper Holm, Bent Søndergård and Ole Erik Hansen

The theoretical background for this chapter is transition theories linking design for sustainability studies to changes in socio-technical systems. The concept of design is understood as distributed social processes of research, experimentation, standardization and institutionalization leading to the formation of artefacts, and services, in various design spaces and embedded in the context of technological regimes. We provide an illustrative example with a study of design processes of ecofriendly flax insulation examining in detail how an alternative design space evolved. The contribution to a general core of design research is a critical reflection on theories of sustainable design, offering a systemic approach to the development of design spaces, and discussing design for sustainability as meta-design.

Design and sustainable transition Design for sustainability is becoming a major challenge as reactions to climate change, resource depletion and environmental health recently have widened to include designers, architects, urban planners and the like. It calls for intentional design, redefining products and practices, capable of being reflexive and radical. ‘Sustainability’ is an open concept with different and often conflicting interpretations, thus ‘the definition’ or substantiation of sustainability becomes part of the design process itself. It is a demand for radical changes (transitions) of products, services and practices to meet the challenge of sustainability, accordingly calling for design which addresses structural changes. The school of thought on sustainable design is a normative approach requesting the design of ‘more sustainable’ artefacts and systems, but also the design of sustainable social practices (Stegall 2006). A core issue of sustainable design studies is the question of how designed artefacts and systems affect individual and societal behaviour and practices. Designing for sustainable practices has drawn on the concept of affordance (Norman 1999) which highlights that intentionally designed artefacts and systems can suggest sustainable values and practices (Stegall 2006: 59). It is a general understanding of the potential of design which can also be illustrated by Buchanan’s work Declaration by Design, claiming that ‘designers have directly influenced the actions of individuals and communities,

124

J. Holm et al.

changed attitudes and values, and shaped societies in surprisingly fundamental ways’ (Buchanan 1989: 93). Thus, sustainable design involves an ambition of staging transition: ‘Design is the art of shaping society through new products’ (Stegall 2006: 59). It calls for a change in design practices in terms of a vision of sustainability, in terms of changed skills, and in terms of a reflexive interaction between designers, users and society. ‘Design should support the formation of people’s/user’s capacity to act sustainably (support the development of ecological literacy)’ (Stegall 2006: 59). Papanek (1995: 59–60) also takes this position in his discussion on ‘natural design’ by defining the role of designers as that of enabling people to participate in finding solutions, ‘to become their own designers’. Design becomes also a question of initiating and facilitating socially distributed processes of problem setting and problem solving. Design for sustainability represents an ambitious design position where design affects society. Evolutionary and transition theories oppose this position and point to the constraints and path dependencies in design practices imposed by society. They perceive design as social processes embedded in technological regimes, and see design practices as structured by previous design, since history matters. Design takes place in already integrated structures of products, practices, cultures and structures of production and has a high degree of path dependency. Sustainable design from this perspective becomes a question of how design may be arranged in order to change our present (unsustainable) socio-technical systems and regimes. It becomes a project of meta-design, concerned with design as meta-level processes of regime transformation and the configuration of alternative design spaces. Innovation and sustainable transition studies (Elzen et al. 2004; Kemp and Loorbach 2007) explore sustainable design as nested efforts among a complex web of actors for achieving sustainable ways of producing and living. Such studies engage in design practices going beyond existing knowledge systems embedded in fixed systems of practice. The development of alternative technologies, products or systems is supposed to take place in alternative design spaces and design is highly related to the configuration of such spaces. The study presented in this chapter investigates such a configuration process and how it is related to the transition of technological regimes. It departs from a study of environmental innovations,1 following the design process of a new kind of eco-friendly flax insulation mat (Holm et al. 2001). It explores how a design process may be seen as being distributed among various sub-systems, making design an effort of coordinating a variety of groups, inventors, corporations, politicians, unions and users. We studied the design process of the flax insulation mat, how it evolved in space and time among various fields of practices and knowledge systems, how it developed in the interplay with the structural conditions of the dominant technological regime of construction, and how it became possible in a field of new actors and discourses putting the dominant regime under pressure. From a meta-design perspective we examine how network, experimental, and institutional activities are influential in sustainable design projects under dominant

Design and sustainable transition

125

socio-technological regimes. Drawing on evolutionary and transition theories, we discuss the formation of design spaces as configurations of networks of actors, both as they emerge and how they may be deliberately shaped (Kemp and Rotmans 2006).

Transition theory Technological regimes, transition and design The concept of technological regimes derives from understanding technology and technological development as embedded in socio-technical configurations of technology/artefacts, user practices and application domains, techno-scientific knowledge, production structures, infrastructure, regulation, policies, symbolic meaning of technology (Geels 2002: 1258; Rip and Kemp 1998). Since technological regimes are the result of activities of social groups producing and reproducing them, they are socially constructed (Geels 2002: 1259). Socio-technical configurations also imply the sedimentation of specific technological trajectories. In other words, they can be seen as technological regimes having stability and guiding innovation and design. Within regimes that have environmental purposes, the design practices of corporate and scientific communities are normally restricted to incremental, environmental improvements or the optimization of present systems of production and consumption. There is path dependency, where radical shifts in products and practices needed for transition to more sustainable socio-technical systems, are typically not addressed. Rip and Kemp highlight this path dependency in their definition of regimes: A technological regime is the rule-set of grammar embedded in a complex of engineering practices, production process technologies, product characteristics, skills and procedures, ways of handling relevant artefacts and persons, ways of defining problems; all of them embedded in institutions and infrastructures. (Rip and Kemp 1998: 338) Thus design processes are shaped in a complex interplay of different actors, involving communities of engineers and designers, but also producers, users, social groups/stakeholders, policy makers/public authorities, financial networks, and research networks. The practices of engineers and designers are embedded in technological regimes, constituted of a multi-actor network which provides the stability and selectivity of the regime, and the processes of innovation and design (Geels 2002). However, the development and design of alternative technologies (such as sustainable products) also includes a concurrent development of alternative configurations of actors and elements. Transition-oriented management and policy research has suggested a ‘multilevel model’ to understand transition processes of regimes. Technological regimes are understood to operate and develop within relatively stable socio-technical

126

J. Holm et al.

landscapes (national and global conditions) and in a dynamic interplay with niches of alternative technologies and practices where new openings and possibilities are created (Geels 2002; Kemp et al. 1998; Kemp and Loorbach 2007; Smith 2003). This model can be seen as constituted by ‘analytical and heuristic concepts to understand the complex dynamics of socio-technical change.’ (Geels 2002: 1259). The socio-technical landscape is an ‘external structure or context for the interaction of actors’, where the term landscape includes such different elements as price structures, political coalitions, domination norms and values, and environmental problems (Geels 2002). They are all elements that may be considered as external to the processes of the regime. Changes in the socio-technical landscape can put pressure on, and set off tensions within, regimes. It is a process of structuration in which the landscape is subject to interpretation and translation from different positions within the regime. In relation to the stable regime world within a landscape, ‘radical innovations are generated in niches’ (Geels 2002: 1260). Such niches are protected or particular domains of technology, and may evolve at the fringe of or independently of the dominating regimes. They can be encouraged by changes in the socio-technical landscape, be driven by alternative movements or social entrepreneurship (Smith 2003), be the object of strategic management (Kemp et al. 1998) and be supported and developed, for example, by social experimentation (Brown et al. 2003) or by the creation of technological or market niches. Within this conceptualization, ‘niches’ are assigned a pivotal role in transition processes. Still, however, regimes (and the socio-political landscape) provide the structural conditions of the development of such niches – and also act as selection environments. Design and formation of design spaces Taken altogether, to practice intentional design for sustainability, designers have to expand their professional skills in order to become players in the formation of alternative design spaces. This involves ‘ecological literacy’ of design, understanding interaction with ecosystems and streams of material, but it also involves a knowledge of ‘metadesign’, design processes of structural changes, changes of visions, discourses and institutions and configuration of new design spaces. Design spaces are specific configurations of networks of actors, specific interpretations and discourses and structural conditions in terms of institutional and material interdependencies, all structuring design practices. Design space can be seen as a transition field (Weber et al. 2003: 1), which is a space between ‘abstract sustainable production visions and concrete technology projects’, between needs and specific technologies. Weber et al. perceive transition fields as the level ‘where specific technologies are tied together with and embedded in social and organisational practices in order to offer an alternative solution for providing a functionality needed’ (ibid.: 11). Operating within such a design space (transition field) involves an understanding of interdependencies, specific interpretations or translations, which construe

Design and sustainable transition

127

a set of actors, technologies and objectives as a field. This points to the need for studying the histories of design spaces, to understand how their formations are part of a transition process and how designing technological changes takes place and is shaped in such fields. Design processes are of central importance in framing actors’ needs and aspirations to a technological idea, and to the translation of various positions and ideas into a specific technology field. Studies of more radical innovations make the configuration of specific sociotechnical networks a crucial step in the process of establishing new paths within a regime. The formation of such a network is a central part of transition processes (Geels 2002: 1273). Adrian Smith (2007) has contributed to this approach by studying the role of social technological entrepreneurial movements, designing alternative technologies that fitted new social needs, in the period 1970–90. Smith discusses how the options of alternative technologies were framed in order to encompass a variety of discourses and stakeholders, and how negotiations among various actor groups occurred. Framing is especially of interest in sustainable design as it views new ways of making mental models of products and technologies that fit to everyday life experiences (Lidwell et al. 2003). But as Smith points out, if newly designed products are to become successful, industrial strategies and government R&D programmes would typically have to be introduced. This, in turn, depends on the ability to bridge between the framing of a new technology and the technological frames dominating industry and government. The making of technological, radical shifts in this perspective, often depend on a very broad network of practitioners who undertake technological experimentation, promote niche efforts and make deliberative politics to enhance new designed products, systems and so on. What do we know about how such networks come about in processes of more radical environmental innovations? What do we know of agency? Who can, and by which means, shape and constitute such constellations of actors and institutions in which such change processes can be found (Weaver et al. 2000)? These are fundamental questions for design for sustainability. Socio-technical regimes are extremely complex. They are the collective outcomes of the choices of many actors, and their transformation ‘cannot be steered by a central plan or institution’ (Rennings et al. 2003: 23). But we may learn from successful design processes in networks of NGOs, designers, corporations, trade organizations and other shareholders, where different worlds of actors have merged into an entrepreneurial formation of product design developers, using available national and international R&D schemes. This is what we now turn to.

Designing a construction material We will refer to a case study of designing processes involving innovations, the formation of various actor positions and the establishment of institutional backup. It is a history of an emerging alternative design space. The product in the design case is flax and hemp-based insulation materials, an alternative to the dominant use of mineral fibres insulation in Denmark. The design activities have been part of a broader agenda of using plant fibres for industrial

128

J. Holm et al.

purposes. At the core of the design of flax and hemp-based insulation mats are a number of technical innovations, but in bringing the new product to the market, design also needed to respond to regulatory obstacles, enable experimentation, and take part in forming public R&D programmes for funding, standardization, technical tests and so on, all in order to influence the dominant socio-technical regime. We followed the process along several steps in the product chain, from plant growing and harvesting techniques, plant treatment to product manufacturing. Similarly, we followed the chain of actor constellations representing separate interpretative properties that have influenced the design and niche product development. Our objective was to understand how a specific design process and product is established by the configuration of technologies, networks of actors and institutions during the development of a niche product, which breaks with the path dependency of mineral wool insulation products. In Denmark, mineral wool dominates the socio-technical regime of insulation in terms of market position and contracts with retailers, in terms of the influence exerted on technical, building and environmental health standards, and in terms of educational habituation of craftsmen to mineral wool. The case presented here concerns the historical formation of a specific alternative design space (or transition field) enabling innovative research, constructing and stabilizing various discursive framings of the product, designing corresponding material properties of the alternative insulation materials and, finally, niche experimentation. It is a study of how such a design space was established despite the dominant socio-technical regime, its well established companies with a closed in-house design culture, and path dependency of building techniques. The design process of eco-friendly flax insulation mats from 1989 to 2007 was analysed by following a process tracing technique in which the various actor constellations, institutions and rules have been identified historically. Articles, acts and scientific reports on the subject of insulation materials and their hazardous, environmental and technical properties were studied, as have the details in the experiments of flax growing, harvesting, and technological processing involved. We researched reports and standards of the technical properties of the insulation products and identified various actor constellations, and undertook qualitative interviews representing key positions in the web (for references and research sources see Holm et al. 2001). The case represents a design process emerging from a biotechnical research area. It is a producer-user design process involving an increasing number of social actors from different sectors, co-designing through technical experiments, standard making, rule confronting, and cognitive framing activities. The design process emerged when the key research and design actors incorporated various discourse alliances, framing the values of the insulation material. At the time, when the invention of harvesting and treatment techniques for free fibres was well established, the search process for industrial use configured a number of different actor worlds. Plant-based insulation materials were interpreted in various ways dependent on positions:

Design and sustainable transition • • • • • • •

129

as a competing raw material to near-monopoly mineral fibres in Denmark (the insulation company) as an occupational health device (the union) as an eco-friendly resource (the eco-housing community) as an indoor health-friendly product (the environmental regulation agencies) as a successful plant-design research output (the research centres) as a device for new economic opportunities for farmers (Danish Agriculture Council) and as impetus for local economic growth (the municipality and business developers of the Lolland economic area).

The interaction of actors and institutions has co-shaped and transferred the plant fibres into a ‘sustainable’ artefact: an organic-crop based, low-energy processed, healthy, stable and recyclable insulation mat. The design process succeeded in the making of a new flax mat by consistent framing and designing, by integrating and influencing a number of regulations and institutions in the support of the artefact. The formation of designers has changed during the process, as has the designed artefact: from a free fibre construct to a niche effort in sustainable insulation. Also, the design of the product has taken shape by reacting to the grammar of the institutional configurations of the predominant socio-technical regime of construction and insulation. We will highlight some of the design processes (for an overview of all stages and institutional frameworks, see Figure 9.1). Research based design of new plant fibres and processing techniques The research and design processes of making plant fibre materials for industrial purposes were framed under the 1990s discursive campaigns, policies and subvention schemes for sustainable use of plants for non-food purposes in Denmark. The process of design for a new insulation mat originated at the private R&D Department of Plant Production (DPP) and Danish Agricultural Advisory Centre. In 1989, they started an open plant fibre research process (breeding-harvestingtreatment) for various, non-defined technical purposes. The DPP searched for an industrially usable short flax fibre material, instead of the expensive, traditional long-fibre flax technologies found in textile fabrics. A new process was invented: cutting, swathing, natural retting on the field, combine harvesting and rolling into round bales. Besides, the DPP experimented with mechanical weed control finding that they could avoid the use of pesticides in crops growing flax. These experiments, which were carried out from 1990 to 1996, were made in cooperation with agricultural R&D units and farmers. The DPP was in these design and development efforts supported by the Danish Ministry of Agriculture biotechnological programmes from 1991 to 2001 and the programmes in developing organic non-food products. The processing of the harvested straw was the next stage that had to be rearranged in order to handle the filtered straw bales. Alternatively, the farmers

130

J. Holm et al.

Institutional and discursive framework

Agro-industrial discourse

Bio-technological non-food program Plant materials & products Organic non-food program

Eco-construction discourse Alternative insulation program

Work environment discourse EU – regional program

Regional development discourse

Main stagess in the design process R&D in flax sort selection and harvesting R&D in fiber achieving processes R&D in air forming technique Involvement of producers and users Design of insulation mats Design of full scale production

90

95

00

05

Figure 9.1 Main stages in the design process of the flax insulation mats: Discursive framing and institutional framework, 1990–2005.

delivering flax would have the straw bales opened and shredded before delivery to further treatment. The DPP research experiment focussed on drying the straw by hot air puffing machines in order to lower the content of water so as to avoid the flax wool getting stuck in the processing machinery. Subsequent experiments in bale opening and shredding techniques were to take some years, as a number of options were available. The aim was to handle the bales so as to establish a continuous process line of straw treatment and prepare the straw for further free-fibre processing. The DPP cooperated with machinery workshops, contractors and R&D institutions in Denmark, Sweden and the UK. Hereafter, several experiments on processing the detached straws with a new straw hammer were issued together with machinery works and contractors. This machinery processing design could cut the straw into the preferred fibre lengths, and scotch it – loosening the shives (outer layers) from the fibres. The subsequent processes which separated the fibres from the shives enabled further experiments with different processing techniques. In this process, networking with seed handling machinery contractors and farmers with competencies in screen processes was undertaken. These design and experimental processes were institutionally enabled due to the agro-industrial R&D programmes from the Danish Research Council on plant materials and products, on free-fibre processing, and short and long fibre composites. The end result of all these separate processes was an innovative design of a combination of rather simple, but not easy to establish, techniques deliberately using the shives for enhancing the shredding, grinding and scotching processes. Hot-air-drying, a hammer mill, and a revolving screen were used. The shives are

Design and sustainable transition

131

usable for main fibre plates, and the dust is useful for auto-repair shops. The shortfibre process for producing free fibres could be installed at different geographical sites for various product chains, as pre-processing sites of raw material among farmers or specific fibre-manufacturers. The R&D efforts thus led to an opening of a farm-industrial processing configuration of plant materials, an opening that fitted with the institutional framing of R&D. Designing plant fibres fabrics for insulation The free short-fibre process innovation has been the basis for investigations in various options for industrial usage of the fibres: fibres for concrete, paper, insulation mats, car components and so on. From the raw materials, the DPP searched for industrial applications together with a number of industries. Thus insulation mats were identified as one of the targets, but research and design primarily focussed on processing the fibres into a mass. A co-operation was established between the DPP’s bio-fibre researcher Bodil Pallesen and an inventor and designer, Marianne Eriksen, who had invented a new fibre forming technique on industrial full-scale commercial development. Marianne Eriksen had experience from textile and fluff pulp industries and had an idea to use the whole plant without too many treatment processes, and how to inflate the fibres by fresh air into a spongy felt. Marianne Eriksen’s research and design efforts resulted in machinery for pneumatic felting of the plant fibres. However, while the search process for various industrial uses was open to a number of industrial players, it did not lead to an investor who would take the free fibre process design into a specific technology path. At an early stage in the idea-development of fibres for insulation purposes, the papers insulation firms ISODAN and Rockwool were contacted concerning the co-development of flax-based mats. ISODAN backed up the idea, but wanted to maintain a focal concentration on insulation granulates for cavity wall insulation, mainly from paper. The Rockwool Company, which would have investment and market power to enhance a full-scale market introduction, backed out, probably because the idea was too radical, both technologically and institutionally. However, new alliance options were sought among other actors. The union of insulation workers in the construction sector (Træ-Industri-Byggeri, TIB) had for many years struggled for better occupational health conditions when working with mineral wool products, including efforts in institutional recognition of carcinogenic properties of the mineral wool fibres, besides its well recognized allergenic and itchy properties. Occupational health regulation under Danish legislation referred to the EU’s and WHO’s classification of mineral wool fibres as allergenic, and mineral wool was also suspected of being carcinogenic. However, since there were no substitutes to mineral wool, Danish authorities did not enforce occupational health laws establishing the substitution principle. This would have pushed constructors and others to search for alternative insulation products. Marianne Eriksen contacted the union TIB concerning their interest in co-designing a type of insulation that would fit into their purpose, ensuring occupational health, and their pursuit of enforcement of the substitution principle in Danish

132

J. Holm et al.

occupational health regulation. TIB, as part of the technology field, quickly became involved in the wider design space of what was now framed as a health-friendly alternative insulation fabric. In September 2000, they announced that they would urge Saint Gobain/Isover and Rockwool to look for alternative insulation materials, and that their members would reject to work with mineral wool mats from 2003 onwards, as alternative materials would be available by then. TIB called in the National Association for Eco-Construction (Landsorganisationen for Økologisk Byggeri, LØB), which was entrepreneurial in searching for new designs of dwellings and in developing new organic, recyclable construction materials. LØB were representing entrepreneurial interests of building companies, product manufacturers, and engaged eco-builders giving attention to new ecofriendly construction materials. To the design and discursive framing of the flax insulation product, LØB added property components such as eco-systemic impacts from a life cycle perspective. They all lobbied successfully among political parties in the national parliament for an R&D subvention scheme under the Danish Energy Agency, the Development of Insulation Methods Benign to the Environment and Occupational Health, in the following called ‘The alternative insulation program’, 1997–2001. They succeeded in forming an agenda for the scheme that additionally supported entrepreneurs and carpenters to work on alternative insulation methods and materials. A number of stakeholders for alternative insulation were placed as directors of various working groups within the scheme. Consequently, the DPP had fair chances of succeeding in applying for a grant for an industrial pilot project of flax and hemp based insulation mats. The subvention scheme had the intention of enhancing design, and the sales of new, sustainable insulation materials and construction methods. The aim was also to support environmental documentation for alternative insulation materials and to document ‘non factual barriers in rules’ (Energistyrelsen 1997, point 3.3), for example, disfavouring technical standards for sustainable insulation from the Danish construction code (Bygningsreglementet). The scheme gave priority to initiatives with new insulation material made from organic plant material and

Figure 9.2 Discursive framing of flax insulation. Sales illustration from http://fibre-tech.dk/ (accessed November 2009).

Design and sustainable transition

133

paper cellulose, due to the described success of R&D in flax and hemp fibres. ‘The alternative insulation programs’ also subventioned full-scale demonstration projects for construction, in order to do a realistic assessment of occupational health, environmental impacts, thermal insulation capacity, humidity, acoustic and fire-technical profiles, dimensional stability, construction and indoor climate. A number of technical standards and manufacturing manuals have been made which are of importance for the specific design of flax and hemp-based insulation materials and they cover many of the fields in the existing dominant socio-technical insulation regime. The scheme had stabilized the active networking among the growing number of actors framing the flax fibre research and design process. Now the free flax fibres artefact was to become a renewable, healthy, and technically sound insulation product. The design of insulation mats. The DPP successfully applied the Alternative Insulation Program for the funding of a pilot project for experimenting with continuous free-fibre processing and forming machinery. The primary design of the forming process was a pneumatic combustion of the free fibres into fast-revolving, rasping machinery that fluffs the fibres into a felt – that is to say, opening the fibres surface into fibrils that bond more easily together and busting the mass with air. The whole process from the pre-treatment of straw to final forming is only based upon mechanical and pneumatic processing technology, thus producing no wastewater or chemical waste. Since the formation of the network coalitions, the R&D work by Bodil Pallesen has articulated a need for an eco-designed insulation material, focussed on ‘finding the right fire retardant, the best combination of binder and matrix, the best binder for form stability, reducing the amount of synthetic polymers in the product, acquiring sufficient documentation of the product specifically concerning fire-retardance, affinity to humidity, persistence of the product, affinity to attack from rodents etc.’ (Interview. Bodil Pallesen, researcher from the DPP, September 2000). The major innovative steps in these initial R&D processes were made in a small-scale pilot process that were installed at the DPP, 1998–99, by means of subventions from the alternative insulation programme. The next and final step was to form a full-scale continuous process. Velux, a major Danish window producer, were contacted for investment and marketing, but they refused to go into the alternative insulation business. The group of network actors close to the DPP then made contacts, in 1997, with a network of local farmers related to a Green Centre for agro-industrial R&D, situated on the island of Lolland, a centre set up to find alternative incomes (and jobs) to former sugar beets monoculture on Lolland. The farmers started to grow flax on a contract basis for experiments at the DPP, and Bodil Pallesen made contact with a number of actors in the region: industries, municipal politicians, mayors and two representatives from local farmer associations. The challenge was to ensure the formation of a niche market by securing stable financial and political support. SydTek, a local innovation R&D unit, became a major driver in the subsequent processes. The Pool for Green Jobs donated the capital for the preparation and design of the production unit to be build

134

J. Holm et al.

in the region, the Danish Ministry of Trade and Industry, and County of Storstrøm (administering EU-Target 2) invested in all the machinery. A regional fund and a company attached to SydTek (EnviroTech) invested a smaller amount of money. An eco-construction company, Egen Vinding og Datter, became involved as a partner; they knew of the market options for eco-materials, had the networks, and were expected to become an important purchaser. The insulation company was founded in 2000 in Sakskøbing, Lolland. Marianne Eriksen became a leading manager to work on installing and mantling machinery. Since 2004, the firm has been taken over by a group of investors, including an eco housing smallscale producer, Svanholm Ecobyg. The product, called SCANFLAX, is still a niche product for sale by order, and all technical standards are available. But the craftsmen’s knowledge about handling the material, its technical properties and so on have not been dispersed to building markets or the construction sector in general. Summing up: the formation of design space for a niche product The 15 years of research and design for a new insulation product to be introduced onto the market covered a remarkable amount of networking among actors who were not previously connected. Thus a design space gradually developed that promoted the properties of free plant fibres into being an eco-friendly, healthy and geo-economic device. The research and design process included a mobilization of farmers in flax growing experimentation, of eco-constructors in experimenting with various insulation types and methods, of labour unions in pushing for design and experimenting on occupational health properties of the flax insulation, of knowledge institutions in plant technologies for designing the proper plant-decomposition techniques, and institutions in construction materials, to examine and design for purposeful, technical properties. Research has played a pivotal role in opening the use of recyclable plant materials for an industrial purpose, but the design of an artefact for industrial, health, environmental and occupation purposes, became, early on in the process, part of the research and development agenda. The constellation of actors was obliged to undertake research and design in order to address all the features of the dominant sociotechnical regime of insulation and construction. They succeeded in an exhaustive effort to develop a number of full-scale experiments and standards by involving the Danish Parliament and Energy Agency to form institutional backup, but they failed in building up a niche product that would be called upon from a broader part of constructors, retailers and so forth.

Sustainable design between creativity and path dependency In this chapter we have launched a dialogue between innovation, design and transition theoretical perspectives on the research, design and development of sustainable products and practices. Innovation and transition theories operate with the notions of technological regimes and path dependence, making the development

Design and sustainable transition

135

of transition fields dependent on strong interventions from government or strong coalitions of social actors. Design theoretical approaches focus on competent designers’ ability to develop future sustainable practices by intelligent intentional design. A design process was analysed bottom-up in order to understand how a specific design space emerged, configuring a network of actors developing a product and potential practices which break with path dependency, and containing new interpretations of sustainability in a specific technological field. The case is informative because the claim for sustainability points to the need for radical innovations and because it represents a design process emerging from a complex web of social actors, acting under institutional configurations evolving in an interplay of a number of different agendas. The product is given meaning in a process of selective interpretations of such different agendas as environmental improvement, the development of future agricultural products and markets, occupational health improvements for construction workers, improved constructions with improved indoor climate, all having an impact on the configuration of the coalition of actors functioning as co-designers contributing to the technological development project. This shows that the landscape (and regime) is not only external to design processes, but actively interpreted and constructed in a sensemaking process among niche actors. The case highlights the importance of the process where creative designers build links, interact with and involve other actors in the field. This interaction is decisive for the development of the technology and the coalition of designers. Based on these coalitions, existing institutions are challenged and new institutional frameworks supporting the new technology are formed. The case, however, also shows how the product has remained a niche product with a very limited market share. This situation is despite the fact that the product has technically and functionally qualities comparable to the dominant products on the market and despite the fact that it represents a more advanced perception of sustainability. The coalition of designers was strong enough to bring the product onto the market, but it did not have the strength to penetrate the market. The findings point to the importance of designing policies to support the development of design spaces. There are normally strong regulatory, normative and cognitive institutions supporting dominant products and practices, and the networks of actors in transition fields often lack the capabilities to establish access to markets, to educate users and so on. Policies do not have to pick the winning technology at an early stage, but it is an important task for policies to develop concrete visions for a more sustainable practice, enabling the establishment of different transition fields and design spaces in the same area. It is important to meta-design reflexive policies that can support the establishment of institutions making it possible for new products and practices to develop, but also to be disseminated on the market.

136

J. Holm et al.

Note 1 The study Towards an Integration of Environmental and Ecology-Oriented Technology Policy. Stimulus and response in environment related innovation networks (ENVINNO), 1999–2001, was funded by the Target Socio-Economic Research Programme, EU. The project included partners from Austria, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and UK.

References Brown, H.S., Vergragt, P., Green, K. and Berchicci, L. (2003) ‘Learning for sustainable transition through bounded socio-technical experiments in personal mobility’, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 15: 291–315. Buchanan, R. (1989) Declaration by Design: rhetoric, argument, and demonstration in design practice, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Elzen, B., Geels, F.W. and Green, K. (eds) (2004) System Innovation and the Transition to Sustainability: theory, evidence and policy, Chelterham: Edward Elgar. Energistyrelsen (Danish Energy Agency) (1997) ‘Miljø og arbejdsmiljøvenlige isoleringsmetoder’ (Environmental and occupational health friendly insolation methods), Udviklingsprogram udsendt af Energistyrelsen (Development programme issued by the Danish Energy Agency), October 1997. Online. Available online at: (accessed 16 November 2009). Geels, F.W. (2002) ‘Technological transition as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: a multilevel perspective and case study’, Research Policy, 31: 1257–74. Holm, J., Hansen, O.E. and Søndergaard, B. (2001) ‘Regulatory support of entrepreneurs, researchers and Labor Unions networking for an eco-work friendly alternative to a monopolized trajectory: the innovative construction of plant-fiber insulation mats in Denmark’, Roskilde: ENVINNO Working Paper, Roskilde University. Online. Available online at: (accessed 16 November 2009). Kemp, R. and Loorbach, D. (2007) ‘Transition management: a reflexive governance approach’, in Voß, J-P., Bauknecht, D. and Kemp, R. (eds) Reflexive Governance for Sustainable Development, Chelterham: Edward Elgar. Kemp, R., Schot, J. and Hoogma, R. (1998) ‘Regime shifts to sustainability through processes of niche formation: the approach of strategic niche management’, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 10: 409–29. Lidwell, W., Holden, K. and Butler, J. (2003) Universal Principles of Design, Beverly, MA: Rockport Publishers. Norman, D. (1999) ‘Affordance, conventions and design’, Interactions, 6: 38–42 Papanek, V. (1995) The Green Imperative: natural design for the real world, New York: Thames & Hudson. Rennings, K., Kemp, R., Bartolomeo, M., Hemmelskamp, J. and Hitchens, D. (2003) ‘Blueprints for an integration of Science, Technology and Environmental Policy, 5th European Framework Programme for Research and Development. The Improving Human Potential Programme: the Strategic Analysis of Specific Political Issues (STRATA)’, Online. Available online at: (accessed 1 October 2009) Rip, A. and Kemp, R. (1998) ‘Technological change’ in Rayner, S. and Malone, E.L. (eds)

Design and sustainable transition

137

Human Choice and Climate Change, Vol. 2, Resources and Technology, Columbus, OH: Battelle Press. Smith, A. (2003) ‘Transforming technological regimes for sustainable development: a role for alternative technology niches’, Science and Public Policy, 30: 127–35. —— (2007) ‘Translating sustainabilities between green niches and socio-technical regimes’, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 19: 427–50. Stegall, N. (2006) ‘Designing for sustainability: a philosophy for ecological intentional design’, Design Issues, 22: 56–63. Voß, J-P. and Kemp, R. (2006) ‘Sustainability and reflexive governance’, in Voß, J-P., Bauknecht, D. and Kemp, R. (eds) Reflexive Governance for Sustainable Development, Chelterham: Edward Elgar. Weaver, P., Jansen, L., Grootveld, G. v., Spiegel, E.V. and Vergragt, P. (2000) Sustainable Technology Development, Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing. Weber, K. M., Leitner, K-H., Oehme, I., Rohracher, H., Späth, P. and Whitelegg, K. (2003) ‘Middle-range transitions in production-consumption systems: the role of research programmes for shaping transition processes towards sustainability’, in Jacob, K., Binder, M. and Wieszorek, A. (eds) Governance for Industrial Transformation: proceedings of the 2003 Berlin conference on the human dimensions of global environmental change, Berlin: Environmental Policy Research Centre.

10 Designing an exhibition Bruno Ingemann

The theoretical background in this chapter is phenomenology and semiotics related to processes of design and the designer. The concept of design is enveloped by the design process but also by the end product, which is an artefact. An illustrative case example focuses on the visual and symbolic design of a small poster exhibition by following the design-thinking processes in detail. An introspective analysis presents a dialogue between the designer and researcher concerning the processual experience as a reflection-in-action. The contribution to a general core of design research is the close examination of the actual practice where tacit knowledge is revealed, hereby opening the black box of the individual designer’s design processes.

Introduction Donald A. Schön’s study of the processes of design shows how those with more experience educate the young, less experienced learner, that is, the novice. His work can be seen as a phenomenological investigation of processes, practices and experiences, which are often difficult or impossible to trace and make explicit (Schön 1982, 1987). Design processes can also be seen as a variety of experiences, narratives and schemata as theorized by British psychologist F.C. Bartlett (1995) and further developed into processual methods in creative reception (Gjedde and Ingemann 2008). Reflection-in-action is the core of Schön’s theory. He believes that ‘[a]s makers of artefacts, all practitioners are design professionals’. He stresses that his main case, architecture, demonstrates that we have access, ‘to a prototype of the designer’s reflective conversation with his materials; and we can observe it in service both to functional and aesthetic values’ (Schön 1987: 43). Design is much more than giving form that serves function to an object. In his book, entitled How Designers Think, British psychologist and designer Bryan Lawson claims that his book, ‘is not about science, art and technology’ and that ‘the designer cannot escape the influences of these three very broad categories of intellectual endeavor’ (Lawson 1988: 5). He follows this line of thinking when he cites graphic designer

Designing an exhibition

139

Paul Rand (1970), saying that the ‘graphic designer’s central task is to find the essential meaning in his material and then to abstract and symbolize’ (Lawson 1988: 143). This chapter focuses on the processes of developing the visual and symbolic design of a small poster exhibition by following the design-thinking processes in detail. The fundamental concept is an introspective analysis completed by allowing the author to take different perspectives to reflect on his work and work processes. For the most part, reflection proceeds from the perspective of two roles, that of Designer and Researcher. The result is a dialogue concerning the processual experience as reflection-in-action. This is interspersed with narrative analysis of this dialogue. This introspective analysis can be seen in the tradition of phenomenology, experimental psychology or semiotic sign theory like Ronald Barthes’ work, who, in his autobiography Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, turned towards himself as a text to be studied. Developing methods designed to allow close examination of actual practice can lead to an upgrade of the practice-learned insights to a level where tacit knowledge is revealed (Polanyi 1967). Consequently, design research becomes more vivid and more related to actual practice, in addition to developing approaches for opening the black box of design processes.

The biotechnology case The focus of this article is a case that involves the communication of rather complex content about biotechnology, or more precisely, it is about the development of a design over the course of more than a year. The client was an organization called the Technological Board, appointed by the Danish state to raise issues of a problematic or critical nature about society and technology. In this context, the purpose was to examine and define what the core issues in the debate on biotechnology are. These issues were then to be communicated via a small poster exhibition at public libraries. The end product comprised eight posters each measuring 100 × 70 cm (Figure 10.1). The process concluded in September 1990 and the dialogue presented here as an ‘interview’ was written during the following year.1 Serendipitously, at the time, circumstances coalesced in a manner that allowed the researcher, who has nearly twenty-five years of practical experience, to stop at a crossroads, which opened up the possibility of combining his experience with graphic design practice and the writing of his dissertation at the same time as the making of the exhibition. The dialogue in question was developed in this context, the uncertainty and openness of the situation providing fertile soil for the idea of gaining insight into the creative process of design. In this dialogue, the Designer and the Researcher are the same person and the ‘interview’ is formatted so that it alternates between the author’s perspective as designer and the tacit knowledge he tries to reveal through the interviewer, who in the role as the researcher, questions the designer’s answers. The researcher’s aim is to discover how visual ideas are created. How do creative processes unfold? How are knowledge, insight and experiences facilitated beyond rational logic modes of thinking? What effect does the craft process have

140

B. Ingemann

Figure 10.1 The final series of the poster exhibition. Produced to hang in public libraries, the original size of each poster is 100 ´ 70 cm. The content and headlines of the eight posters are: ‘Genetically engineered sugar beets: CAN YOU SEE THE DIFFERENCE?’; ‘Biorefinery: OIL, PAPER, AND PLASTIC ARE HARVESTED HERE . . .’

on creativity? This dialogue is interspersed with narrative reflection from the more detached perspective of writing this chapter.

The dialogue/interview The subsequent dialogue was written during the year following the design-process and the poster exhibition: [Researcher]: How do you tackle your work? How do you get started? [Designer]: The most important step a designer will take is the first one. The main issue for a poster exhibition is to choose a visual and textual style that can be sustained throughout the exhibition. In that phase you’re rather vague

Figure 10.2 The cliché images have to be formulated to get rid of their influence on the Designer.

Designing an exhibition

141

Figure 10.1 (continued) ‘Malaria vaccine: IF YOU HAVE MONEY, THEN . . .’; ‘Washing powder: THE EARLY BIRD CATCHES THE WORM . . .’; ‘Rabies vaccine: LABORATORY GOODBYE’; ‘Research: BIG, SMALL’ ‘International competition: THEY LOST, WE WON’; and ‘Growth hormone: READY, STEADY, GO!’. and tense. On one hand it’s important to make your choice quickly. But on the other hand it’s crucial that you choose right. That’s why I spend a lot of time making small postage stamp-size sketches to try out various ideas for layouts and for the content and nature of the illustrations, as well as for the type of title to go with them. In this early stage I’m not talking about typography, but about the style of the message expressed by the titles.

—That’s pretty vague; can you be more specific about the exhibition we are talking about? Biotechnology is a difficult subject. There are no obvious images associated with it. Well, maybe there are. Various kinds of pictures pop into my head, but they are all scenes of horror. A cow with two heads. Genetically modified humans. Utter fear and loathing. The point of the communicative process is

Figure 10.2 (continued)

142

B. Ingemann

not to create fear, but to establish a basis for issues which are worth discussing, in other words, how can we use biotechnology to serve society and what effects do we want it to have on society?

—You say that the first images that sprang into your head were primarily images of horror, so how did you get around those clichés having an influence on you (Bartlett 1995)? It’s extremely important to free yourself quickly from such obvious and wellknown images. I rapidly draw some sketches with those types of images. It’s like a stockpile of pictures that prevent you from thinking of new visual expressions. Those pictures prevent me from forming my own exciting, interesting pictures.

—But doesn’t a designer always have to use and re-use the repository of pictures? Both to be understood by the public, but also because the designer lives in the same visual culture as other observers? What you call new – isn’t it just a way of thinking through the same visual ideas and using them in a new and perhaps surprising manner? You could say that there is a certain amount of recycling. What is new is perhaps the relationship between the picture and the title. When I free myself of the most cliché-ridden pictures, it starts to get hard. Time also plays a role. I need to get a lot of input. So I read all about the subject, but some time has to pass before any visual ideas begin to form. It is important for me to learn about the material I’m going to express. Obviously. After reading broadly in the literature, I found a number of topics that I felt were both interesting and important. In addition, they contained good stories with a potential for exciting visualization. So right from the start we were thinking about both form and content.

The eight topics [Researcher]: Why did you choose eight topics? Wouldn’t many other topics also have been of interest? Because the exhibition was to hang in a library, there were both space and budgetary constraints preventing us from making more. So it was mostly practical issues that determined the number. We couldn’t just start up somewhere and work away until there was nothing more to say. We were mounting an exhibition and that meant we had to meet certain requirements regarding simplicity and visual quality.

Designing an exhibition

143

—That means that from the beginning you were involved in the design of the entire exhibition. Both the text and the presentation? But you have no particular knowledge about biotechnology and in no way are you an expert in that field. That’s true. We worked together with the people on the Technological Board; they were responsible for the scientific content and I was the communications expert. But it didn’t mean that the content was written first and then diluted and simplified. The manner of presentation was considered from the start. The content was actually not written before the presentation and titles were ready. Then we began to pour in the content. Being familiar with the stories and which points were to be made by each poster was actually a good basis to create the exhibition in its entirety. The public is quite unprepared upon meeting the exhibition. Initially, the exhibition should function in the same way as a poster. The audience should be able to catch the message at a fleeting glance. The pictures and titles should clearly tell their stories and engage a potential reader.

—It sounds almost like what you would expect of a good poster: one word. One picture. But it’s not quite the same as a poster. There is more information at an exhibition and aren’t people supposed to read the entire text? I was perhaps too glib in saying that the picture and title should be able to tell the whole story. In this case the messages to be presented are more complicated than the ones a normal poster would contain. The idea is also for the audience to read the text or part of it, which is why the layout of the finished exhibition has been specially designed.

Layout and reading – the overall picture matters [Researcher]: Is that something which has been thought through from the start? I mean the final layout that we, the public, see now. No, it wasn’t. During the brainstorming period we worked with a very ‘boring’ and rigid layout in order to put the illustrations, titles and content in place. But while we were doing that, everything became more defined. And when we were almost finished juggling all the elements into position, we could then concentrate on the final layout. It’s a matter of only focusing on certain issues at a time. You can’t have too many balls in the air at a time. As the work progresses, the issues that you focus on change.

—How do you read a poster? What I mean is, how do you picture the audience reading a poster?

144

B. Ingemann

I don’t think everyone ‘read’ a poster in the same way. What I try to do is offer different ways of reading. Some people are very text-oriented and others are better with images. So I try to provide several ways of reading. I choose the most extreme approach, which is image-oriented. During the entire work process, the visual aspect is what obviously catches the eye first. The title and picture are seen first. They form a unity. They are also the most dominant visual elements and fill most of the surface. The secondary title which is the small text above the title, will be read at the same time. The eye can then glide down to the second element, which is visually an independent entity, namely the fox. There is a small drawing with a brief text that makes a snappy little comment on the content of the picture/title and the body of the text. Then the eye returns to the introductory paragraph, which is right under the title, and if enough interest has been generated in the content, you will read the text. The text can be read in several ways. You can read the entire text, or just the end of the text, where there are some short questions dealing with the problems connected to the topic. The text begins with a description

Figure 10.3 These elements create the specific idiolect of the entire exhibition.

Designing an exhibition

145

of the topic, followed by positive arguments and then negative or questioning arguments. The Technological Board as sender of the message is important information that will surely be one of the first things read! Who actually says this? You can see/read parts of the poster and understand them without having to read the entire poster or all the posters.

—You seem to imagine a very easygoing form of reading. You apparently think of the readers as people who have to discover on their own what interests them. I have no illusions that every utterance will be so immensely interesting for all potential viewers that they will read everything. You have to accept that the time a viewer is willing to spend on the posters varies greatly. Some will only ‘read’ the pictures and headlines, some will read all the posters, but most people will do something in between. At least I hope so.

Making a start – the sugar beet [Researcher]: Let’s return to the discussion about how each poster was conceived and try to understand how ideas develop. We can start with the first poster. It deals with genetically modified beets. How was this idea conceived? This poster was important for several reasons. It was the first one I made, and therefore it was the most difficult. It was more than a question of finding an illustration. Rather, the challenge was to determine what relationship the picture and title should have to one another. The written information explains that it is now possible to genetically modify beets so that when a certain herbicide is used to kill weeds the beets remain unharmed. Drawing a picture of a beet is obvious. But what then? There is no visual difference between beets that are modified and those that are normal. A beet is a beet is a beet . . . How can you show that the beets survive the herbicide and the weeds die? How do you show that the beets are genetically modified? So I drew some beets just to get started – there’s nothing worse than a blank sheet of white paper, so just putting down some doodles made the paper less fearsome and less virginal. Suddenly, there were many beets on the paper. Words such as similarity/difference were what got the ideas moving. There were two beets beside each other on the paper, and that was exactly the idea: to show that they were identical. And then when you have two identical beets side by side, you have the picture, but also a whole stockpile of similar pictures: before-after, fat-thin, find-five-faults pictures etc. So then, it was obvious what the title should be: CAN YOU SEE THE DIFFERENCE?

146

B. Ingemann

Figure 10.4 The first of the eight posters in the series. As the first poster to be visualized by the designer, it set the standard or format for the entire series. The poster’s title reads: ‘Can you see the difference?’

This challenges the reader to take another look at the picture to compare the beets and to determine what the differences are between the two beets; they are of course identical. The text is interactive. It points toward the picture and encourages entering into a dialogue with the picture. In all actuality, the text does not have a clear message when it stands on its own, making it nearly devoid of meaning. It could be a title for just about anything and contains nothing that indicates what it is about. To guarantee that the title is understood, it was also given a secondary title: Genetically engineered sugar beets. It functions as a label that refers to a factual reality. There is no fancy wordplay or references to the picture. Even if we do not read the rest, this ensures that the reader will know what the poster is about.

Let me intersperse some elaboration, considering the dialogue from my perspective as a designer and researcher today. I am aware that the Designer is referring to illustrations that are typically found in ads for weight loss drugs, hair growth remedies and so on. And when he believes that the title is self-explanatory, it is most certainly because he is working with it not only as an extension of the genre advertisements use, but also as an ad style that directly takes advantage of the interplay between text and illustration, not to mention familiar wordplays that nearly have value in and of themselves. The title obviously does not refer to a thing or a situation in the real world, but solely to the illustration. The title is necessary to

Designing an exhibition

147

show what the viewer should be aware of in the illustration – namely the difference between the two beets. The interaction between the text and the picture does not mean that the text is anchored to the picture but rather that it relays something (Barthes 1977: 39–41). The picture supersedes parts of the text in the same way that it does in the cartoon. In this case, the picture explains a crucial aspect of the entire story while the text is of essential importance for providing the drawing with significance. This is an exceptionally successful way of presenting material to be ‘read’ at a glance and to generate interest. The picture carries the maximum amount of information possible, liberating the text from having to provide the entire message. Combining these two elements ensures fast, effective communication. Thus it is no coincidence that the cartoon and the ad apply substitution as the main technique. In this case, the message or joke must be delivered quickly. This also goes well with the Designer’s description of what he had in mind, namely that even a fleeting glance from the viewer would be enough to get the message across. People are sceptical and have irrational fears about genetic engineering. This is exactly why it would be a good idea to tap into these irrational fears if the objective is to quickly grab people’s attention. If getting attention was the only factor that needed to be taken into consideration, then this would be a straightforward approach. It would, however, be the equivalent of putting half-naked women on the hood of a car. Attracting attention would be the most significant feature, but our purpose was greater than that; the aim was to gain attention using something that was central to the message. If one can demand something from the pictures, then it is similar to what American designer Bob Gill once described. He believed that good visualization and good ideas can be explained on the telephone. If this is not possible, then the idea is worthless. He does not devalue the aesthetic design, but rather points out that if the idea is not clear, then it cannot be saved by the aesthetic design (Gill 1981). This is also the reason why it is possible to work at the rough draft level, where only the idea is given consideration and not the final design.

[Researcher]: Do you consciously take advantage of the aesthetic and a style that has features in common with ads? I would say that it’s not surprising. This is not something that I have consciously thought about. Maybe this sounds a bit naive, but I’ve often seen this kind of spill over effect from other types of media. I know that it happens and I don’t think that it is problematic. I think that people get inspired and that subconsciously they respond to a variety of influences of this kind. Digging up all of the subconscious factors that are significant in the creative process is difficult.

148

B. Ingemann

At this point, time plays an important role. During the process when ideas begin to surface, it is impossible to respond analytically and consciously to each and every form of influence and borrowing that occurs. The chief concern is to concentrate on adequately expressing the subject as well as possible. In this regard, it is the interaction between the creative and analytical levels.

Research on creativity has traditionally divided the creative process into four areas: the preparation phase, the incubation phase, the illumination phase and the verification phase (Kneller 1965, MacKinnon 1976, May 1975). During the preparation phase one becomes aware of the existing problem and begins to identify it. During the incubation phase the problem is put aside and presumably forgotten. During the illumination phase a crucial idea suddenly comes to the surface: ‘A light bulb went off in my head’. During the verification phase the idea is tested, after which, if necessary, it is reformulated or revised. The designer frequently goes back to the issue of time and its role in the process. When he examines the pile of material on the subject, he quickly disregards what he calls cliché pictures, which means he is in the preparation phase. —Can you recognize any of these steps in the creative process? I know the feeling of ‘a light bulb just went off in my head’ well. This is an aspect that I consciously work with. Over the years I have discovered that I often get good ideas when I ride the train late at night after a long day and am really tired. I also often wake up at night with a crystal clear idea in my head. This has led me to work consciously with subconscious processes. If I have a problem that I can’t solve, I sit down and focus my thoughts on it just before I go to bed. I frequently wake up with a new idea, but it doesn’t happen every time. I don’t think that I forget the problem; on the contrary, I remind my subconscious of its existence. The tiredness I experience on the train, on the other hand, shows precisely how much I need to let the censorship and limitations of my conscious mind go. I believe that I can work consciously with the incubation phase and integrate it with the illumination phase. Time plays a big role here again. If I have a project to complete and the pressures of time are heavy, then I don’t have time to let this process take place. The result is that the solutions that I come up with are often repetitions of something I have done previously. This is permissible on a professional level. At any rate, it does not surprise me. Even though many people believe that they work best under time pressure, I believe that this is only partially correct. Having to finish something quickly can be a challenge, but the greatest amount of time is spent on the actual idea phase. If I don’t have sufficient time, then I seldom come up with something that surprises me. It’s a luxury that I would like to give myself. This is where the challenges lie. This is why being in the middle of a variety of projects at the same time is a good idea. When I have a need for the problems to develop on their own, then I can work on something else.

Designing an exhibition

149

The second poster: the complexity of a biorefinery [Researcher]: The title on the completed poster about the biorefinery reads: ‘OIL, PAPER AND PLASTIC ARE HARVESTED HERE . . .’ The illustration shows a golden brown field of grain with two white shafts of wheat to the left in the foreground. Style-wise it closely matches the interactive aspect of the first poster with the sugar beet. Was that also one of the ones that was self-explanatory? I thought that this poster was difficult to sort out. The problem was how to create an interactive unit out of the title and the illustration. The first rough draft shows this. The title is Biorefinery. This title is perhaps puzzling enough in the first place. In brief, it is a system for gathering, sorting and processing what biologists call young biomass: grain, beets, beans, sunflowers, potatoes, wood etc. They contain substances that can be extracted with the help of enzymes and genetically modified bacteria. This is what happens at a biorefinery. These substances can be used to make oil, paper, plastic etc. The first idea I had to dismiss was a flow diagram of the entire process. Although it may have communicated the aspect of planning, it was incomprehensible unless accompanied by a several-page explanation. The issue of technology wasn’t actually what I was pursuing. Well, I didn’t really truly know what I was looking for. The next idea, which formed the basis of the first draft, was the ‘black box’. On the box it said ‘Biorefinery’. A multitude of different kinds of biomass, corn, beets, beans, sunflower seeds, wood etc. were being poured from the upper left corner of the poster into the black box and came out of the lower right

Figure 10.5 This is only a section of the diagram showing the flow in a biorefinery. Difficult.

150

B. Ingemann

Figure 10.6 The title on the last biorefinery poster reads: ‘OIL, PAPER AND PLASTIC ARE HARVESTED HERE . . .’

corner of the black box in the form of food, paper, plastic, film etc. This was perhaps a good illustration of what happens in a biorefinery without being too technical. It was an explanatory, instructional illustration, but the style established in the first poster of the sugar beets was certainly not being adhered to.

—What, then, was the best way to proceed? How did you progress from an understanding of why it didn’t work to what is now the final visualization? Did it just pop up out of the blue? My reply is pretty much of a ‘yes’ to that question. I actually tried to analyse the sugar beet poster. It was a familiar product that took on new significance due to the title. In the case of biorefinery, what was new and what was familiar? The new aspect was the products that you can manufacture and the familiar aspect was the corn, beets etc. Although I had hit on the surprising aspect, no visual ideas came out of it. When an idea succeeds and has been fully developed then it looks natural and obvious. Unfortunately, the same cannot be

Designing an exhibition

151

Figure 10.7 The rough draft shows the thought process of the black-box metaphor.

said about the process. In this case it is confusion, frustration, irritation and blockage that reign. You go about your daily family life, cook dinner, pick up the kids, talk with family members about their day, read the paper and watch TV, but a recording plays in your head about the confusion you are experiencing while you simultaneously continue to try to find a solution. This is a pain in the neck for everyone around you because you are physically present, but nonetheless absent. At this stage in the process, time was getting short. Two new ideas had to be generated within the space of a few days. It is especially difficult because you have come up with an idea that you’ve written down. It’s nearly become like a child to you. Doing away with it and moving on is difficult. You become fond of the ideas that you get. Even the ones that aren’t very good. Consequently, you create blockage that actually makes it more difficult to move on.

Let me intervene once more, to clarify and expand from my point of view today: The Designer has to get rid of the clichéd illustration he has had from the beginning.

152

B. Ingemann

Although it is a liberating process that sets the creative processes free, the opposite is true when he expresses his own ideas on paper. He makes the comparison to having to deal with a child. It is falling in love and a birth. It can also be looked at as being lazy. Creating something new is terribly exciting, but it also means experiencing fear and pain. Apart from perhaps just being fun and exciting, it is also demanding, stressful and ambitious. —Do you have ambivalent feelings? Would you like to do something that is good from both your point of view and the consumer’s on the one hand and yet also experience dread at the thought that you might not be able to do it on the other? Well, I wouldn’t quite use a word like ‘dread’. I would say that when I started doing this kind of work many years ago, I most likely had a feeling of dread associated with the notion that I wasn’t good enough or that I couldn’t manage. To a large degree, it was a feeling that was connected to other people’s appraisal. Today, it is more my own assessment and norms that I battle with. My ambitions are probably the issue. I know what I am capable of – but that is not always possible. I’ve become more humble and accepting. I’m not a world champion, but I’m good enough. Regardless, one solution blocks another. This is why the first solution has to be done away with for new ideas to arise. I have to forget what I have done and try to begin again.

—How can you actively forget? Is it possible to wipe the slate clean? I wipe the slate clean and start over from the beginning with a fresh piece of paper. This gives me a very empty feeling, which is how it is supposed to be. It’s not pleasant and it requires overcoming reluctance. I began with the text. This is the area where I had spent the least amount of energy until now. How could I create a text that would invite initiating a dialogue with an illustration that I had not yet come up with? This was the weakest point and the easiest place to start. In retrospect, it is easy to see that I made the first rough draft in one sentence: Harvesting film, petrol and paper is possible . . . Just as it is possible to drill for oil. Using a shortcut where some processes are skipped, you end up with the product of biotechnical processes. This is typical for developing ideas: one comes up with something by grouping what is impossible and illogical. The entire biorefinery process ought to have read: You harvest grain, beets, beans, sunflowers, potatoes and wood . . . which can be turned into oil, paper and plastic . . . This is the one that I wrote and then combined in a new way: Biorefinery OIL, PAPER AND PLASTIC ARE HARVESTED HERE . . . The illustration was obvious. It should be an ordinary, easily identifiable field in Denmark planted with a familiar crop. In this case, I think that a field of grain was an obvious choice – what could be more Danish or more familiar?

Designing an exhibition

153

To give some further details from my perspective today, the Designer (in me) at the time thought that it was difficult to wipe the slate clean, so he chose to concentrate on the weakest link, namely the title, and then to completely forget the illustration for a while. This is where he has invested the least amount of energy and creative work. At the same time, it is clear that without the work that went into the first instructional illustration and the resulting understanding, it would have been impossible to come up with the final title. Even though he claims to have wiped the slate clean, he has not actually done so. To a great extent, he uses his previous experience in a highly active way. He had the picture in his head and was puzzled about the connection between ordinary fields and oil, paper, plastic etc. This puzzlement was tied up with focusing on explaining a biorefinery. The Designer clearly shows a desire to be educational. This is an offshoot of his extensive experience with precisely this type of communication. He has fallen into a pit that he has dug himself. He has thorough knowledge about instructional illustrations. This leads to the short-circuiting that he finds so difficult to get away from, and that he spends a long time describing. Believing that it happened is difficult. Certainly, his observations are correct on a more general level, but in the specific situation, his explanations are insufficient. The next section will continue to reflect on these reflections-in-action enabled within the force-field of this dialogue between the designer and the researcher, which was created directly after the exhibition. By adding another, more analytical level of reflection some conclusions become possible that take us back to relating design research to actual practice.

Back to the practitioner Familiar with constraints and ‘value traps’, the Designer tries actively not only to overcome them but also to creatively exploit, build upon and actually create constraints (Pirsig 1974: 302). The Designer actively determines the constraints for his work as a tool to induce new ideas. He invents ‘points-of-attention’ and tries to identify where the ‘soft spots’ in the design process are. In addition, he works vigorously, nearly to the point of exhaustion, to find information and visual inspiration from popular culture and the field of science to expand his repertoire of expression. Interested in finding out how visual ideas are created, the Researcher poses the questions: How do creative processes occur? How are knowledge, insight and experiences facilitated beyond rational logical modes of thinking? What effect does the craft process have on creativity? However, it is not just the Researcher, who has recognized that the whole of the design process contributes to the creation of knowledge and artefacts through the production process of communication – so has the Designer. When Schön analyses his superb prototypical example from the studio, he demonstrates his understanding of many interesting aspects of the case. He notes: ‘Quist [an architect] reflects very little on his own reflection-in-action, and it would be easy for a student or observer to miss the fundamental structure of inquiry which

154

B. Ingemann

underlies his virtuoso performance’ (Schön 1983: 104), he highlights a serious question, namely, who is it that performs the reflection-in-action, and who gains insight from this process? The analytical, self-reflective move of putting one person into the roles of both Designer and Researcher was created without knowledge of Schön’s study at the time of the analysis. In this approach, the insight gained made the tacit knowledge and the practical action visible and useful for the designer. It can also be viewed as an answer to a further question Schön raises in the following: ‘We know very little about the ways in which individuals develop the feel for media, language, and repertoire which shapes their reflection-in-action. This is [an] intriguing and promising topic for future research’ (Schön 1983: 272). Furthermore, dialogic interviews such as the one described here reveal of the role of design constraints. With Bryan Lawson we can divide these constraints into internal and external constraints related to the designer, the client, the user and the legislator. But when describing how constraints structure design work as design generators, Lawson explains, ‘this model is not intended to form part of a design method but rather as an aid to the understanding of the nature of design’ (Lawson 1988: 79). Constraints thus do not ‘drive’ design, although they play an important part in doing design work, almost like ‘tools’. In order to follow the design process and reflectivity beyond the academic level, Schön’s observation about reflective research provides further guidance: ‘Reflective research requires a partnership of the practitioner-researchers and the researcher-practitioners’ (Schön 1983: 323). The dialogue presented here is an introspective form of such a partnership. It provides a counterweight to more distributed and collaborative forms that are discussed in Chapter 2 by Simonsen and Hertzum, Chapter 7 by McHardy, Olsen, Southern and Shove, and Chapter 8 by Lindstrøm, for example. On another note, how users of a variety of cultural products create meaning and experiences has also been of interest. In the case of the poster exhibition, the aim has been to develop methodologies that are able to examine so-called personin-situation experiences. Users and informants exhibit highly creative actions, but what occurs in their interaction with designed objects cannot be described as design processes. But the methodologies they use can be creatively addressed. Studying person-in-situation experiences requires the use of video technology, for instance, a video cap (see for example the video-cap presented in Gjedde and Ingemann [2008, p. 76]) or a ReflexivityLab. However, simply creating mountains of data with technology is not sufficient, which is why the methodology proposed by Gjedde and Ingemann to capture cultural experiences comprises three types of dialogue to be engaged in during the design process: the process dialogue, the work dialogue and the reflection dialogue. This opens up additional avenues to the introspective dialogue presented here. One of the main advantages of using three types of dialogue is that the action-in-the-present is stopped and interrupted regularly, thus allowing the informant to be part of and learning from the reflection-in-action (Gjedde and Ingemann 2008: 173–76). The practitioner can be provoked to reflect on his or her own practices and the researcher can theorize about the uncertainties and chaotic or unique aspects of the situation in question.

Designing an exhibition

155

Note 1 The entire project and the final product were analysed in detail and published in an internal stencil as working papers. The Danish title is: ‘Grafisk Design – om de creative processer, strategier og deres resultat’ [Graphic Design: on creative processes, strategies and their results], paper on professional communication, Communication Studies, Roskilde University, 1991.

References Barthes, R. (1977) ‘Rhetoric of the image’ in Heath, S., (ed.) Image, Music, Text, New York: Hill and Wang, 32–51. —— (1994) Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bartlett, F.C. (1995; first published 1932) Remembering: a study in experimental and social psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gill, B. (1981) Forget All the Rules About Graphic Design, New York: Watson-Guptill. Gjedde, L. and Ingemann, B. (2008) Researching Experiences: exploring processual and experimental methods in cultural analysis, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Publishing. Kneller, G.F. (1965) The Art and Science of Creativity, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Lawson, B. (1988) How Designers Think: the design process demystified, London: Butterworth Architecture. MacKinnon, D.W. (1976) ‘The assessment and development of managerial creativity’, Creativity Network, 2 (3). May, Rollo (1975/1985) The Courage to Create, New York: Bantam Books. Pirsig, R.M. (1974) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values, New York: William Morrow and Company. Rollo, M. (1985) The Courage to Create, New York: Bantam Books. Polanyi, M. (1967) The Tacit Dimension, New York: Doubleday. Rand, P. (1970) Thoughts on Design, London: Studio Vista. —— (1988) A Designers Art, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Schön, R.D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner, New York: Basic Books. —— (1987) Educating the Reflective Practitioner, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

11 Joyful, collective design processes Henriette Christrup

The theoretical background of this chapter is psychology, Western scientific insights into creativity and inspiration from Eastern schools of wisdom, supplemented by ideas from management science, design and profession research, performance theory, neuroscience and heart research. The concept of design is defined as ideas materialized in, for example, drawings and models as well as the further process of construction of an object or other phenomenon, with the intention of creating what does not exist but could. The illustrative examples come from student projects and workshops at the Performance Design programme, Roskilde University. The contribution to design research is to investigate and experiment with ideas on how to create emotional spaces for collective, creative design processes and tools for the generation or the materialisation of ideas.

From design to design process Fashion historian Laird Borelli says of fashion designers that their sketches are like a download from their brains – as if one gets into their heads and sees ideas (Borelli 2008). I include this inspiration for the materialization of ideas in my support for Nobel prize-winner Herbert Simon’s proposal for the concept of design that is characterized by its focus on what is not but could be (Simon 1969). Consequently, I regard the focus for design research as ideas materialized in sketches and models, as well as the process of the construction of an object or other phenomenon that can be read with a focus on how it is used/experienced. Having said this, there is also a need to focus on the processes through which design is managed. Through his practice in creating, for example, the Swire Tower in Hong Kong, the world-famous innovative architect Frank Gehry experienced the need for tools to manage design processes. For this reason he created the Digital Project, which is the software that enables him to realize creative visions. . . . a three-dimensional software programme making it possible to draw, calculate and generate all thinkable geometric forms directly into a computer model. . . . Digital Project visualizes architecture and the entire process from design to construction. The

Joyful, collective design processes

157

building process is worked out and calculated down to the very last detail before the actual building process is implemented. (Digital Project, Frank Gehry’s Vision 2007) It is interesting that Gehry’s digital tools represent great progress, seen as enabling architectural designers to control and calculate down to the smallest screw before building commences. This shows the necessity of developing specific management models and tools for different fields of design. Within performance design, for example, there is no ideal of being able to control and decide everything down to the smallest details before the performance. A performance is precisely characterized by the possibility for improvisation and interaction between performer and audience. In other words, a creative process in the here and now is essential. This can be illustrated by the world-renowned performance artist Signa Sørensen’s live performance show The Black Rose Trick (see http://www.blackrosetrick.com). Managing process here presented a great challenge, before and also during the show. It lasted 10 days and nights in total and was built up as a hotel associated with a military regime. A bleak atmosphere throughout! The participants could come to the hotel; they could even spend the night. A total of 11,000 visits were paid to the hotel, and forty performers – professionals and volunteers – were involved. Overall themes, timing and events down to the last detail were fixed in advance for this performance, but the participants’ choice of space, their engagement through the concrete interactions, in particular the conflicts that also arose between the performers, determined the development of the performance over time (Christrup 2008). Even though, as illustrated, it is necessary to develop specific management models and tools for different fields of design, in the development of design research creating more general theories, models and tools may also be a constructive experiment. Otto C. Scharmer has a contribution to make to this challenge. In his book Theory U: leading from the future as it emerges, theories models and tools are developed that can be used in widely different fields (Scharmer 2007). Scharmer has the same intention that I share with Simon: to create what is not but could be. Scharmer does not merely work with the processes of transformation in the outer world, but also looks at inner transformation for those involved. Here the state of presencing, the third of the phases mentioned in the quote below, is the most important source of inspiration. Scharmer’s general model operates with sequences of movement away from existing frameworks (‘downloading’) in a U-shaped journey through five phases: 1 Co-Initiating: Build common intent. Stop and listen to others and to what life calls you to do. 2 Co-Sensing: Observe, observe, observe. Go to the places of most potential and listen with your mind and heart wide open. 3 Presencing: Connect to the source of inspiration and will. Go to the place of silence and allow the inner knowing to emerge.

158

H. Christrup

4 Co-Creating: Prototype the new in living examples to explore the future by doing. 5 Co-Involving: Embody the new in ecosystems that facilitate seeing and acting from the whole. (Scharmer 2008: 6) Scharmer also works with 24 principles, the last three of which are root principles: the intentional fundament, the relations fundament and the authentic fundament. Scharmer stresses that his work can be utilized in three different ways: 1 A process with phases, but for this process to succeed it must be linked to the principles and the root fundament. 2 Principles utilized freely in relation to the context in which one is working, without any predetermined order of sequences. 3 Work on the basis of the deepest source of thought and action, presencing, where one does not think in phases and principles. (Scharmer 2007: 436) In terms of Scharmer’s work, my contribution can be characterized as follows: create a fundament and emotional space for working with authentic interactions in inner and outer transformation processes in collective design processes and develop tools that can be used for materializing idea generation and related professional states of consciousness. In this chapter, I present personal reflections on how my cross-disciplinary theoretical work is materialized. A model with icons, symbols and metaphors linked to states of mind and activities that support groups in creating an atmosphere that is conducive to creative collaboration is explored. My approach has emerged in practices of, among other things, supervising students, and in this sense it is a form of research through design as discussed in Chapter 1 by Bærenholdt, Büscher, Scheuer and Simonsen and in Chapter 6 by Olsen and Heaton.

Theoretical sources of inspiration Psychological research is the primary source of inspiration, probably related to the fact that I am a trained psychologist. In her theory of ‘broaden-and-build’, Barbara L. Fredrickson (2004) illustrates the correlation between positive emotion and an extended repertoire of thinking-action that can facilitate creativity. Alice Isen’s (2000) research, which is closely related to Frederickson’s theories, contributes new ideas and experiments. A.H. Almaas (1998) transcends the research universe above in his theoretical work because he integrates the very best of Western psychology with the schools of wisdom of the East. In Almaas, I have found inspiration to, among other things, comprehend reactions that are destructive in interactions in design process.

Joyful, collective design processes

159

In addition, both neuroscience and heart research shed new light on the interaction between reason and emotions, and between mental clarity and patterns in the heart rhythm. In these fields of research, I refer to brain researchers Antonio Damasio (1994) and to the heart researcher, Rollin McCraty (2003). From the management science field of research I find C. Otto Scharmer’s work on management that creates the future (2007) inspiring. Like other chapters in this book, in the field of design and profession research, I build on Donald A. Schön’s (1983) work on the reflective practitioner’s reflection-in-action, and Donald A. Norman (2004), who writes about emotional aspects. Performance theory is represented in Marvin Carlson´s (1996) critical analysis of theories in the area and Gernot Böhme’s (2002) theory concerning space and atmosphere.

Remode: a performance design project The Performance Design programme at Roskilde University aims to open a field of practice in designing, organizing, managing and evaluating performances and cultural events. It is a breeding ground for innovative performances. Project work by two student groups are examples of the way in which joyful, collective processes emerge in practice. The first project group designed a new concept for fashion shows: Remode. Students aimed at doing something for the greater good. A city space was designed and created at the Vega nightclub in Copenhagen, symbolizing that the city is also a space of the homeless and the students’ decision that any revenue from the fashion show should go to the homeless through the Red Cross. Instead of the usual catwalk models on the podium, three sets were designed: elegance, colours and fun, and raw. These sets magnified the contrasts in the space of reality, with bouncy, expressive performers dancing in redesigned, recycled clothes to music aiming to move in different ways, especially composed for the three sets. As an experience researcher, I felt an unusual atmosphere in the interaction between space, performers and audience, 300 people between the ages of four and eighty but mostly young people, united in feelings that switched between enthusiasm, joy and sympathy with the homeless. This was a space with intensity and letting go, and after the three sets the happy givers, the guests, were crazy to buy the items of redesigned clothing that had caught their attention during the performance. The result was a take of DKK 26,000, including revenue from the entrance charge. There were 120 actors: dancers, choreographers, musicians and architects – all of them students, sound and light people, hairdressers, make-up artists, cooks and so on! It was an enormous job for the project group to manage the multifarious, chaotic and unruly event from the first idea to the concluding research about the audience and the actors’ experience of Remode. As a part of the education towards professional reflective practitioners, the group worked with a theory-based reflection-on-action that should make it possible in the next design assignment to deal competently with reflection-in-action, which requires double vision. This state is characterized by trust in intuitive holistic interpretation, for example on the basis of metaphors, experimenting with the situation,

160

H. Christrup

combining readings and discovering something new and unique that does not fit in with readings (Schön 1983). The project group’s reflection-on-action was facilitated through my supervision, reading theory, writing reports (Berner et al. 2007) and developed at the oral examination.

Creating space for design processes When we enter a space, we can feel the atmosphere, and this has material dimensions, inter alia bodily-emotional states which are very important for creativity. The Remode project group was successful in creating an atmosphere with joy, enthusiasm and compassion when the five project participants met with 40 actors of the project for the first time: architects, choreographers, dancers, musicians, clothes designers, all of whom were students at different creative schools. With a clear, strong initiative from the group, the intention about the good cause, and a framework for Remode, a fantastic atmosphere was created with engagement and liberating laughter about the challenge: what experience do we want to create? The idea of the three sets, elegance, fun and colours, and raw, was created through a collective process. Each member could follow her own inclinations and choose the working group for the set that most appealed to her. The project group understood the joyful atmosphere that they helped to create in light of the fact that for the first time during their studies they were working with a project for the greater good, which can be linked with the first phase of Scharmer’s theory: Co-initiating. The initiation of the Remode project corresponds to the phenomenon that Scharmer identified as essential in this phase: At the beginning of each project, one or few key individuals gather together with the intention of making a difference in a situation that really matters to them and their communities. As they coalesce into a core group, they maintain a common intention around their purpose, the people they want to involve, and the process they want to use. The context that allows such a core group to form is a process of deep listening – listening to what life calls you and others to do. (Scharmer 2008: 6) Scharmer emphasizes that it is important that the core group, here the student project group, create an ‘open space’, that is, are intentionally incomplete so that there is a creative space around the staple idea for the rest of those involved. German philosopher Gernot Böhme operates with a scientific view of atmosphere: The space of atmospheres is a physical expanse to the extent that it involves me emotionally. The space of atmospheres is an atmospheric space, that is a certain mental or emotional tone that permeates some special surroundings, and it is also this atmosphere that spreads itself spatially around me and in which I participate by virtue of my feeling. [my translation from Danish] (Böhme 2007: 14, see also Böhme 2002)

Joyful, collective design processes

161

This understanding can be clarified: when perceiving a space’s layout, interior, objects, people, smells and sounds, an evaluation takes places in a person’s unconsciousness, such as like/do not like, which attunes the person bodily emotionally and which can be read by others. If the person’s evaluation forms part of the conscious experience – perhaps as a vague feeling or sense only, it is termed an experience of atmosphere stemming from the relation between the space, objects and people. This is a subjective experience of reality that some people share with each other, not necessarily with everyone in the space. In the space for design processes, it is thus important to create a material basis for tuning the mind to the function of the space. Inspiration can be obtained from the layout of a space where both evidence-based design and phenomenology are worked with (Norman 2004). In this context, I shall limit myself to examining an important phenomenon in working with atmosphere in the design space: the relation between creativity and disposition in persons during interaction.

Ego roulette or Jolly C(h)ora On the basis of empirical experiments, American psychologist Barbara L. Fredrickson has developed the theory of ‘broaden-and-build’. The essence of the theory is that positive emotions make the range of thought-action options broader in the present moment while at the same time building up personal resources that facilitate the management of difficulties in the future (Fredrickson 2004). Empirical studies carried out by the American psychologist Alice Isen lend support to this theory as they show that positive emotions further a process of free association and greater inventiveness (Isen 2000). On the other hand, the primary function of negative emotions is to restrict the options in a given situation. From prehistoric times their primary function has been to help us to fight or flight in a dangerous situation. Studies conducted by the American heart researcher McCraty serve to provide this theory with a bodily material anchorage. He explores the interaction between emotions, heart rate variability and the function of the autonomous nervous system. Experiments show that the patterns in the heart rhythm are chaotic when negative emotions such as anger are experienced, while positive emotions, such as appreciation, give rise to a coherent sinus-curve formed pattern. In the state of coherence, physically optimal synchronicity exists between the different systems in the organism, and psychologically this state ‘is linked with a notable reduction in internal mental dialogue, reduced perceptions of stress, increased emotional balance and enhanced mental charity, intuitive discernment and cognitive performance’ (McCraty et al. 2004: 16). By means of experiments, McCraty has demonstrated the way in which two persons influence one another’s states at a distance of up to 1.5 metres through the heart’s electromagnetic field. Thus there exists a materiality in interaction processes (McCraty 2003). Materiality also enters interactions through reading faces, which we constantly do, consciously or unconsciously, and which causes emotions to be catching (Goleman 2006). Some theorists, such as Donald A. Norman, argue that it is good to be under pressure, for example, with deadlines that create anxiety as a driving force in the phase

162

H. Christrup

of the design process, where focus is to be created in order to transform the idea that has been created into a product (Norman 2004). This is a doubtful argument when it comes to collectively creative processes, where anxiety can contribute to negative interactions that inhibit the process. Enhanced attention to types of pressure that can cause most people to experience negative emotional states facilitates creation of an atmosphere that enables people to ‘broaden and build’. Through critical scrutiny of international stress research, Danish psychologist Gretty M. Mirdal has identified four phenomena that most people would experience as pressure and which would lead to negative reactions (1993). Following Goleman (2006), a fifth type of pressure that psychological experiments show is important can be added. These are discussed below. Personally, I have found inspiration in Almaas’s theory of human development to understand the reactions that originate in negative emotional states and that can lead to destructive interactions (Almaas 1998). I have materialized insights drawn from analysis of the role of emotions in creative work in a model called ‘Space for joyful, collective design processes’ (See Figure 11.1), which is intended for practical use in design collaborations. The intention is to create an atmosphere that promotes the life-developing movement of individuals and the group with idea generating interactions rooted in pleasure and interest, and constructive management of pressure situations dominated by anger, fear and shame, so that the creative design process is not destroyed but facilitated. The model is composed of seven elements:

Figure 11.1 The model ‘Space for joyful, collective design processes’ (illustration created by Sarukokoro and Mads Folmer).

Joyful, collective design processes

163

The Ego Roulette is at the top left; here there are nine reactions having their origin in anger, fear or shame (Almaas 1998): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Moralize Manipulate Self-assertion, perhaps at the expense of others Self-control with arrogance Withdrawal to the inner universe Adaptation Away from the present in plans Place blame and reproach Fall asleep – without emotions and thoughts – indifference.

If a person shows a negative ego reaction, for example apportions blame (no. 8), there is great risk that another person will feel affected and react by for example moralizing (no. 1) – hence an ‘ego roulette’ is set in motion with the potential effect of seriously impeding creative work. To the right of the model is Jolly C(h)ora, which illustrates spaces where an atmosphere of pleasure and interest is created. Chora means space, and with the ‘h’ in parentheses the word ‘cor’ becomes part of it. The Latin ‘cor’ means ‘heart’, and this wordplay seeks to place the heart at the core of design space/atmosphere of pleasure and interest. A shared psycho-physiological state of coherence and synchronicity (McCraty et al. 2006) is an important reference point for creating Jolly C(h)ora – individually and collectively. There is an arrow under these two symbols representing the intention for movement: an inner process of transformation and a group process away from the negative ego-reactions towards an inner freedom, a life developing movement in pleasure and interest. Kairos is an important state in this process, denoting intimacy in the present moment that opens up possibilities for new actions (Stern 2004), corresponding to Scharmer’s ‘presencing’ in his third phase. The Compass under the arrow has four nodes that point to four basic psychic functions. Two are judging: thinking and feeling; and two are perceiving: sensation and intuition. The psychic compass can be used by the individual, but it can also facilitate group processes. For example, everybody should be in the intuitive ‘corner’ when the task is to generate ideas and avoid using the judging functions (thinking, feeling) during the first phase of the process (Jung 1964). Under the compass are two spirals symbolizing two persons in interaction in life-developing movement. Then follows a line representing fundamental emotions: fear, anger, shame, contempt, pain, interest, joy. The first three (fear, anger and shame) are connected with the Ego Roulette, and the last two (interest and joy) are connected with Jolly C(h)ora. At the very bottom of the model is a line symbolizing five different types of pressure:

164 1 2 3 4 5

H. Christrup pressure of time contradictory communication expectations cannot be constructed expected action fails to take place evaluation of performance occurs while the task is being carried out.

When the model is present, for example as a poster in the design space, the text belonging to each element is written into the model. Though this is not possible in a book format.

The model in creative leadership An example of how I use the model in practice may help to further understand the model. In the context of a ‘Creative Leadership’ workshop in the Performance Design programme, the model is briefly introduced (see Figure 11.2). Emphasis is placed, for example, on the virtual inevitability that design processes – where we wish to create what is not – will create emotional and interactional pressures. Students are alerted to the fact that the group will work with a high degree of flexibility and that this can be at the expense of clarity, which can lead to some students experiencing built-up expectations not being met, while others may not be able to build up clear expectations. I then point to the two types of pressure in the model and the participants are encouraged to stop for a while, taking a starting

Figure 11.2 Photograph of the model ‘Space for joyful, collective design processes’ in use in the Performance Design workshop on ‘Creative Leadership’ (photo by Poul Erik Nikander Frandsen, Roskilde University).

Joyful, collective design processes

165

point in the model and pointing out phenomena, opportunities and problems they experience in the process. The ‘Creative Leadership’ workshop was supplemented with another poster with phenomena that many years of practice as a supervisor, workshop leader and consultant have shown to occur frequently. The group is asked to focus on these and to stop their work process when negative pressures arise with a view to learning to handle the situation creatively. The phenomena are: 1 Experience of pressure 2 Need to create Jolly C(h)ora through coherence and synchronicity 3 The untouchable zone of intimacy, especially important because we are working with states of consciousness where we let go of the controlling ego 4 Not being seen, heard, understood, maybe because of a self-assertive interpretation of what is said (no. 3 in the Ego Roulette) 5 Apportioning guilt when obstacles and problems arise (no. 8 in the Ego Roulette) 6 Generation of ideas obstructed due to the use of the judging functions in the psychic compass 7 Choices/decisions become destructive due to conflict or superficial agreement that can cause the Ego Roulette to roll. The group of participating students decided to use these seven phenomena as a supplement to the model with the option of adding new phenomena when the need arose. This soon took place. The eighth was formulated by one of the participants: a lack of attention and unclear instructions for the exercise. In this way we tried to relate to the irritation that arose and could have made the Ego Roulette roll. On the first day of the workshop, the process stopped at: • • •

pressure of time at the end of the day most of the group were irritated because of problems with the facilities and we worked with the state of Coherence one participant experienced that his statements about the positive effects of aggression and competition were placed at a negative pole and misinterpreted (no. 3 in the Ego Roulette).

On the second day, the group worked with, among other things, the participants’ own ongoing design projects. One of the projects was the design of an urban space focusing on light effects. The other students were to produce ideas for finding the most potential fields the project group could observe with open minds and hearts to find inspiration – corresponding to Scharmer’s second phase. After one project group had finished their drawings and told about the challenge, other participants used the mental function of sensation, given that it was possible to ask for further information, after which they individually produced ideas in the intuitive function, and ideas that were materialized. Sketches with elaborating comments were given to the project group, who in a process of dialogue associated to the sketches and

166

H. Christrup

assessed the ideas, with the functions of feeling and thinking, in relation to the group’s continuous idea generation.

Generation of ideas and materialization processes The challenge in creating an atmosphere conducive to creative collaboration is to optimize creativity through facilitating interaction between individual and collective processes. The Performance Design programme experiments with design processes and approaches to the materialization of idea generation that support responses to this challenge. I personally find inspiration for a deeper understanding of creativity by exploring analyses of great geniuses’ work processes. For example, psychologist Graham Wallas’ research on the creative processes of creative people describes that changed states of consciousness and inner image creation are important in these processes. For example, Wallas proposes that Einstein discovered the theory of relativity through the metaphor of ‘seeing oneself riding on a beam of light’. Einstein himself said this about his creative process: ‘The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined’ (quoted in Samuels and Samuels 1982: 249). Wallas (1926) points out that inspiration often comes spontaneously from the unconsciousness at an unexpected moment of illumination. Prior to this there has been a first phase with preparation in which one works consciously with the problem, and a second phase of incubation. The challenge is to create a space that tunes individual minds and a collective creativity to working with states of consciousness where everybody can create ideas in life-developing individual and collaborative moves, and hold on to ideas through materialization, which also facilitates collective creativity. But it is also about giving time to both the individual and the group, for example, to follow up ideas after an incubation period with illumination, encountered, for example, in the shower, on the train or during sleep, to work further with the material (see also Chapter 10 by Ingemann). Neuroscience shows that most of the choices people make are made in the unconscious, controlled by emotions, and the linguistic utterances concerning the choices are often post-rationalizations (Damasio 1994). The materialized idea generation process makes it possible to make conscious choices where the students collectively attach meaning to the emotions. The following are examples from the repertoire of creativity tools that my work within the Performance Design programme has produced. They have different strengths and weaknesses and it is important to be sensitive to the specific situated circumstances of each situation in its own right, including judgements about the energy level in a group and untouchable zones of intimacy. Placing the model ‘Space for joyful, collective design processes’ in the space, and using the psychic compass for managing tools and associated dialogue, can help to assemble a suitable set of tools for particular situations: Future vision. The person places him/herself in the space, representing the future and allowing feelings of success with a product from an absolutely fantastic

Joyful, collective design processes

167

design process to flow through him/her. Inner images appear that the person relates. Another asks questions about the origin of the idea, obstacles and possibilities along the way, and so forth. Statements are materialized in a text that form the point of departure for a dialogue. Draw your idea. The person can create a visual and manual expression in a drawing, circumventing language, and over time work with this as a material object, in interaction with others. What is special about creating a drawing is that the person becomes both the practitioner of and the spectator to an expression in which the process channels, thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition, work together and where the pre-conscious and unconscious creative force can develop (Robbins 1994). Metaphor game. Encourage the generation of metaphors that can fertilize each other in a group process around common challenge, and record them on a board or tape. Select your images. A multitude of pictures are spread out, especially selected for this design process, and the person chooses three that express an idea that he/ she would like to bring into the process. These pictures can then form the basis for a collective process. Balloon ideas: Each participant blows up a balloon and this is followed by free play with just one rule: the balloon must not touch the floor. When the gong is sounded, each participant is to hold on to one balloon and write an idea for the theme/project on a label and stick it on to the balloon. Free play continues, the gong sounds, a new balloon is grabbed and the person associates to the ideas on the first label on the balloon and sticks a label with a new idea onto the balloon, and so on (developed by Performance Design student Camilla Duus 2009). In experimenting with the creativity tool, there is a fixed reference point in working with states of consciousness: Coherence. A calm, neutral inner balance – state 0 – can be achieved through, for example, a specific breathing rhythm. With this as a reference point, the following three states can be created for the individual and the group: 1 Jolly C(h)ora: Coherence through music and the feeling of appreciation. 2 For a deeper letting go of the ego’s controlling function, through breathing and music an altered state of consciousness can be created: Emotional Quiescence, with ‘a profound feeling of peace and serenity and a deep sense of being centred in the heart . . . the feeling of being totally alive and fully present in the moment’ (McCraty et al. 2006: 17). 3 High energy states in Jolly C(h)ora, such as enthusiasm, can be created by means of movement, music and so forth.

Up-coming music: another performance design project I have worked with the repertoire of creative tools above as well as different states of consciousness inter alia as supervisor of the project on ‘Klaverfabrikken’ (The Piano Factory). The cultural centre Klaverfabrikken, in the town of Hillerød,

168

H. Christrup

tendered a project to design an old truck hall for concerts with up-coming music, a space that 18–24-year-olds would enjoy. We are sitting in a space at Roskilde University and the students are encouraged to tell this and that, big and small, from their first meeting at Klaverfabrikken. I listen intently and hear most about obstacles. I think for a while and decide to have a little session with ‘choose your pictures’. The group is sent out and I quickly spread the pictures out on the tables. The group comes in again and I try to guide to ‘Emotional Quiescence’. I instruct: Go around and look at the pictures. When I give the signal, you are to choose three pictures that express the atmosphere you intend to create in the truck hall. Then we sit in a circle, each student with three pictures on which he/she bases what s/he tells. Now five pictures are to be chosen as a collective material expression of the project group’s intentions and ideas for atmosphere. The pictures are now hanging on the wall: an enthusiastic violin player, to express that performers should enjoy playing in the truck hall; a picture of a rhinoceros and a small hen, to show that the differences between the young people should flower; a 50s cap sideways on a young woman, to say the show should be a little eccentric; a picture with strange colours exhibiting strength, chaos and flow; and finally, a young man in a powerful karate jump. Thirteen days later we are sitting together at Roskilde University again. The project group has been busy with, for example, experience research at music venues to read the atmosphere and talk with guests and performers, interviews with music experts, reading theories about self-education and music. Some of the activities form part of Scharmer’s second phase: Co-sensing. The students are now to individually move freely around the terrain for five minutes. What pops up spontaneously? What has most surprised you? We sit around the table, ‘share surprises’ and record them on a poster. We take a short break and I get time and space for reflection. I decide that we should play ‘Balloon ideas’. We start with Coherence, and already at the first puff in the balloon there is Jolly C(h)ora, with childish pleasure and enthusiastic energy that grows in step with the number of idea labels on the balloons. The gong sounds and we collect the balloons. The associations on the pink balloon have created a new idea: the lounge zone must match the logo. We include the intentions and ideas expressed by the five pictures from the last meeting. The balloons are also now hanging in the space. The process continues; it is exciting to consider whether the group will collectively experience Kairos: the auspicious moments where there is a close connection between time and opportunity that must be exploited. Moments that hold a gift (and a task) for the person: a possibility for creating the new from the deep inner source and seeing the past in another light in the present moment (Stern 2004), corresponding to Scharmers third phase – Presencing.

Changes in states of consciousness The talent for changes in states of consciousness is an important component in working with creative design processes. This is a thread in my own research and

Joyful, collective design processes

169

is also emphasized by Wallas in 1926 and Scharmer in 2007. I shall create an overview of the different states of consciousness I unfold in this article for the continued work of research and development within this field: Double vision: Through his analysis of people in various professions, for example designers, Donald A. Schön arrives at what professionals actually do when they are creative, reflective practitioners. They master double vision with reflection-in-action and an intentional mental guideline on which they base their reflections (Schön 1983, Christrup 2008). It is interesting that Marvin Carlson, who in his critical analysis of performance theory tries to reach a common feature of performance, ends by stressing Richard Bauman’s focus on double consciousness, a phenomenon that is identical with Schön’s double vision (Carlson 1996: 5). That is to say that a professional who masters double vision has a consciousness like a performer. Whether it is optimal that the mental guideline works in the unconscious or is conscious depends on the job in hand (Christrup 1993). Psychic compass: double consciousness requires flexibility in the use of basic psychic functions – the perceiving: intuition and sensation; and the judging: feeling and thought. And a shift between the introvert and extrovert attitude, which also forms part of the psychic compass. Ego Roulette: the automatic pilot reactions with an origin in the emotions of anger, fear and shame must be shut down to achieve this flexibility in the psychic compass and creative double vision. Coherence: the neutral state is the fixed reference point for both work with changes in states in Jolly C(h)ora and altered states of consciousness, and the transformation of Ego Roulette reactions. Jolly C(h)ora: where there is feeling originating in the fundamental emotions of pleasure and interest, a development intention can be to have more sustainable states with Coherence. Kairos: a particularly tension-filled present moment where there is close connection between time and possibility, with creation of the future on the basis of the inner source of creativity and a new view of a remembered past.

Conclusion To conclude, important questions are whether the approach and tools that this chapter presents can be used elsewhere, and whether the ambition of creating an atmosphere for creative collaboration can be achieved? It is my experience that the principles and ideas can be utilized in a multitude of design fields. I invite the readers of the book to test them! My assumption that appropriation will produce positive results is based on the fact that my own work originates in my own experience from different fields: organizational design and performance design, as well as empirical work and theory from a diversity of research fields. But there may be obstacles to its usefulness: the challenges in fields of practice have been the motivating force for the research process. Interesting phenomena in practice have formed the reference point for an inquisitive quest for existing theories that could inspire my own theory development. Not merely the development of

170

H. Christrup

a new product, performance and so on, but the intention that the inner deep source in which creativity originates creates self-development. The question is whether in this practice-developing interest I have overlooked works or fields of research that could intensify awareness of phenomena that I myself have not discovered in practice. This interdisciplinary book can contribute to clarifying this point.

References Almaas, A.H. (1998) Facets of Unity, Berkeley, CA: Diamond Books. Berner, A., Pawlik, D., Engelbrecht, M., Thomsen, R. and Hansen, S. (2007) ‘Remode’, unpublished student project report from Performance Design programme, Roskilde: Roskilde University. Borelli, L. (2008) Fashion Illustration by Fashion Designers, London: Thames & Hudson. Böhme, G. (2002) ‘The space of bodily presence and as a medium of representation’. Online. Available online at: —— (2007) Atmosfære [Atmosphere], Copenhagen: Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole Institut 1. Carlson, M. (1996) Performance: a critical introduction, London/New York: Routledge. Christrup, H. (1993) Konflikt og Kærlighed i Adhocratiet [Conflict and love in the adhocracy], Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. —— (2008) ‘On sense and sensibility on performative processes’, in Sundbo, J. and Darmer, P. (eds): Creating Experiences in the Experience Economy, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Damasio, A.R. (1994) Decartes’ Error, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Digital Project (2007) Frank Gehry’s Vision 2007, Folder, Århus: ARoS, Århus Gallery of Contemporary Art. Fredrickson, B.L. (2004) ‘The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions’, Philosophical Transactions: biological sciences, 359(1449): 1367–77. Goleman, D. (2006) Social Intelligence, London: Hutchinson. Isen, A.M. (2000) ‘Positive affect and decision making’ in Lewis, M. and Haviland-Jones, J.M. (eds), Handbook of Emotions, New York: Guilford Press. Jung, C.G. (1964) Man and his Symbols, London: Aldus Books. McCraty, R, (2003) The Energetic Heart, Boulder Creek, CA: Institute of HeartMath. McCraty, R., Bradley, R.T. and Tomasino, D. (2004) ‘The resonant heart’, Shift in the Frontier of Consciousness, Issue 5: 15–19. Online. Available online at: (accessed 4 December 2009). McCraty, R., Atkinson, M., Tomasino, D. and Bradley, T.B. (2006) The Coherent Heart, Boulder Creek, CA: Institute of HeartMath. Mirdal, G. M. (1993) Psykosomatik, Sårbarhed, Stress og Sygdom [Psychosomatics, Vulnerability, Stress and Illness], Copenhagen: Munksgaard. Norman, D.A. (2004) Emotional Design, New York: Basic Books. Robbins, A. (1994) A Multi-Modal Approach to Creative Art Therapy, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Samuels, M. and Samuels, N. (1982) Seeing with the Mind’s Eye, New York: Random House. Scharmer, C.O. (2007) Theory U: leading from the future as it emerges, Cambridge, MA: SOL. Scharmer, C.O. (2008) Addressing the Blind Spot of our Time. Online. Available online at:

Joyful, collective design processes

171

(accessed 24 November 2009). Schön, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner, New York: Basic Books. Simon, H.A. (1969) The Sciences of the Artificial, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Stern, D.N. (2004) The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Wallas, G. (1926) The Art of Thought, New York: Harcourt Brace.

12 The becoming of urban space Kristine Samson

The theoretical background in this chapter is process aesthetics, inspired by Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming, expressed, for example, in recent theories in landscape urbanism and emergent urbanism. The concept of design is defined as a process of becoming negotiated between different social and material agents. The illustrative case study discussed an attempt to replace traditional master planning with ‘potentiality planning’ in the parallel commissioning process for Varvsstaden, Malmö, Sweden. The contribution to a general core of design research is an understanding of urban design practices as cross-disciplinary, processual and situated practices of developing urban potential.

Introduction I’m horrified by the fatality that leads each generation to contradict the preceding one Rem Koolhaas

These are the words of Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas – perhaps the most influential thinker in architecture today. His statement questions the need to develop new concepts that stand in opposition to those that guided the previous generation of designers. However, a rationalist and materialist approach to planning has dominated urban design to its detriment. And, as the landscape theorist James Corner has pointed out: ‘The failing of twentieth century planning can be attributed to the absolute impoverishment of the imagination with regard to the optimized rationalization of development practices and capital accumulation.’ (Corner 2006: 32). In other words, urban design has been dominated by economic concerns. Moreover, all too often transformation is conceptualized by comparing start and endpoint by deducing the set of differences between them. In philosopher Deleuze’s understanding, this is highly limited and problematic. Before proceeding to Deleuze’s aesthetics of becoming and process as an imaginative approach embedded within

The becoming of urban space

173

the urban, a short outline of the two main contemporary approaches within planning will set the scene. The rationalist planner Even though modernism has been rejected several times in architectural theory, in no small part due to its lack of specificity and understanding of local processes, a modernist notion of the plan still lives on in practice. When developing cities the modernist planner envisions the city as a physical end product. This is an ideology that hails back to early modernist urbanity, where Haussmann carved broad boulevards through the city of Paris as a rationalization of the premodern ‘mess’ that reigned at the time. The line of thought is developed in modernist master plans such as Ebenezer Howards ‘Garden City’ and Le Corbusier’s The Cities of Tomorrow and its Planning. All over the world, mega-structures were built as a way of imposing form and human will upon urban matter. Stuyvesant Town in New York and the Brasilia, Høje Gladsaxe in Denmark are historic modernist examples. However, the ideology still operates today. The 1990s planning of Ørestaden in Copenhagen is a more recent example of rationalized form imposed on urban reality. Widely critiqued, but nevertheless still widely used, the traditional master plan often ignores or deliberately violates indigenous processes of urban living. Many planners still work within rationalist aesthetics of representation and control, in which each element has a functional role within an overall plan and where scale is regarded as a ‘functional relation’ between, for instance, individual housing units and the city plan. The ideology of the master plan is very persuasively and powerfully manifested in the aesthetical and material relationship between part and whole, and the unequal relationship between planner and citizen. However, modernist master planning has been revealed to be counter-productive in many aspects. It does not take changing needs, the ongoing transformations of space and creative urban processes into consideration. Furthermore, it is a top-down design approach that neglects the heterogeneous and unpredictable needs and practices of future users. Participatory planning While the planned and structured design approach discussed above is conceived as a top-down process, where planners and architects apply structure – and thereby meaning – to the city for the citizen to decode, ideas of user participation offer a different idea of the city that run counter to rationalist planning. The user driven city is a bottom-up approach that makes human agency, everyday life and the events and actions of the inhabitants the core of shaping of urban space, as introduced by French sociologist Henri Lefébvre in The Production of Space (1974). Here the city is regarded as a collaborative performance of everyday routines, experiences and actions carried out by its inhabitants. Participatory planning approaches focus on social interactions in the socio-spatial field – for instance between private and public, different levels of governance, organized and unorganized groups of residents, and adjoining municipalities.

174

K. Samson

Whereas the materialist and rationalist city is seen as the product of the architect (with city life a process to be channelled and controlled through the formal arrangement of the city fabric), the user driven city is the product of the sociality and practices of everyday life. Urban space is composed of human agency and habits, practices, dispositions, routines, customs and cultural patterns. Participatory planning draws on these forces within the everyday as the creative resource of the city. This social constructivist perspective often presumes that urban space is produced through the people who are acting and living within it. Terms like the ‘informal’ (Brillembourg et al. 2005), ‘local interaction’ (Brandt et al. 2008) or ‘direct action’ (Maier and Rick 2008) are all definitions pointing to the absence of professional planners and architects in favour of the self-organizing public. Freetown Christiania in Denmark is an example of how urbanity can grow as a self-organizing urban form despite the attempts by local planning authorities to control the area. The interdisciplinary project Supertanker is another Danish example of how user participation plays an important role in recent planning and transformation processes (Brandt et al. 2008). But while the participatory city in its extremes may lead to squatter movements and informal settlements, most European municipalities have employed more restricted participatory planning models, for example, through inviting existing and prospective inhabitants to hearings during the planning and design process. This spread of the participatory approach has, arguably, lead to a more democratic design process in some areas. However, modernist development is still dominant. For example, participatory planning often tends to lead to a final master plan, with the only difference being that citizens had some opportunity to affect and inspire the drawing hand of the architect. Towards cross-disciplinary design practice Having taken these two opposing approaches into consideration, I will claim that neither succeeds to address the complexities at stake in the processes of urban becoming. Whereas the materialist approach of the urban designer conceives of urban space as a setting to be filled with material design objects, the socialconstructivist and participatory planner neglects material reality by focussing on the management and governance of the process of negotiating the various interests at stake. How can we overcome this binary opposition in the design of urban space? The notion of design research might provide some answers for bridging these opposing interests and design practices. And it might pay to think of these design practices as sets of practices for a moment. Practices are corporeal and shaped by habits, ‘without reflection’ (Thévenot 2001:2). Thévenot therefore proposes a reflective approach, namely ‘pragmatic regimes’ as offering a realistic and moral understanding of the engagement with the world. Pragmatic regimes ‘illuminate this necessity of moving between modes’ as well as reflecting on ‘the differences between agency engaged locally and those modes oriented towards the general or the public’ (ibid.: 4). Inspired by Thévenot and with the aim of addressing the

The becoming of urban space

175

complex becoming of urban space more sensitively, I will plead the case for a more reflective model for the understanding of the various design practices in urban transformation processes. Urban planning must cover both the common good (the master planner) and the locally engaged individual (the participatory user). A model for design should enable movement between different modalities in urban planning. A model mapping different practices, and how they affect and engage in urban processes might also contribute to defining the role of design research. Furthermore, such a reflective model aims at the dissolution of the deterministic distinction of socio-cultural space in opposition to a material and object-bound architectural plan. What characterizes this ‘third way’ of approaching the design of urban space is an awareness of benefits from cross-disciplinary collaboration. More recent approaches, as we shall see, try not only to account for the movement of individual urban agents but also map the way the environment (both materially and socioculturally speaking) responds to these agents. This understanding often involves a ‘designed process’ aimed at bridging the gap between master planning and participatory approaches.

Process-oriented approaches How do new approaches deal with the question of urban space as a lived performance and how can these approaches serve as a research model with consequences for the planning and production of urban space? In this section, a short outline of new process-based approaches in urban planning and design is embedded in reflections that explore their ability to grasp the question of urban processes as an alternative to urban design understood as either material planning or participatory practice. Landscape urbanism ‘Landscape urbanism’ is a way of approaching the urban field from the perspective of landscape. Landscape is understood as a heterogeneous and emergent phenomenon as opposed to architecture regarded as a culturally shaped and constructed object. Landscape urbanism defines design from within a given space. Thus landscape does not just refer to the geographical landscape but rather to reality as a point of departure for design modifications. Landscape urbanism attempts to avoid an architectural understanding of space and place, pointing towards the becoming of form between multiple agencies. It is a cross-disciplinary approach ‘embracing urbanism, infrastructure, strategic planning, and speculative ideas alongside the more familiar themes of nature and environment. [. . .] one that aligns diverse and competing forces (social constituencies, political desires, ecological processes, program demands, etc.) into newly liberating and interactive alliances.’ (Corner 1999: 2). Landscape urbanism as a set of thought for contemporary urbanism has affinities with actor-network theory (Latour 2007) as it bridges the social with the

176

K. Samson

material. The approach appreciates the processual becoming between heterogeneous agents – human as well as material that takes place in landscape. The process as such, rather than the product of it, comes in to focus as ‘the projection of new possibilities for future urbanisms must derive less from an understanding of form and more from an understanding of process – how things work in space and time’ (Corner 2006: 29). In a broader cultural and epistemological context landscape urbanism proposes a processual approach to the urban: ‘it views the land and public space as an expression of ancient culture, or as a palimpsest that evidences all of the activities that contributed to the shaping of that particular landscape.’ (Marot 1999: 50). Thus the approach of landscape urbanism shifts attention away from the object qualities of space (whether formal or scenic) to the systems within time that condition the distribution and density of urban form. Landscape urbanists use field diagrams or maps describing the play of those forces, thereby designing a diagrammatic meta-system for the understanding of the processes taking place between the heterogeneous agencies: these diagrams are meant as ‘instruments in furthering an understanding of urban events and processes (Corner 2006: 28). Contrary to a modernist approaches to designing urban space, landscape urbanism respects the ‘performative’ nature of the urban realm, linking material and human practices as it prepares ‘the setting for programmed and unprogrammed activities’ (Shane: 2005: 57). Thus, it does not understand the shaping of urban form as a cultural or designed creation, but rather as the processual co-existence of already existing movements within a given space. Only a few projects have yet been carried out based on the ideas of landscape urbanism – for instance, the regeneration of the Highline in the Meatpacking District in New York. Emergent urbanism Emergent urbanism is a relatively new term for the self-organizing transformation of cities. Unlike landscape urbanism it focuses on large-scale developments related to the phenomenon ‘urban sprawl’ pointing to the way cities grow to connect in larger urban regions, as, for instance, the Ruhr-district, the Öresund Region and the vast urban infrastructural regions around London and Paris. As Hajer and Reijndorp have pointed out, ‘this new metropolitan form actually connects the urban, the rural and the suburban environments. The result is a network, a seemingly structure less conglomerate of functions. Nobody developed this Metropolis: it simply comes into being.’ (Hajer and Reijndorp 2001: 56). This self-organized ‘coming into being’, sometimes in spite of, or in reaction to, planners’ actions links urbanisation with de-industrialization as wastelands of abundant territories emerge due to socio-economic changes (Berger 2006: 199). In addition, globalization plays an important part in urban sprawl processes where ‘emergent urbanism’ is ‘an ongoing assemblage flourishing from the dynamic interactions of parts and participants in the urbanisation field’ (Pinilla 2007: 81). Broadly speaking, emergent urbanism accounts for the physical manifestations of self-organizing development of cities. They avoid singular causal explanations

The becoming of urban space

177

breaking with the rationalistic and functionalistic approach in traditional planning. Rather, they ascribe the development of cities to complex networks of interrelated causes and effects, including new family structures and their movements, businesses, and organizations on both micro and macro levels. Whereas landscape urbanism extracts its aesthetic ideas from the existing site, emergent urbanism is oriented towards the movement and self-organization of people, goods and objects in relation to geographical qualities and attractors. Emergent urbanism offers critique against the traditional master-planning process, arguing that it is often motivated by private initiatives or the interests of governing municipalities neglecting the way urbanism itself develops according to complex systems (Portugali 2000). Instead, emergent urbanism requires interaction with the lived and present state of urban affairs. Emergent urbanity is a continuous process. Therefore the planner must not only cope with, but constructively orchestrate processes of ‘rapid adaption, mutation and exploitation of all available means’ (Maas 2007: 28). It goes without saying that the master plan is a too rigid a planning tool to work with these ongoing emergent, de-stabilizing processes. Emergent urbanism proposes design as temporary ‘games’ or ‘assemblages’ enabling intervention in the urban processes by participating in its ongoing production. The role of the architect is radically subverted in this process. For instance, the Dutch Office MVRDV consider themselves meta-analysts operating as strategic agents navigating in a complex system of socio-economic changes: The goal is that architects use “intelligence” in a two-fold way: as a specific form of practical knowledge characteristic of the profession, and in the practical way the American CIA or military might use “intelligence”. In terms of the design process architects should be able to think ahead and visualize ahead – a form of knowing beforehand the effects and, at the same time, the social impacts of their proposals. (Grafland 2007: 99) This ‘knowing beforehand’ is a way for emergent urbanism to adjust to the preferred production of the urban field through a strategic and analytical intervention. Whereas traditionally, planners developed master plans to be realized as material-architectural manifestations, emergent urbanism implies that planners take the role of participating players among a wide range of strategic actors: local governments, private developers and investors, economic structures and regulations, public interests and private ownership. Now, although the traditional master plan may have had the effect of enabling negotiation between a wide range of strategic actors, this role was mostly unacknowledged and it gave rise to highly unequally planner-citizen relations. In emergent urbanism approaches, in contrast, negotiation processes are explicitly sought and supported on a more equal footing. Accordingly, the urban sphere is considered a market or even ‘a game zone’ that is to be understood according to a ‘multi-agency model’ in which the characteristics of these agencies can be described and adapted in time (Maas 2007: 28). The

178

K. Samson

term ‘assemblage’ applies to both landscape urbanism and emergent urbanism. It originates from Deleuze who describes it as ‘the multiplicity which is made up of heterogeneous terms and which establishes liasons and relations between them’. And he continues: ‘Thus the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a “sympathy”’ (Deleuze and Parnet: 69). A design practice based on temporary assemblages is interdisciplinary in its nature – it is based on ‘cofunctioning’ between divergent perspectives. Both landscape urbanism and emergent urbanism operate with urban processes as a strategy. This processual approach is divergent from earlier ideas of urban design as either participatory or mainly an imposition of material design onto an urban setting. Thus, these two approaches offer examples of design practices that address urban space in its becoming rather than as a setting for material objects, infrastructures and flows developed either through participatory design or the master planner/architect as the individual creative mastermind. However, to realize processual approaches in urban planning, planners need new tools to understand the complex interplays of time, process and becoming as opposed to space, place and urban form.

Varvsstaden – a plan for urban processeses One way of coping with the becoming of urban space as an architect and urban planner is by redefining the role of the architect. In urban planning and design, architects are gradually becoming a facilitator, organizing events throughout the planning process, paralleling processes in design more generally (see Chapter 1 by Bærenholdt, Büscher, Scheuer and Simonsen). The architect as the choreographer of urban processes is an often recurring metaphor in recent planning examples. In the following I will focus on the JUUL | FROST Architects proposal for Varvsstaden (The Warf City) in Malmö, Sweden as an example where architects develop a strategy to loosen up the restraints of traditional master planning. Parallel commissioning Varvsstaden was a parallel commission for the regeneration and transformation of Varvsstaden, a former industrial site in Malmö, Sweden. Parallel commissioning is a rather new Scandinavian model of competitions in architecture where competing teams are working closely together and even sharing results during the process. It implies that local authorities invite a limited group of architectural offices to contribute to the same project. In the commissioning phase, the offices compete in an open dialogue with the commissioner. As a result, the commissioner and the competing teams are able to affect, modify and even change the direction of the project during the process (JUUL | FROST Architects: 2008). In the case of Varvsstaden, four teams were invited to participate. Varvsstaden is an industrial wharf site – formerly one of the largest workplaces for industrial workers in Malmö. The design problem was how to open the formerly closed site for the public in Malmö, how to engage future users and how to combine the history

The becoming of urban space

179

of the site with present developments of Malmö as a city rooted in the knowledge economy. The present situation and its historical roots were, in other words, to be considered in the problem solving. This context was to be related to the creation of a development plan (not a ‘master plan’) for the future. Hence, the question was how the architects could transform the old industrial wharf into public spaces, housing and mixed use through a situated understanding of urban potentials and redevelopment where the qualities of the industrial wharf city could serve as a framework for the development of new urban potentials. The first step in the drafting of the project proposal was the creation of an interdisciplinary project team. An archeologist was engaged to ensure that the historical values and the heritage of Varvsstaden as an industrial warf city were taken into account, and an urban sociologist was asked to help ensure that valued qualities of urban life and mixed use were safeguarded, especially with regard to the socio-economic make-up of the prospective resident population. Furthermore, the project team consisted of two designing architects, two project leaders trained as architects, and a cultural theorist – (the author of this article). Team members held different perspectives, making negotiation central for the collective and cross-disciplinary project proposal. The embedded researcher and author of this article was both a participating agent in the development and a reflective researcher, evaluating the process. The development of the potentiality plan Throughout the initial design phases, the group met four times to develop and exchange ideas. The concept of a potentiality plan took form. This plan was an open plan in order to ensure that the inherent capacities of Varvsstaden were carried through the design process as the framework for the future development. Even though the team decided only a few buildings were worth preserving, the site had a multiplicity of sensorial qualities, for example the light, the water, the immense scale and the roughness of the buildings. Consequently, these existing qualities were used as the starting point of a reinterpretation of the industrial site in terms of the new needs of the surrounding city. The option was that the potentiality plan, due to the immaterial, processual and experience-based nature of the knowledge society, should invite groups to intervene and develop the site and its characteristics through temporary use of the buildings and available empty spaces: young creative artists and students from the nearby institutions and production companies could use the site temporarily to start up creative industries in the old wharf buildings. The engagement of the ‘creative class’ (Florida 2002) was not in itself innovative. However, the idea of a temporary plan where the existing urban spaces could be appropriated for emergent purposes until further decisions were made would ensure a processual and sustainable development of the site. The new neighbourhood would then virtually grow out of the old, using existing characteristics of the site as the starting point for the process. By letting different social and cultural practices use the site while waiting for the right moment to built new housing and institutions, Varvsstaden could transform itself autonomously. The potentiality

180

K. Samson

plan was to keep the future material design and program of the area open enabling the area to transform gradually according to changes in the economical, political, public and social context of Malmö and the Øresund Region. Hence, the potentiality plan was an attempt to make a situated development, which entailed the design of a guiding model offering a platform for the exchange between existing qualities and the semantic production of new site qualities through the inhabitant’s affections and ideas. This affective and sensory approach should unveil new potentials in the old material manifestations of Varvsstaden – not as a constructionist re-experience of the site, but as the user’s productive and affective responses to its existing material qualities. In this perspective, the potentiality plan was an attempt to bridge the participatory approach with the material approach of the master plan through the emphasis of the feedback processes in the sociomaterial surroundings over time. The urban user would, through his experiences of the material qualities and his imaginative visions and remembrance of its history treat Varvsstaden as an active site pregnant with a wide range of developmental potentials. The potentiality plan was so to speak a flexible model that should ensure the structuring, framing and re-ordering of new potential spaces out of the existing, not by realizing and imposing urban material design on the site but by activating potential and imaginary spaces through the existing qualities. Matter and imagination, physical design and participatory agency were therefore proposed as a combination in a non-causal relation, where the materiality and the historical atmosphere of the site affected the perception of the user; who on the other hand, would project his ideas and visions onto the site. Thus, the potentiality plan shifted the focus away from the analysis of the functionality and programming of spaces (the role of the traditional architect) to an understanding of space as a system of ‘places’ (Harvey 1993) and specific meanings for specific groups. Contrary to conceiving of the existing buildings as monuments of the past to be preserved, the spaces in between buildings were equally defined as the potential spaces for the urban transformation to take place. In the first place, the plan was not to be considered as a material development, rather as a mapping of potential spaces for development. Providing formal responsiveness to a changing society, the potentiality plan orchestrated public hearings, a communications platform between stakeholders and a development plan in three stages to ensure openness to the opportunities and changes in both the context and the desires of the users. These changing needs were continuously to be integrated into the overall design of the potentiality plan, keeping it perpetually unfinished and open to possible change of directions. Situated in space and time Varvsstaden is a case showing how to use time as a creative tool in design and planning. The new role of the architect was to create a framework for events and the material production of the city to unfold as a process in time. The involvement of various stakeholders, their different interests and potential conflicts was set up

The becoming of urban space

181

as part of the process as an engine that would make the former mono-functional space a self-transforming urban scene for different perspectives to exchange, live and materialize shared, collaborative and collective spatial visions of the future. The potentiality plan developed in the competition period was also an alternative to the modernist planning in terms of motivation; whereas the architect of the comprehensive master plan organized urban form in terms of form and common values based on the agreement of the majority, the potentiality plan was developed out of the specific urban user’s interests, affections and engagement with the site. Instead of a fixed plan for buildings, the potentiality plan would be a way of combining the material spatial plan with socio-cultural events in time (see Figure 12.1). Thus, the passing of time was viewed as a creative force and used as a method in the transformation processes. This spatial and temporal approach of bringing stakeholders together early and of allowing time to work on the unfolding, emergent design was applied to resolve the planning problems in the process phase: it involved a period of exploration in which problem and solution spaces were produced as potential scenarios, but remained undetermined until they were temporarily fixed in terms of, for instance, visualizations, plans or process diagrams. However, in the next section we must ask what happened after this in some ways daring commissioning process. What was the next step? Did the city council’s courage hold or fold? The problem of the plan In the spring 2009, the four project proposals in the parallel commission were evaluated by the commissioners. The winning project by Vandkunsten Architects was chosen due to its ‘simplicity’. It was seen to be possible to realize without

Figure 12.1 Process diagram for the Varvsstaden development showing the stages and interchange between user participation and design. Ó JUUL | FROST Architects 2008.

182

K. Samson

major problems. The project presented a plan that showed the exact new building sites and that had a clear programming in terms of urban functions and qualities. In contrast, the JUUL | FROST proposal was turned down due to its lack of determinate programming and its more open and flexible form. For example, the proposal was criticized for its temporary and ‘unfinished’ character (PEAB 2009). The approach to allow development to unfold over time and in three stages was considered risky. For instance, did the temporary spaces and functions, the shops and infrastructure developed throughout the earlier processes have to be moved to ‘fit’ to the final plan? And would some of the value in the earlier temporary efforts then be lost? The playful, open aspect of taking potentiality planning into the planning and design was, in other words, considered too risky despite the fact, that the Malmö city council has estimated a development period of 20–30 years (Rosberg: 2009: 22). Thus the plan for urban potentials and processes was rejected in favour of a rather traditional master plan. The potentiality plan was considered an ‘interesting perspective in the configuration process’ (PEAB 2009), but the commissioners demanded further research and proof to validate it as a planning and design method. Instead, the focus of the commissioners was on the material and sequential outlines of the plan. The need for a visual master plan as an outcome is thus strong in both regular competitions and parallel commissioning processes. This is due to regulative demands from the local government, highlighting how urban design is embedded in a whole system of practices, institutions and conventions that are difficult to change. One could argue that the parallel commissioning, with its processual features and dialogue-based involvement between competing teams and users in the early phase, would allow for these strict demands for a master plan to be abandoned or at least loosened, but that this would require more effort and courage on the part of city councils. As we have seen, in the review of both landscape urbanism and emergent urbanism approaches, design solutions do not necessarily require a master plan. For instance, a mapping and investigation of the possibilities and qualities of the site, combined with a strategy to initiate development can be enough. To deliver a final master plan with defined building structures contradicts the mapping of possible outlines and facilitation of their material emergence. The structural plan, in other words, determines the future in a fixed relation between building and site. To solve this conflict between potentiality and plan required by the commissioner board, the JUUL | FROST team had worked with the aesthetics of emergence. For instance, new buildings were visualized through the use of transparency. Existing buildings and the preserved cranes of the wharf were emphasized graphically through the use of solid colouring of the facades indicating existing buildings, and transparency used for possible new building structures. But the choice of transparency made it difficult for the commissioner board to envision specific urban qualities. For instance, what type of building and materials would be chosen? For the architects, these choices were meant to be held open in the potentiality plan so as to allow for issues for dialogue and affective responses. The architects could hardly determine them single-handedly beforehand. The accepted

The becoming of urban space

183

plan, in contrast, sketched infrastructure and blocks more definitively to indicate their material aesthetics, while in JUUL | FROST’s plans specific urban qualities were not determined beforehand apart from an indication of old and new. What was still on an open conceptual plane could not be realized in material drawing (see Figure 12.2). Against the backdrop of this short reflective analysis of the Malmö process, the problem in dealing with urban processes instead of plans could be formulated as a problem concerning the media in which design solutions are produced. And consequently what kind of end material the commissioning board calls for in parallel commissions supposed to be open and adjustable. If urban space should develop as processes in time, as suggested by the Malmö city planning authorities in the commission, the media through which the potential visions of the architects take form must change accordingly. As long as the commissioning authorities have a dominant preference for the spatial scaled plan, urban processes and transformations cannot be grasped without loosing – at the same time – their very potential qualities in terms of time. To define the planning of urban space in terms of geographical borderlines and specific housing types as was the case of the chosen winner project of Varvsstaden, and to represent it through a designed master plan, would therefore be contradictory to the humanistic and process-oriented design solutions called for by the Malmö city department. To summarize, urban design in the potentiality planning of Varvsstaden was dealt with as a becoming of urban space rather than the design of a master plan to be applied on a cartographical space. The negotiation between divergent interests, the use of process in time and the use of inherent qualities characterizes this form of processual development – a way of doing design out of or as a proliferation

Figure 12.2 The scaled plan worked within the aesthetics of emergence. For instance, new buildings were visualized through the use of transparency. © JUUL | FROST Architects 2008.

184

K. Samson

out of the existing reality. In other words, one could say, design in its traditional sense is no longer called for. Instead, the planner should engage in the process of urban reality-making or performance as a strategic method for the development of the qualities of urban space. Such processual planning strategies are developed theoretically in, for instance, emergent urbanism and landscape urbanism. The potentiality plan for Varvsstaden was similarily suggested as an embedded practice of process aesthetics. However, it was not accepted due to its lack of material specifications in the building plan, highlighting not only philosophical, but also practical and institutional obstacles to an architecture of emergence.

Design research The role of design research in relation to urban planning could be seen as the development of a model of design as orchestrating negotiations about differences in space. The parallel commissioning process and potentiality plan of Varvsstaden, for instance, offered a model for the process of negotiation, experimenting and the final decision making to determine agreements across diverse perspectives and interests. The aim of design research would therefore be to promote and conceptually scaffold a broader embracing of cross-disciplinarity evident in much recent design practices. Thus the design problem and the role of design research take the role of grasping the ‘undetermined problems of design’ where the design problem is hard to identify because it evolves in the design process (Dorst 2006: 16). The design solution, in the case of Varvsstaden, even though it was never accomplished, would then be a product of processes in time. In principle, every design problem dealing with the shaping of reality, is open. But in the case of Varvsstaden, and with the design approaches in landscape urbanism and emergent urbanism, the openness and the potentiality between interests were in the center of the design problem at hand. As a research model, the potentiality plan for Varvsstaden differs notably from both participatory user design and the master plan: The process of negotiation in the potentiality plan keeps the plan open for potentials. Differences are an integrated part of urban reality and the plan must therefore be open and adjustable accordingly. Thus design research must be able to analyse and characterize different perspectives and their inherent potentials in terms of the becoming of urban space. Dorst’s definition of design as a way of staging a problem within a given framework is one way of dealing with the question of design as process. It aims at the reconciliation and negotiation of conflicts between the different perspectives (Dorst 2006). Also Bruno Latours idea of ‘drawing things together’ through texts, graphs and models applies to this understanding of design research. Such ‘inscription devices’ are ‘immutable yet mobile as they are able to travel across various disciplines and still stay unchanged.’ (Latour 1986: 7). These are all meta-models for the organizing and solving differences and possible conflicts in time. If planning could become closer to process guidance of the complex processes of reality, it raises the question of the role of the architect. Koolhaas has noted, that ‘there is a strong intolerance for our profession when

The becoming of urban space

185

we don’t have any answers and perhaps worst, when we don’t even claim any answers.’ (Burdett and Sudjic 2007: 491) Potentiality planning, landscape urbanism and emergent urbanism deal with another notion of aesthetics not claiming those fixed answers. Aesthetics are not to be understood in the formal sense of the word. Rather, it is closer to the affective and strategic aesthetics proposed in Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1978) or Deleuze and Guattari’s affects. In their line of thought, ‘it is no longer a question of imposing a form upon a matter but of elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap increasingly intense forces.’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 13). Differentiating forces are in both perspectives what constitute urban processes. The notion of plan in planning could accordingly be reconsidered in terms of ‘the plane’: it is not in itself given but is ‘as much a plan(e) of organization as of development’ (ibid.: 265). Potentiality planning is, then, about visualizing and making amenable to control what causes the given to be given, in this or that state, at this and that moment. Accordingly design research as a guidance of various perspectives in space and time could hardly be carried out by one discipline alone. It supports different forms of dialogue and collaboration in heterogeneous assemblages and is rather a generative foundation happening in the process when various knowledge disciplines work together as potentials within a plan.

References Brandt, J., Frandsen, M. and Larsen, J.L. (2008) ‘Supertanker: in search of urbanity’, Architectural Research Quarterly, 12(2): 173–81. Brillembourg, A., Klupner, H. and Feireiss, K. (eds) (2005) Informal City: Caracas Case, Munich and New York: Prestel Verlag. Burdett, R. and Sudjic, D. The Endless City, London: Phaidon. Corner, J. (1999) ‘Recovering landscape as a critical cultural practice’, in Recovering Landscape: essays in contemporary landscape architecture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (2007) Dialogues 2 (European Perspectives). A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism. Columbia Classics in Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press. Dorst, K. (2003) ‘The problem of the design problem’, in Cross, N.G., Edmonds, E., Expertise in Design: Design Thinking Research Symposium 6, Creativity and Cognition, Sydney: Studios Press. Florida, R. (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class: and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life, New York: Perseus Book Group. Hajer, M. and Reijndorp, A. (2001) In Search of New Public Domain, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Harvey, D. (1993) ‘From space to place and back again: reflections on the condition of postmodernity’, in Bird, J., Curtis, B., Putnam, T., Robertson, G. and Tickner, L. (eds) Mapping the Futures: local cultures, global change, London: Routledge, pp. 3–29. Graafland, A. (2007) Spacefighter The Evolutionary City (Game), Barcelona/New York: Actar.

186

K. Samson

JUUL | FROST Architects (2008) The Gateway to Copenhagen – Brief for the parallel commission. A new city district at the Copenhagen Wholesale Market site, Copenhagen: JUUL | FROST Architects. Latour, B. (1986) ‘Visualization and cognition: thinking with eyes and hands’, Knowledge and Society: studies in the sociology of cultures past and present, 6: 1–40. A revised version can be found in Latour, B. (1990) ‘Drawing things together’, in Lynch, M. and Woolgar, S. (eds) Representation in Scientific Practice, Amsterdam: Kluwer. —— (2007) Reassembling the Social: an introduction to actor-network-theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maas, W. (2007) ‘Spacefighter: the evolutionary city (game)’, in Spacefighter: the evolutionary city (game), Barcelona/New York: Actar. Maier, J. and Rick, M. (2008) Acting in Public: Raumlabor Berlin, Berlin: Jovis Verlag. Pinilla, C. (2007) ‘Emergent urbanism’, in: Spacefighter: the evolutionary city (game), Barcelona/New York: Actar. Rösberg, G. (2009) Planering, Malmö, Information från Malmö Stadsbygnan, Nr. 1, Malmö. PEAB (2009) Utvärdering av Parallella Uppdrag, Varvsstaden 2009. Till Inbjudna arkitektkontor, Parallella Uppdrag, (unpublished document), PEAB Malmö. Portugali, J. (2000) Self-Organization and the City, Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Shane, G. (2006) ‘The Emergence of Landscape Urbanism’, in Waldheim, C. (ed.) Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press. Thévenot, L. (2001) ‘Pragmatic Regimes Governing the Engagement with the World’, in Knorr–Cetina, K., Schatzi, T., Saigny, E. (eds) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London: Routledge, 56–73. Whitehead, A.N. (1978) Process and Reality, Corrected edition, New York: The Free Press.

13 Tourist experience design Michael Haldrup and Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt

The theoretical background for this chapter derives from recent work in tourism studies in which tourist experiences depend on tourists’ own performance and on the designed affordances of particular sites and artefacts. Design is approached as an ongoing process of reflection-in-action, involving intervention by heterogeneous stakeholders, who do not need to consider themselves as being ‘designers’. The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde provides the illustrative example of how affordances and performances feed into the materialization, mobilization and mooring of a replica Viking ship. To design research, this is a rich example of how tourism experience design emerges through ongoing iterative processes where multiple actors contribute across different scales and fields.

Introduction: designing experiences? Experiences are intangible, so the question arises of whether or not it is at all possible to design them. Not only do the tourism business or the site management of, for example, famous attractions contribute to designing ‘tourist experiences’, so do travel agencies, transport companies, hospitality providers, local shop keepers, volunteers, and so on and, perhaps most important, as recent research in tourism emphasizes, the tourists themselves. Tourist experiences are produced, performed and consumed not only at famous attractions and destinations but across a variety of spaces away and at home, watching television, skimming books and guides. In this chapter, we discuss how design practices are, and can be, approached in recent developments of theoretically informed tourism research including ethnographic studies of tourist practices. One of the central problems is that analytical research into tourist experiences (the ‘why’s and ‘what’s of research) has not – yet – been fully integrated into the practical enterprise of planning and staging tourism (the ‘how to’). In recent years, tourism studies have examined such contingent and complex conditions concerning how tourist experiences are performed (Bærenholdt et al. 2008; Bærenholdt, Haldrup, Larsen and Urry 2004; Haldrup and Larsen 2009). Thus tourist theorizing has recently also turned its attention to the study of concrete performances of people and the use value of materials, objects and technologies in line with developments also found in consumption studies (Warde

188

M. Haldrup and J.O. Bærenholdt

2005) and design studies. It is especially this increasing attention to the importance of objects, artefacts, sites and other socio-cultural materials in this research (Haldrup and Larsen 2006, 2009) that make such research ready and prepared to engage in design research. Thus research into design acknowledges how leisure performances too are ‘shaped by and constitutive of the complex relations – of materials, knowledges, norms, meanings and so on – which comprise the practiceas-entity’ (Shove et al. 2007: 13). As Franklin (2003) summarizes: [T]ourism does seem on the face of it to be more object – rather than simply idea – or discourse – orientated. Tourists have an intimate and complex relationship with tourist sites, heritage buildings, museum artefacts, art gallery objects, souvenirs and postcards, cameras and videos, foods and drinks, tickets and passports, planes and trains. (Franklin 2003: 101) Geography – with its long penchant to combine across the material, social and cultural – engages with such kinds of hybrid engagements and attentions across the human and the non-human. But the interest for material objects and material culture can also be found in recent interdisciplinary studies, including also sociology and cultural studies of consumption and the culture industry (for example, Lash and Lury 2007), in studies of material culture (such as Shove et al. 2007) and among psychologists and others inspired by Science and Technology Studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT) (such as Costall and Dreier 2006). Approaching the role of design in relation to tourist experiences should, then, engage with the question of how tourist sites are materially constructed though not as a ‘pure’ engineering building process. What we seek is a concept of design that takes into account not only the material but also the social and imaginative dimensions. Furthermore, this concept of design should include an analytical understanding of how users (tourists, consumers, visitors) experience sites, objects, images and events in order to understand better how the making of particular sites afford the performances of tourist experience. In order to do this, we suggest employing the notion of affordance as proposed by J.J. Gibson (1979). We suggest this notion as a way to capture the complementarities of human practices and the artefacts and materials engaged. According to Gibson, affordances are what the material environments offer and provide for animals and human beings (ibid.: 129). Thus the notion of affordances should be understood as what objects offer observers: the material aspect of the environment that escapes social and cultural construction (ibid.: 138–39, for a more detailed discussion of Gibson see Haldrup and Larsen 2009: 7–9). The notion of affordances has widely been used in design science especially in the work of Norman (1988, 1999) who used the notion to critically investigate the reasons for how designs of everyday objects such as telephone systems, doors, tea pots and so on succeed or fail. What we propose is to use it as a starting point for examining how embodied and material experiences of tourist environments are translated into various social and cultural contexts of tourism, leisure and everyday life. Thus, acknowledging the

Tourist experience design

189

constraining and enabling powers of material designs, understood as affordances, is a necessary first step for bringing tourism experience design to life. However, this analytical understanding of the role of performance, materiality and design is not the only relevant knowledge. Most design processes relating to tourism and experience take their guidelines from more practice-oriented knowledge fields. Thus a no less important inspiration comes from constructive traditions of planning and architecture that are also professions often practically involved in making tourist sites. Architects belong to the oldest type of designers; their profession is like a prototype of design (Schön 1983: 77). Their way of working challenges simple technical rationalities where design was thought of as just a question of putting research findings into practice. Architects have to reflect on how to construct sites and buildings, while they are in the making, since many challenges are unforeseeable. This is even more the case with planners, in itself an unstable category, since their role is to negotiate with many different stakeholders and regulative systems in order to make things move, or rather to facilitate others to make things happen (Schön 1983). The complexity of planning, in making places, is now increasingly acknowledged and discussed in the planning literature (Healy 2006). When it comes to the design of tourism experience, there are also more specialized professional cultures in play, such as curators (historians, ethnologists, archaeologists, etc.) in the case of museums, gastronomists in restaurants, landscape designers, art historians, transport experts, engineers, tourist information (‘destination’) managers, communicators and so on, depending on the specific field in question. Traditionally it has been these, much differentiated kinds of specialists, which have been the professionals practicing what we are now calling tourist experience design. They have often, depending on the kinds of attractions and systems made, been working together with architects and planners. More than any systematic competence in facilitating good (enriching, amusing) tourist experiences, these professionals have designed sites, scapes and events more or less in accordance with their own imaginations of what is a ‘good experience’. They are in fact reflective practitioners (Schön 1983, 1987) developing designs where the research based component is not part of designing – but rather in the special expertise. Designs of tourist attractions are made through reflection-in-action with a kind of professional artistry making it possible to judge and decide without any possibility of stating what the rules or procedures followed are (Schön 1987: 24). But through research into design processes – into reflection-in-action – we can examine how design processes are, in fact, practiced through procedures not unlike experimenting research. Therefore, in the following, we report glimpses of ‘a full, qualitative description of phenomena’ of design (Schön 1987: 313) in order to reflect on the reflectionin-action going on around a tourist site. To do this we develop earlier work on the emergence of Viking attractions (Bærenholdt and Haldrup 2004, 2006; Bærenholdt et al. 2008; Jóhannesson and Bærenholdt 2008), analysing the spatiality of practices and experiences among visitors to the museum. We will especially develop our argument through a series of examples from the recent history of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde. Cultural institutions such as the Viking Ship Museum

190

M. Haldrup and J.O. Bærenholdt

recognize themselves not only as custodians of cultural heritage but also as producers in an experience economy. While focusing on the latter this chapter analyses how such institutions act as ‘experience designers’. In short we argue first that design research can benefit from studying the concrete practices that have produced successful or unsuccessful experience designs by studying these in the natural environments in which they occur (Norman 1999), while second we need to investigate how professionals involved in the making of the Viking Ship Museum reflect-in-action (Schön 1983, 1987). Experience design does not emerge from materials themselves but through the iterative dialogue taking place between various actors – professionals, managers, partners, and visitors involved. And third, by our efforts in research into design, we hope to contribute to making this a design-based research, thus adding ‘design researchers’ to the list of actors involved. The basis of this research have been the developments which have taken place around the Viking Ship Museum, and which through fieldwork and interviews we have followed during the period 2003–04. This was supplemented by reading the frequent reports on activities around the museum and its ships in the local press (especially Dagbladet Roskilde), collecting various written materials from the museum and numerous visits and passages over the years, since one of the authors has lived most of his life nearby. Furthermore, our work benefits from the ongoing development of cooperation between Roskilde University and the Viking Ship Museum (and other museums in the RUCMUS cooperation), in which both authors take part and informal talks with key persons at the museum, not least the director of the museum Tinna Damgård-Sørensen. Besides various encounters, dialogues and a common project proposal, she was interviewed by us twice, once in 2003 and again in 2004. As the development of the Viking Ship Museum is often regarded a success locally, nationally and internationally, it can be seen as an instructive case of design practices.

Materializing the Viking ship The design of tourist experiences departs from design of material and virtual things by being thoroughly intangible. For the Viking Ship Museum, the crucial task has been how to bring the world of the Vikings and their craftsmen’s culture to life for visitors: how to make the imaginative world of the tenth and eleventh century present and real to the observer. To do this, the materialization of this imagination has been an ongoing endeavor involving planning, design and management. The Viking Ship Museum first opened for the public in the form of the Viking Ship Hall in 1969. The ‘heart’ of the museum is the exhibition of five wrecks from Roskilde Fjord. The hall itself is a piece of late modernist architecture designed by the architect Erik Christian Sørensen, and the hall, made of brutal concrete, itself is also preserved. Though a frame given long before her employment, the director of the museum embeds her understanding of the museum’s idea in what she calls ‘a very “honest” building. Everything is what it pretends to be’ and ‘the “honesty” of the building is mirrored in the fundamental attitude to the development of

Tourist experience design

191

communication activities: The museum must offer real [virkelige] experiences: the real [ægte] thing, the real [rigtige] work process, the real [virkelige] sailing, the personal encounter’ (Damgård-Sørensen 2002, our translation from the Danish). Thereby the director envisions her specific line of interpretation of the relation between architecture and exhibition, to order and organize a frame of understanding for the 1990s enlargement of the museum. In 1997, the Museum Island opened (see Figure 13.1). This is a completely different type of construction including a museum harbour with Viking ships and other boats as well as an artificial island (through the digging of channels) with a ship yard, an archaeological workshop and facilities for courses and teaching. In addition to this, a new building with museum offices, together with a restaurant, youth hostel and so on, opened in 2000. Both these constructions were a part of an overall municipal plan for the renovation of the Roskilde Harbour area, and it was funded by a number of foundations as well as by Roskilde Municipality itself. Buildings, especially on the Museum Island, are demonstratively different from the Viking Ship Hall (sometimes called the ‘sarcophagus’), made in cedar wood and with roofs slanting in different directions. It was the purpose of the Museum Island to design new experiences, in contrast to the increasingly auratic – or static – Viking Ship Hall. In the early years, the public could follow the assembling of the original wrecks, with the wood parts fastened to artistic metal structures, showing the original size and forms of the ships, also where no wood parts have survived a thousand years in the mud at the bottom of Roskilde Fjord. In this sense, the Hall started as a workshop, but this ended with the completion of conserved ships. Therefore, a new archaeological workshop was constructed on the Museum Island, to show the public how marine archaeologists work when measuring and conserving remains. This workshop had a lot of work for several decades, because during the digging of channels in constructing the Museum Island nine more Viking (and early medieval) ships were found and excavated. So there is certainly no shortage in archaeological material, but there is shortage in funding for the workshop. However, the main attraction of the Museum Island – if not of the whole museum – has become the ship yard and the collection of ‘real’ both original, renovated and replica ships that can sail. Here visitors can watch the building of replica ships, the repair of ships, the sailing of ships and not least there is the possibility of booking a tour on one of the ships, so that visitors can experience the ships ‘for real’. In our investigation at the museum, interviewees standing beside the auratic wrecks in the Hall said they saw the replica ships at the Museum Island as the more ‘real’, since they can sail (field work summer 2003, see Bærenholdt and Haldrup 2004). In fact, the Viking Ship Museum already had a more playful ‘jetty’ or ‘Activity Room’ inside the Hall, where people can board part of a replica ship, dress in clothes, lift weapons and so forth. But the Museum Island activities added a lot to tourist experiences. The atmosphere of the Museum Island – including that of the smell of tar – is that of a rustic, living, shipbuilder culture. And the ships have to be used, repaired and can even be scrapped.

192

M. Haldrup and J.O. Bærenholdt The whole idea of a ship yard is not only that when a ship gets damaged we can repair it, but we do in fact also try to grasp the craft traditions that have survived for 1000 years. We understand the building of a boat, not only as a craft, but as a whole way of thinking. (Interview with museum director Tinna Damgård-Sørensen, 2004. Our translation from Danish)

The concept of the museum’s new – combined – design has been explained this way by the director, in her contribution to a seminar in Oslo, addressing the future location and design of the much more traditional Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. She highlights how the Hall has now been resituated in a living maritime environment, as a background to enrich the museum experience: One of the most important questions in museum work is how one mediates the transition between everyday and the museum visit. How one tunes the audience and makes people open for experiences. Before the extension, the museum audience arrived directly from the outside into the large exhibition hall, where the black ship wrecks can be experienced as very abstract. Almost as large black sculptures. The location at the Fjord did of course strike a tone – but with the new museum grounds a new sounding board has been created. The visitors now move through an active maritime environment with ship building, sailing and maritime workshops, before the arrival to the museum [hall]. Irrelevant speculations are driven back. One has to give in . . . (Damgård-Sørensen 2002, our translation) The director’s poetic explanation gives much weight to the emotional, to atmosphere, not least via the use of musical metaphors, but also through special performances by, for example, the famous Danish jazz composer Palle Mikkelborg. However, it is continuously stressed that such interventions are not done in order to stage historical culture tied to the ships (2004 interview). Activities are not staged plays, but strictly real professional communication following the concept of the museum design. Aesthetic and emotional ‘design’ consistently follows the simple organizing idea of the museum: doing things honestly and because they are necessary. However, in her own written text from 2002 (quoted earlier), the museum director clearly expressed a stage-like flow understanding of tourists’ experience, which is her expectation of the affordances of the material environment the museum offers its visitors, channelling visitors to arrive at the museum via the Museum Island to get in a contemplative mood – ‘to give in’ (see above). This is a designer’s explanation of how the different parts of the museum should work according to different ways of displaying the maritime culture of the Vikings. She also explained this in our first interview: [L]ooking at a place where one comes to experience, then it is incredibly important to think of it as a garden, where the decisive move in having a really beautiful garden is to have a gardener, who takes a decision on each bed and

Tourist experience design

193

manages each bed, letting it display on its own conditions, with different smells, different colours and expressions, totally, and in this connection it is extremely important to think of the Viking Ship Hall as the museum part, as the place one has to – partly the original objects and partly the encounter with the time perspective lying in gazing at something a thousand years old. There has to be some kind, a form of seriousness in the experience you get over there, it has to be thoughtful. For me as a historian, there is something important in viewing a museum as a memory instrument, and this about remembering that before us so incredibly many things happened – and hopefully also after us. We are only a place in a time perspective . . . (Interview with the museum director, 2003. Our translation) Interestingly, this quote moves from a place of experience with the metaphor of a garden, which that has been carefully planed by a gardener, to a place of ‘us’ as a moment in a long history. The director vividly explains how the first facilitates the second experience of place as a small temporal place in history. There is here a consistent awareness of the role of contemplative moods and of thoughtfulness in making the Viking Ship Museum a good experience place. Place is here both in space and time, and it is being taken care of. The director thereby hints at some principles of experience design as a form of place making, displacing the focus from the material affordances of the objects (ships) at the Museum Island to their afterlife in the memories and reflections of the visitors. The temporality of a tourist place is especially obvious when it comes to the museum’s shipbuilding projects. Among these, the most ambitious so far has been the making of a replica of the Skuldelev 2 wreck, the largest of the wrecks, a long ship, probably a warship, but also the ship from which there were the fewest remains and therefore also the most questions about what the ship could actually have looked like. The replica of the long ship was constructed over the five years 2000–04 on the Museum Island (see the completed replica ship in Figure 13.2). It attracted a lot of interest and can be seen as the culmination so far of ship reconstruction at the Viking Ship Museum. The project depended on funding from especially the Tuborg Foundation, and it is worth noting, that external funding agencies are integrated in sub-committees responsible for the profiling, marketing and following up projects like this. Meanwhile, the design of the Museum Island was not without problems. It became a real attraction, not at least because of the ongoing building of the magnificent Skuldelev 2 replica. Due to municipal funding and legal rights of citizens to pass along coasts in Denmark, it also became an important public space. It became so popular both among local citizens and among visitors that museum incomes decreased since the entrance fee was only needed for the Museum Hall itself, and many chose not to go there anymore. There were experiments with a fence around the island in 2002, but it caused so much protest, anger and stress among locals that it was quickly removed. The museum admitted this redesign to be a failure, and had to stick to the original material design, affording the openness of the area. A more gentle, and smart, compromise was found in the years following. Entrance

194

M. Haldrup and J.O. Bærenholdt

fee facilities were set up at the southern entrance bridge to the Museum Island from the parking area, and now signs state that the outdoor exhibition areas, besides the broad east–west passage, are only for those with entrance fee badges. Meanwhile, the eastern and western bridges, used by locals to pass along the coastline, remained open, and access to exhibition areas is not guarded. With good access, the place can remain vibrant during, and outside, museum opening hours, while most visiting tourists, arriving from the parking area in opening hours, also pay the entrance fee that is crucial to the economy of the museum. One can say that the museum found a redesign by making use of ‘natural’ and cultural constraints rather than fences. This was crucial for continuing a long tradition of drawing together Viking (ship) enthusiasm with local engagement and vivid atmosphere in the harbour area.

Mobilizing the Viking ship In its origin and at the heart of its research and exhibition practices, the Viking Ship Museum is a museum concerning the archaeological finds (and finding) of the wrecks in the fjord overlooked by the main exhibition hall (though the find was 20 km away). The experimental archaeological interest in how Viking ships sailed has been the motivation for displaying the craftsman practices of Viking shipbuilders on the Museum Island. But the recent extension and redesign of the museum has afforded the building of replicas to become part of an impressive mobilization of the Vikings Ships as objects of educational and entertainment purposes. In some senses this mobilization marks a new move into a globalizing cultural economy in which objects, events and images circulate and take on new meanings and purposes of their own. Most importantly in this respect has been the sailing of the Skuldelev 2 replica ‘back’ to Ireland (where it was presumably built in the early eleventh century, from timber from around Glendalough). This avalanching process began with a locally and regionally much published launch in August 2004. At this event, HM Queen Margrethe of Denmark named the ship the Sea Stallion from Glendalough and, once launched, together with director Tinna Damgård-Sørensen, the Queen boarded the ship and took part in its first sail on Roskilde Fjord. In the years following, the crew of voluntary sailors continued with various sailing trips – ever more bold experiments – along the coasts of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Much attention followed in the daily coverage by national television, distribution of diary podcasts and a countdown watch on the homepage of numbers days before the departure back to Ireland. All this culminated with the departure of the long ship from the Viking Ship Museum on 1 July 2007, stories broadcast from the ups and downs of the trip along Norway and Scotland and the arrival to Dublin, 14 July. The long ship was thereafter lifted into the central court of the Irish National Museum for exhibition over the winter, waiting for its no less mediatized return trip and a much celebrated welcome back in Roskilde in summer 2008 (see Figure 13.2) This expedition was a huge success. A surprisingly large number of people visited the museum website (http://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/) during the summer of 2008 to download podcasts and skim for news regarding the journey. Half

Tourist experience design

195

of these were repeat visitors that followed the sufferings of the crew on the sea. In this way, the mobilization of the Sea Stallion seems to have been successful in translating the identification of its audience with the ‘fantastic realism’ of Viking life (Bærenholdt and Haldrup 2004, Bærenholdt et al. 2008). The launching of the Sea Stallion also builds on a long tradition at the Viking Ship Museum of cooperating with national and international media in dispersing images and knowledge relating to Viking maritime technology. From the building of the first replica ship in 1982, the process was covered by national television as part of their popular history series. This in turn influenced decisions both to increase public access to the yard and to let the building processes unfold a central significance in funding applications and projects. Fundraising and media performance fuel each other. Parallel to this, the expertise of the archaeologists and shipbuilders of the museum has been frequently used in media productions such as programmes on Viking routes, settlements, culture and everyday life by National Geographic Channel and BBC History Channel. In this way, the assets of the museum – the Viking ships – have been mobilized to reach a global audience, and in turn bringing the world of the Vikings to live as an important backcloth to the activities of the museum. Interestingly, this mobilization of broader aspects of Viking culture has mostly been unintended consequences of more small-scale responses to media producers. Thus the director explains with reference to a programme series produced by National Geographic Channel:

Figure 13.1 The Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde. (Map first designed by the Viking Ship Museum, modified by Ingrid Jensen under the guidance of Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Roskilde University, figure first published in Bærenholdt and Haldrup 2004)

196

M. Haldrup and J.O. Bærenholdt

Figure 13.2 The Sea Stallion from Glendalough just landed at the Viking Ship Museum, 4 August 2008, back from Ireland (Photo: Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt).

[A]nd what happens is . . . It is a type of relations, a type of cooperation with a production company that develops into having this massive marketing effect. We are being used very, very, very often by foreign TV channels that come in here producing programs about the Viking Age, about the history of the ships, or something else . . . And we have been part of an ocean of programmes scheduled on BBC and a lot of other big, international TV companies, and it has not been noticed because the programmes were not scheduled in Denmark [. . .] but we have registered it from the responses abroad, so there has been an effect . . . but what happens is that National Geographic Channel has an office in Denmark, and when it was decided to schedule it on Danish Television, well, that is obviously a start, they decided to relate all work with the press to this museum, right? And it made it look like that we had been enormously eager, but it was actually the TV companies that were the initiators of this [. . .] I think there is a very simple explanation to this (frequent media appearance, authors comment), and that is that most places . . ., I cannot really think of any other, where you can show up with your team and combine footage of original finds with footage of fresh finds, with interviews of highly esteemed researchers, who will be able to tell about examination and documentation, the problems with constructing replicas, see a ship being built AND sail. You can get the whole package here. And that you can’t do any other place, and of course production companies know these things. They watch each others’

Tourist experience design

197

films, they talk, and while there are being built other replicas around the world, it is not the same staging as here. (Interview with the museum director, 2004, our translation) Of primary interest is that the museum has continuously experienced and made use of the positive feedback from media productions not only for ‘marketing’ purposes but for designing projects, events, artefacts and exhibitions. Second, this process has been a rather contingent and autonomous project in which no rational ‘grand design’ has existed, but in which the design of tourist experiences has emerged from the responses to media actors and the public. The mobilization of Viking ships has gained a life of its own reinforcing the shape and design of future projects and activities culminating in the ‘return of the Sea Stallion’. The question remains: what happens to the place-specific assets of the Viking Ship Museum, its relicts found in the fjord and its educational activities on the Museum Island, now that the Sea Stallion has embarked on its journey into the global world of cultural production, a sphere in which, according to Lash and Lury, ‘cultural entities spin out of the control of their makers: in their circulation they move and change through transposition and translation, transformation and transmogrification. In this culture of circulation ( . . . ), cultural entities take on a dynamic of their own: in this movement, value is added’ (2007: 4–5). In other words, how are/can experiences like the ones designed and consumed here, be tied and connected to the particular place of origin: the island in the harbour of Roskilde. Here, reflections by the ‘designing’ director stressed the far reaching importance of the site’s specific staging connections between a diversity of artefacts, skills and types of knowledge.

Mooring the Viking ship Once mobilized and travelling around, is the Viking Ship Museum still true to its design concepts ‘tuning audiences through the various carefully gardened beds of the museum’, to paraphrase the director’s words? Yes, communication, media, events, celebrities and so on are attracted and come. But does all the focus on the travelling ship being broadcast more and more globally entail a risk of diffusion of the museum, its environment, objects and conceptual design itself? Indeed, the museum management has had to take hard decisions in order to continue with the ‘sailing attractions’. More concretely, due to lack of funding the archaeological workshop was closed for some time – and competent staff members fired (in 2008) – in order to have enough funds to get, the now maybe main attraction of the museum, the Sea Stallion from Glendalough, home again (Dagbladet Roskilde 8 January 2008). Furthermore, under much public attention in the local press, the route of the return trip received much consideration. It was, for example, discussed whether to call at Tower Bridge in London on the way back, but the detour up the Thames, financial costs and the risk of disappearing in the flux of the world city finally led the management to decide ‘better to be big in a small place than small in a big place’ (‘Bedre at være stor et lille sted frem for lille et stort sted’, Dagbladet Roskilde 12 February 2008). No doubt, what we can call ‘the media performance’

198

M. Haldrup and J.O. Bærenholdt

of the long ship in different environments was thoroughly designed. There was no doubt that the kinds of tunings, audiences, gardeners and ‘beds’ that are in play here differ from the ones in the museum building and its environment. Now the question became how to maximize marketing impact in timing in which ports to visit on the southern coast of England (Dagbladet Roskilde 12 February 2008). As we have shown, the experiences of the Viking criss-cross different media (from hands-on to ICT-mediated circulation on screens), places (the Museum Island, other European localities and global, virtual imaginative worlds), and genre (general education purposes, research, entertainment). What is important is not this apparent diversity but that all these experiences connect in several dimensions. First and foremost, connections are social; people experience museums together with, or in relation to, other humans (vom Lehn et al. 2001, Heath and vom Lehn 2004). Much tourism is about having a nice time together with one’s family or friends, including when visiting a cultural attraction (see also Grøn 2007). Furthermore, connections may well connect in space across distances, to others in other places, to experiences from other places. Finally, connections also work across time, both in historical time and in personal time. Heritage is shared with others in relations to objects and narratives from ancient times, and memories are made also in anticipation of the future use of these memories (see also Bærenholdt et al. 2008 for this argument). The basic point here is that experiences only work when they are also performed as such among the experiencing tourists. Whether we like it or not, tourists are co-designers of their own experiences. And they may be this increasingly, since other kinds of experiences on the Internet are increasingly available at anytime, anywhere, and therefore not worth the same effort. The ‘true’ experience of ‘being there’ – in-place – seems to increase rather than decrease in importance (and in economic value). It is maybe no coincidence that the categories tourism, ‘the real’ and ‘authenticity’ often seem to be found together. With free access to music, films and other media on the Internet, attending a live concert or the cinema obtains a more important role. So while tourism experiences work via the connections and fantasies enacted, the thing that really makes it a real tourist experience is to be present-in-place. Therefore, the mooring of the Viking ship ‘back home’ at the museum is crucial, and in fact the museum has experienced that a growing number of the visitors explain that media and Internet coverage of the journey of the Sea Stallion attracted them to the place. Abstract connections are without value; what counts, also in terms of museum income, are moorings, meaning concrete connections with attachments. And it seems that the Viking Ship Museum has built its conceptual design through reflection-in-action, explaining the effort in a similar way to the reasoning in this chapter, which has also arisen as part of a dialogue with the museum.

Conclusion: towards design-based experience research In this paper we have discussed the lessons for design research that can be drawn from concrete studies of how tourism experiences are staged and performed. We

Tourist experience design

199

have used the materialization, mobilization and mooring of the Viking ship Sea Stallion from Glendalough as a practical example of such design processes. While the materialization of the Viking Long Ship at the Museum Island in Roskilde has produced a material environment affording tourists to identify with the life of the Vikings by visually contemplating the remains of the (original) ships, examining the craftsmanship involved in building replicas and participating in sailing the ships, this identification was successfully translated into the circulations of global media with the mobilization to of the Sea Stallion to Ireland and back in 2007–08. Let us now briefly suggest what may be learnt from this case. First, tourist experience design has to take seriously the active co-making of tourist sites by visiting tourists and locals. A way to facilitate this is to thoroughly think over how environments and built constructions can be designed in order to afford better experiences. So far, such an understanding is emerging through intuition and experiments that, while underway, are evaluated by professionals. Nobody can be sure whether these understandings, as embedded in actual designs, will work. Constructing the Museum Island certainly had a few setbacks, which led to necessary redesigns, some of which may have been foreseeable. To facilitate a more professional anticipation of how things work, an affordance approach to material designs and human experiences may be helpful. Second, to do that would involve a stronger design-based research, though this is already emerging in the case study. One thing is the Viking Museum’s tradition for experimental archaeology, which is the whole background and inspiration for the Museum Island and the Sea Stallion projects, which is in fact design-based research, researching history through experiments with sailing replica ships. Yet another kind of design-based research would be to allow the kind of research into design, featured in this chapter, develop towards a design-based experience research. This would mean to follow Schön’s advice, revitalizing ‘a phenomenology of practice that includes, as a central component, reflection on the reflection-in-action of practitioners in their organization setting’ to also ‘encourage researchers in academy and practitioners to learn form each other’ (Schön 1987: 321). Without this kind of second order type of reflections on reflections tourism experience research can hardly flourish. Such a strategy for research and for training and coaching students is suggested, since there are limits to how much the design of tourism experience sites can be formally coded and learned in school. Recipes do not exist. There is no automatic transformation from having a good analytical approach to ‘doing the right thing’. What can be learned is rather to do good analysis, to stick to thorough procedures of involvement of a diversity of stakeholders, including visiting tourists and to be flexible – keeping situations fluid – with the use of intuition, ready to remake places. And, first and foremost, humility because there can be tourist performance without experience design, but no working experience design without tourist performance. Such principles and procedures could be crucial in unfolding a field of design-based experience research, potentially also making tourism experiences better.

200

M. Haldrup and J.O. Bærenholdt

References Bærenholdt, J.O. and Haldrup, M. (2004) ‘On the track of the Vikings’, in Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (eds) Tourism Mobilities: places to play, places in play, London: Routledge. —— (2006) ‘Mobile networks and place making in cultural tourism: staging Viking ships and rock music in Roskilde’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 13: 209–24. Bærenholdt, J. O., Haldrup, M. and Larsen, J. (2008) ‘Performing cultural attractions’, in Sundbo, J. and Darmer, P. (eds) Creating Experiences in the Experience Economy, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Bærenholdt, J.O., Haldrup, M., Larsen J., and Urry, J. (2004) Performing Tourist Places, Aldershot: Ashgate. Costall, A. and Dreier, O. (eds) (2006) Doing Things with Things: the design and use of everyday objects, Aldershot: Ashgate. Damgård-Sørensen, T. (2002) ‘Vikingeskibsmuseet i Roskilde’ [‘The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde’], in Bøe, A. (ed.) Vikingskipsseminaret 14 og 15 februar 2002 Rapport, University of Oslo, Universitets Kulturhistoriske Museer (ISBN 82–991964-2-6). Franklin, A. (2003) Tourism: an introduction, London: Sage. Gibson, J.J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Grøn, K. (2007) ‘Undersøgende, hyggere, scannere og kultiverede’ [‘Investigators, cosy people, scanners and the cultivated’], Nordisk Museologi 2007: 46–61. Haldrup, M. and Larsen, J. (2006) ‘Material cultures of tourism’, Leisure Studies, 25: 275–89. —— (2009) Tourism, Performance and the Everyday, London: Routledge. Healy, P. (2006) Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies, London: Routledge. Heath, C. and vom Lehn, D. (2004) ‘Configuring reception: (dis-)regarding the spectator in museums and galleries’, Theory, Culture & Society 21: 43–65. Jóhannesson, G.T. and Bærenholdt, J.O. (2008) ‘Enacting places through the connections of tourism’, in Bærenholdt, J.O. and Granås, B. (eds) Mobility and Place: enacting Northern European peripheries, Aldershot: Ashgate. Lash, S. and Lury, C. (2007) Global Culture Industry, Cambridge: Polity. Norman, D.A. (1988) The Design of Everyday Things, New York: Basic Books. —— (1999) ‘Affordances, conventions, and design’, Interactions, 6: 38–42. Schön, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner, New York: Basic Books. —— (1987) Educating the Reflective Practitioner, San Fransico: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Shove, E., Watson, M., Hand, M. and Ingram, J. (2007) The Design of Everyday Life, Oxford: Berg. vom Lehn, D., Heath, C. and Hindmarsh, J. (2001) ‘Exhibiting interaction: conduct and collaboration in museums and galleries’, Symbolic Interaction 24: 189–216. Warde, A. (2005) ‘Consumption and theories of practice’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 5: 131–53.

14 Synergies Jesper Simonsen, Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, John Damm Scheuer and Monika Büscher

Introduction Design research is nurtured from practices that cross-cut traditional fields of design and research. Researchers take on the role of designers and vice versa. This fosters mutual inspiration and learning – synergy. Design processes work through iterative and contextual experimental forms of research, and researchers work, know and communicate through designing. Design research involves many kinds of other synergies integral to those between research and design: between analysis and design, between different disciplines and design in different domains, between humans and non-humans, between intention and emergence, between small and large worlds, between lived practice and theoretical abstraction, between training and scientific enquiry, between reflectionin-action and problem-based learning and between very different persons. In this concluding chapter, we examine some central synergies that arise from the chapters in this book. Truly, researching, writing, editing and ‘designing’ this book has been a process of learning and cooperation. Besides drafting, reading, discussing, and editing each others’ written contributions, our methods have included exchanging ideas, exploring and inventing new perspectives at workshops, and discussions amongst smaller groupings of authors and editors, including an editorial affinity diagram workshop (Beyer and Holtzblatt 1998) between Simonsen, Bærenholdt and Scheuer aimed at capturing underlying structures and patterns of design research present in our discussions. The latter used a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967), and it inspires the text below.

Design and design research ‘Design’ as a noun refers to a specification, blueprint or plan for a particular artefact or a particular activity. It also describes the style and make-up of an artefact. A design is thus seen as the basis for and precursor to the making of an artefact or execution of an activity. The verb ‘to design’ or designing, describes the human activity leading to the production of a design. In this conventional view, a designer, then, is someone who is, has been, or will be designing, that is, someone who creates designs. Moving from the noun ‘design’ to the verb ‘to design’ is an

202

J. Simonsen et al.

important step, since it implies an emphasis on the processes of making something, and because it makes it possible to conceive of design products that do not take the form of a plan or specification or a particular style. Designing is about more and other things than, for example, making ‘Danish Design’. The essential part of the human activity of ‘designing’ relates the non-routine and creative aspects of producing change. Indeed, the energy, power, meaning and life of design are related to the fact that we cannot find one simple definition (Atwood et al. 2002, Buchanan 2001: 8). It may be that turning from design to design research is a source of confusion, but it is also a way of opening up new ways of thinking about, knowing and doing design. In a society where scientific research reaches deeply into people’s lives and most everyday practices (see the discussion of mode 2 knowledge and society in Chapter 1), design has become infected by – and needs to be imbued with – research! One way of defining design research is, therefore, to take a starting point in the aim of the Design Research Society (DSR 2009): to recognize ‘design as a creative act common to many disciplines’ and to ‘promote the study of and research into the process of designing in all its many fields’. Thus, design research investigates the process of designing with the overall intention to better understand and to improve the design process ‘advancing the theory and practice of design’. As we pointed out in our introduction, design research is about more than research into design. Cross (2006: 100) approaches the question of research for design in terms of, ‘where do we look for knowledge?’ and he suggests that designers do so around persons, processes and products. First, people are the source for Designerly Ways of Knowing (ibid.). Second, studying processes raises questions of methodology in designing, an area that Cross calls ‘praxiology’ (ibid.: 101). Third, design knowledge also resides in products and their social and material configuration. While this approach is powerful, we propose that much can be gained by thinking further across these three dimensions, focusing less on ‘Designers’ and taking a more relational approach to ‘designing’. Design research must take its starting point in clarifying the concept of ‘designing’, which is investigated through design research. We suggest that there are three distinct characteristics that define designing: 1 Designing involves the intention of problem–solution. 2 A tangible outcome is realized and can be identified as the result of a design process. 3 The outcome of a deliberate design process might not correspond to the intended outcome. The intention of problem-solution includes the purposeful rationale of initiating a design process and this intention may be manifested in a specification or a plan. Designing aims to change a situation (A) into another situation (B) that is ‘better’ and desirable in a variety of senses (Figure 14.1). Designing is intentional in terms of facilitating, encouraging, advancing, causing a change process that transforms one situation into another. On a more abstract level, design can be characterized

Synergies

203

as the art of shaping and changing society. The characteristics listed earlier reflect less concern (compared to Cross 2006) with the individual, rational and independent designer; instead, the contributions to this book focus on the contextual and emergent aspects of designing, acknowledging that designing always takes place in situations where multiple things change simultaneously. Therefore, unintended consequences are a highly likely part of the complex products and artefacts we call ‘a design’. However, it is important to stress, concurring with Cross, that design always involves intentionality. The intentionality inherent in designing implies that design research includes analyses of situation A (what is the problem or need that the design must address), and visions of situation B (what solution does the design strive for), and the actions taken to change situation A into situation B. Throughout this book a variety of different situations have been addressed, including designing related to information systems for the healthcare sector (Chapter 2), rubber moulding (Chapter 3), clinical pathways (Chapter 4), management (Chapter 5 and 6), public service design, pervasive computing and participatory art (Chapter 7), economic expert knowledge transfer (Chapter 8), eco-friendly flax insulation (Chapter 9), a poster exhibition about biotechnology (Chapter 10), innovative workshops (Chapter 11), urban planning (Chapter 12) and tourist experience in a Viking ship museum (Chapter 13). The second characteristic emphasizes that a design process makes a difference, realized as the result of the design process. Outcomes differ in form and content (for example, as artefacts, technologies, services, experiences and so on) and they are realized as an integral part of situation B – meaning that the design outcome (sometimes inadvertently) encompasses the whole of situation B. Design research identifies and analyses these outcomes and evaluates them in relation to the intentions of the design process, including how they correlate to the analysis of situation A as well as the actions and interventions taken to change situation A into situation B.

A

B

Figure 14.1 Designing simply outlined as a change from situation A to situation B. © Jesper Simonsen 2010.

204

J. Simonsen et al.

The third characteristic highlights that designing is not a unidirectional process that can be fully anticipated, planned or controlled. A design process might, of course, not be successful or only partially successful, leading to some of the intended goals being achieved, while others are not realized, and parts of the vision may turn out to have been fancy or turn into shattered illusions. More critically, design outcomes might include inappropriate, undesirable, even disastrous side effects as well as unforeseen opportunities and unintended advantageous and desirable results. Designing is thus goal directed but in a highly emergent manner where the goals themselves might change.

Designing through iteration The general design process is characterized as being intentional, situated and emerging. But the deliberate, intended, and problem-solution driven part of the design process is constituted by iterations of planning the process, doing the process (conducting the specific planned actions), and evaluating results (based on observations). Designing involves the creation of something new, and the process of designing is thus also a hermeneutic and highly unpredictable process constituted by ongoing mutual learning among the multiple actors involved. The design process is situated in the sense that every course of action is essentially local, depending on dynamic material and social circumstances: various actors are embedded in different contexts, some of which might seem less relevant to a particular design process, but turn out to be highly influential. Contexts, too, are emergent and their impacts are unpredictable. The overall intention of the design process is to foster a change from situation A to B as outlined in Figure 14.1, but the actual design process is constituted by series of highly iterative processes that experiment with – and evaluate – visions and strategies. This is depicted in Figure 14.2. Ideas and visions for the design are first grounded in an understanding of the current situation (A). But through iterative design experiments these ideas mature and change. This includes individual reflections-in-action during designers’ and users’ conversations with the materials of a design-situation triggered, for example, when the designer draws and models representations of the design artefact (Chapter 10). It also includes collective reflection-in-action triggered, for example, when presenting and assessing design models and prototypes in participatory-design workshops (Chapter 2). The outcomes of one design situation, in terms of experimenting with and evaluating (ideas for) a design artefact, then feed into subsequent design situations elaborating the design artefact, formulating and testing new visions. During the iterative design process (indicated as small arrows in Figure 14.2), design artefacts are evaluated in a kind of ‘laboratory setting’ or ‘living laboratory’ (Schumacher and Niitamo 2008) where designers and users are envisioning or simulating using the designed artefact in a reduced and controlled context. When the design artefact is iteratively implemented, realized, and put into use in ever more realistic contexts like this, it begins to constitute the new situation

Synergies

205

Iterative design Design idea/ vision

Design in use Evaluation

Figure 14.2 The design process depicted as a series of iterations. © Jesper Simonsen 2010.

(B), hopefully helping to materialized desired change. In this situation the design ‘meets’ the diversity and drastically increased complexity embedded in a real social context. Design in use enables intentional as well as emergent change. Observations and evaluations of design in use can inform the further development of the design artefact (indicated as the large lower arrow in Figure 14.2) and, in principle, form an ongoing participatory design process. As indicated in Figure 14.2, the design process must be appreciated and approached as an iterative process (Chapter 2), socially constituted by a combination of planned and emergent properties unfolding in an organized and situated context. This includes two different types of iterations: (1) iterative design situations where ideas and visions are designed and evaluated for example, as drawings, presentations, mock-ups, or prototypes evaluated in workshops (small arrows in Figure 14.2) and (2) iterations where a design is realized and taken into real use (constituting a situation B), hereby enabling emergent change, and evaluated after a period of time (large arrows in Figure 14.2). The starting point of all iterative processes is the interpretation of the current situation (situation A), the needs and desires constituting the problem-solution part of designing, and the plans for how to proceed with the design process. This is then followed by conducting planned actions and realizing (part of) the intended and designed solution (upper part of Figure 14.2). The evaluation of the result of the actions and interventions, including both anticipated as well as emergent changes, then provides the input for a re-interpretation of the situation and plans for the proceeding design process (lower part of Figure 14.2). Across the variety of situations described in this book design processes described share two general characteristics: they are iterative (yet also irreversible), and a goal of the process is to achieve robustness in the state of situation B, that is, designing in a way that is socially and materially robust by appreciating the realities of the context. All contributions in this book show that designing future solutions is characterized by uncertainty and may therefore only proceed if humans approach the situation with a leap of faith. Humans’ trust in other human beings as well as in the

206

J. Simonsen et al.

possibilities of solving the design task is thus a necessary precondition for design processes. Quality in designing is identified in retrospect as human actors reflect upon and try to make sense of the design processes that they have been through. Design solutions that are socially and materially robust, moreover, tend to align large numbers of actors with very different requirements and frames of reference. It is because of the emergent character of designing, we highlight iteration, since it is only through iterative design and evaluation that artefacts and other outcomes potentially become robust under conditions of uncertainty and unpredictability.

The ‘research’ in design research Design research may be defined as the interdisciplinary study of the problem oriented, solution seeking and emergent processes leading to the production of a design. The ‘research’ part of design research is captured by stressing that design research investigates the process of designing, and that design research has the overall intention to better understand and to improve the design process. Design research is characterized by the dual purpose of understanding and improving, thus embracing an analytic and a descriptive approach as well as a formative/normative, and constructive approach. The core of the ‘research’ part of design research can be illustrated as the focus on the relation between situation A and situation B from Figures 14.1 and 14.2: design research investigates designing which aims at changing situation A into situation B. An understanding of situation A is the critical basis for initiating a change process aiming at transforming situation A into situation B. Insight into situation B (as this situation gradually emerges) is the basis for evaluating the progress and success of the change process. Situations A and B are connected through intentional and emergent processes in time and space, where the two situations cannot exist beside each other in the same time and space. What design research then investigates is the usually irreversible process between A and B, where designing is taking part. It studies how the process of designing takes part in change and what the relations, forces, events, and social and material circumstances involved are. The intention to help improving design processes influences the outcome of design research, often taking a formative or normative form. Research findings increase the density of the backgound knowledge from which practitioners in design processes may draw in making judgements about what to do (Polkinghorne 2004). Thus, in practice, designers draw on their background knowledge including their knowledge of design rules, exemplars and other research findings. At the same time, however, they continously monitor and learn about the effects of their own, other humans as well as non-humans actions. They engage in situational improvisation and make adjustments in response to changes brought on by previous actions while trying to realize wished-for goals. As argued in Chapter 1, to gain insight in how designing works, design research tends to take part in design processes, for example through an action research approach, hereby directly contributing to the design process and its results. Hence, much design research is concerned with developing design methods (in general

Synergies

207

or for particular fields) or other forms of descriptive guidance aiming at improving design processes. This is, for example, the case for research in participatory design, with its long-standing tradition for action research and developing tools and techniques for iterative design (for example, Bødker et al. 2004; Greenbaum and Kyng 1991; Schuler and Namioka 1993), and for combining ethnographic studies with iterative design (e.g. Hartswood et al. 2008; Simonsen and Kensing 1997; Simonsen 2009). However, in addition to such research through design, design research might also study design processes, research into design, in principle, without interfering in the domain. There is also research for design, for example, research within computer supported cooperative work has been concerned with ethnographic studies of collaboration in order to inform design (for example, Hughes et al. 1993; Luff et al. 2000; Sommerville et al. 1992, Randall et al. 2007). In Figures 14.1 and 14.2, this corresponds to descriptive studies of situation A. Descriptive studies of situation B (Figures 14.1 and 14.2) include technology assessment studies (Mohr 1999), Science and Technology Studies (Sismondo 2003), as well as many actor-network theory studies (Latour 1996, 2005). The actual design process studied in design research encompasses a wide range of different situations. This book includes, for example, micro-level processes of interaction between actors during a workshop (Chapter 11), macro-level processes of industrial production (Chapter 9) or urban planning (Chapter 12), ethnography of recurrent situations unfolding during a few minutes (Chapter 2), or longitudinal

Iterative design Design idea/ vision

Design in use Evaluation

Figure 14.3 Illustrations of the chapters of this book as related to the design process presented in Figure 14.2. Clockwise from bottom left: development of design ideas (Chapters 11, 5 and 12), presentations from iterative design (Chapters 2 and 10), design in use and evaluations of design in use (Chapter 2, also illustrating Chapters 4, 9, 13 and 7). © Jesper Simonsen 2010.

208

J. Simonsen et al.

studies spanning multiple years (Chapter 13). However, the chapters might be positioned in relation to the design process presented in Figure 14.2 – as shown in Figure 14.3.

Users and use In Chapter 1, we suggested a move from users and designs to relational translations; a move also found in several chapters of this book. However, there are also good reasons to reconsider if this move has helped to better understand the role of users and of designers, and the two next sections summarize and discuss some main findings about these two roles. If we compare our approach to Cross’ (2006) interest in persons, process and products, our way of addressing users, designers and design researchers gives priority to how processes involve and influence users, designers and design researchers. The product, artefact, and broader outcome, can thereby easily imply a change of and among users, when experimenting with use leads to novel ways of use. In our contextual, situational, and relational approach, persons and other entities may change, and this also goes for designers and design researchers. Thus, design processes are constituted by ongoing mutual learning among multiple actors involved, especially between ‘users’ and ‘designers’, potentially adding ‘design researchers’. Users represent the actors who apply and use the designed artefacts, services, experiences and so on for certain purposes. Users represent actors having first-hand knowledge of the use-processes (obtained by actually performing or experiencing the situation at hand) as opposed to second- and thirdhand knowledge (obtained from being informed about the situation by users or actors who know the users). The context of the users in a given design situation might span from a local context where all users in principle are known to a context where the users and the use situation is unknown, as, for example, in pervasive computing (Chapter 7). A local context might for example be designing an information system supporting a small group of actors in form of a specific community (Chapter 2). In such a context, design work can be sensitive to the local language and culture of the community and the material circumstances in the given situation. An unknown context demands a different process of designing for a larger market of users as, for example, when designing a poster exhibition for a public audience (Chapter 10). In such cases, the problem of representativeness is evident. But this is also an issue in local contexts: any user represents a given (personal) perspective and users change over the design and use process as captured by the concept of makeshift users (as discussed in Chapter 7). The role of a user representative is dependent on the given context and the applied design approach. At one extreme, a user representative or a representative user captured in the form of a ‘persona’ (Pruitt and Grudin 2003) informs the designer as part of a general target group analyses. The target group analyses might be based on past experiences with target group representatives made years before the actual design process. In an extreme case, information from user representatives

Synergies

209

might be embedded in the design process solely through the designer’s tacit and intuitive knowledge of the situation and context of the design. At the other end of this continuum, the users are actually present and participate in design process. Here users might also assume a designer role in design process. Furthermore, in design for consumption and experience, for example, in tourism, ‘designers’ are always themselves potential users, with lived experience of use. A continuum can also be described through the following four kinds of situations: (1) where the master designer constructs an imaginary ‘image’ of the user which is then used by the designer to come up with designs that ‘fit’ with this imaginary user (Chapter 10); (2) where the designer introduces a process where the designer is interacting with users as they test out different prototypes of an artefact or process (Chapter 2); (3) where the designer also use her/his own user perspective and evaluation (Chapter 13); and (4), where whole collectives of humans are mobilized and act as both users and designers as it happens in urban spaces where local authorities have lost control with local city development (Chapter 12). It comes out of the continuation of situations that the difference has less to do with the character of users, but more with the character of ‘use’ embedded in the situation and with the designers’ ability to get involved in ‘using’.

The designer While the designer is traditionally seen as the privileged person, the famous Designer or Artist, positioned in the middle of the change process as a kind of governor, designers studied in design research include much more humble designers, who can be directly involved in the use of designs. Here, the designer includes the persons to whom designing is the core profession but also persons to whom designing is an aspect of their work. Indeed some might not consider themselves as ‘designers’ even though they participate and to some degree manage change processes which can be defined as designing (for example, Chapter 6 and Chapter 13). The role of the designer spans a continuum from the designer as the expert and master planner to the designer as a facilitator. At one end of this continuum, the designer struggles with the design process alone, experiencing his or her reflectionin-action as both frustrating periods and rewarding and clarifying moments, as described in Chapter 10. At the other end of the continuum, designing is viewed as a collective process involving multiple actors, where the designer acts to facilitate a design process. A further variation ‘does away’ with the designer and distributes design across many human and non-human actors (see, for example, Chapter 13). Whether designers are experts, master planners, facilitators or just people involved in emergent change they may act in many different ways and may be guided by many different types of criteria when making design choices and decisions. Criteria may include rational, ethical, aesthetic, emotional, bodily and material as well as other criteria. Designers’ social, cultural and material embeddedness may be both constraining and enabling for them and sometimes frame-breaking change as suggested in Chris Argyris’ theory about double loop learning (Argyris 1977). Designers often find it necessary to break away from

210

J. Simonsen et al.

taken-for-granted ideas, values and assumptions. In order to cope with complex challenges of problem solution, designers thus may need to ‘step out’ or ‘stand aside’ customary ways of doing things.

Educating the designer Throughout this book, there has been an emphasis on designing as iterative and emergent and on understanding users, designers and design researchers in relational terms, connected to each other in various ways. We now wish to conclude with a brief discussion of how to educate designers. Educating designers might be a contraction in terms, or at least a very complex task. A key reference in many chapters has been Donald Schön’s idea of the reflective practitioner (1983, 1987). Schön’s work draws intensively on experiences among design professionals such as architects and planners, but it is also used widely in research of professional work. Schön takes his point of departure in phenomenology and as compared with Simon’s positivist design science, his position is postpositivist. While Cross acknowledges the contribution of both (2006: 102), our discussion has also shown how they tend to contradict each other. While this might introduce productive tensions for some, we, the editors of this volume, tend to find Schön’s approach more persuasive, not least when it comes to discussing how to educate practitioners. While many agree on the usefulness of designers educated with a large repository of design case studies (as mentioned by Polkinghorne 2004), the critical point is how to learn the intuition and reflection-in-action professionals perform. Here, there are no rules or procedures to follow. In his Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Schön (1987) reports how, for example, architects educate architects. He proposes that educational institutions include practitioners’ reflection on their reflection-in-action while working. Researchers and practitioners should ‘learn from each other’ (Schön 1987: 321) and our approach to design research and to educating design researchers is in line with this humble, yet challenging, ambition. Approaching design as an emergent, intuitive and cooperative processes in an ever more complex and challenging world, as we have done, points towards traditions of the problem based learning, research and working methods, combined with interdisciplinary approaches, orientation toward societal relevance and critical enquiry. This approach is characteristic of Roskilde University and other universities and educational institutions since the early 1970s. It implies a search for synergies in team work and collective activity. To this tradition we need to add training in designing, meeting the twenty-first century’s challenges, full of unpredictability and irreversibility, and deeply entangled with science. The implication of this second point is to train designers who are in practice able to cope with changes where total control is impossible. Further, training needs to teach students to take part and make judgment in situations where ‘sufficient’ knowledge is not possible before decisions on actions (designs) must be taken. Finally, educating designers not only involves an orientation towards practice but also collaboration

Synergies

211

and learning in and from the meeting between researchers, practitioners, users and students. Educating designers, as suggested by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986), involves developing the ability of meeting a situation as a whole, rather than as chunks of earlier cases, allowing for fluid performance, learning in the flow and being able to conduct oneself ‘a-rationally’, between rationality and irrationality (ibid.: 26). It demands sophisticated communication, organizational and practical skills. The use of the word training is appropriate here, since the abilities involved are a combination of embodied personality, sociability and skills in handling materials. Desirable competences are openness and sensitivity to new experiences, involvement and trust in other people, attachment and courage in design situations. It is our modest hope that inspiration can be drawn from the contributions in this book, building interdisciplinary synergies across the various types of design research, social science and reflection-in-action in different fields, helping design and design research to make a difference in people’s everyday lives.

References Argyris, C. (1977) ‘Double loop learning in organizations’, Harvard Business Review, 55, September–October: 115–25. Atwood, M.E., McCain, K.W., and Williams, J.C. (2002) ‘How does the design community think about design?’, in Amowitz, J., Gaver, W., Mackay, W., Sutcliffe, A., and Verplank, B. (eds) Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, London: ACM, pp. 125–32. Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K. (1998) Contextual Design: defining customer-centered systems, San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Buchanan, R. (2001) ‘Design research and the new learning’, Design Issues, 17: 3–23. Bødker, K., Kensing, F., and Simonsen, J. (2004) Participatory IT Design: designing for business and workplace realities, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Cross, N. (2000) ‘Design as a discipline’, in Durling, D. and Friedman, K. (eds), Doctoral Education in Design: foundations for the future, Staffordshire: Staffordshire University Press. —— (2006) Designerly Ways of Knowing, London: Springer. Dreyfus, H.J. and Dreyfus, S.E. (1986) Mind over Machine: the power of human intuition and expertise in the era of the computer, New York: The Free Press. DSR (2009) The Design Research Society. Online. Available online at: (accessed 4 October 2009). Glaser, B.G. and Strauss, A.L. (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: strategies for qualitative research, New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Greenbaum, J. and Kyng, M. (eds) (1991) Design at Work: cooperative design of computer systems, Chichester: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hartswood, M., Procter, R., Slack, R., Voß, A., Büscher, M., Rouncefield, M. and Rouchy, P. (2008) ‘Co-realization: toward a principled synthesis of ethnomethodology and participatory design’, in Ackerman, M.S., Halvorson, C.A., Erickson, T., and Kellog, W.A. (eds) Resources, Co-Evolution and Artifacts, London: Springer. Hughes, J.A., Randall, D., and Shapiro, D. (1993) ‘From ethnographic record to system

212

J. Simonsen et al.

design: some experiences from the field’, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 1: 123–41. Latour, B. (1996) ARAMIS or the Love of Technology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (2005) Reassembling the Social, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luff, P., Hindmarsh, J. and Heath, C.C. (2000) Workplace Studies: recovering work practice and informing system design, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mohr, H. (1999) ‘Technology Assessment in Theory and Practice’, Techné: journal of the society for philosophy and technology, 4(4): 22–25. Polkinghorne, D.E. (2004) Practice and the Human Sciences: the case for a judgment-based practice of care, New York: State University of New York Press. Pruitt, J. and Grudin, J. (2003) ‘Personas: practice and theory’, in Anderson, R., Arnowitz, J., Chalmers, A., Swack, T. and Zapolski, J. (eds) Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Designing for User Experiences, ACM Press, pp. 1–15. Randall, D., Harper, R. and Rouncefield, M. (2007) Fieldwork for Design, London: Springer-Verlag. Schön, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action, New York: Basic Books. —— (1987) Educating the Reflexive Practioner: toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions, San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass. Schuler, D. and Namioka, A. (eds) (1993) Participatory Design: principles and practices, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Schumacher, J., Niitamo, V.P. (eds) (2008) European Living Labs: a new approach for human centric regional innovation, Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Simon, H.A. (1996): The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd edn, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Simonsen, J. (2009) ‘The role of ethnography in the design and implementation of it systems’, Design Principles and Practices, 3: 251–64. Simonsen, J. and Kensing, F. (1997) ‘Using Ethnography in Contextual Design’, Communications of the ACM, 40: 82–88. Sismondo, S. (2003) An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, Malden and Oxford: Blackwell. Sommerville, I., Rodden, T., Bentley, R., and Sawyer, P. (1992) ‘Sociologists can be surprisingly useful in interactive systems design’, in Monk, A., Diaper, D. and Harrison, M. (eds) Proceedings of HCI’92: People and Computers VII, York University, September 1992, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: pp. 341–53.

Index

accountability 97, 100, 105 actor networks 8, 34, 39–40, 125–6, 128, 135 actor-network theory (ANT) 3, 11, 33–6, 38, 41, 46, 95, 109–10, 112–15, 113n1, 117, 119–20, 120n2, 175, 188 actors: non-human 11, 33, 115, 209; stance of 53 advertisements 146–7 affordances 11–12, 123, 187–9, 192, 199 agency 11, 33–4, 113 agendas 67, 72–4, 72, 74, 76–7 anxiety 161–2 architectural studios 36, 38 architecture: authorship in 33; collaborative work in 36–7; and design 189; education in 36; of emergence 184; and urban planning 174, 177 arrangements 49, 53, 56, 60 art: networks of 39; as relational practice 95–6 artefacts: in design research 12; idea triggering 106; as shapers of reality 113; symbolic content of 114; and tasks see Task-Artifact Cycle atmosphere 158–60, 191–2 audiences, tuning 197 authenticity 198 authority 33, 38, 40, 43, 46 authorship 38, 40, 97; regime of 33, 41, 44–6, 45 avalanching 194 axial coding see coding procedures Balanced Scorecard (BSC) 66, 69, 74–5 Barthes, R. 139 Bartlett, F. C. 138 biotechnology 139, 141–3, 203 black boxes 119, 138–9, 150, 151

black boxing 38, 46, 55 Blair, T. 97 Böhme, G. 159–60 Bootstrap 66, 71–4, 76 Borelli, L. 156 bricolage 57–60 broaden-and-build 158, 161–2 Buchanan, R. 5, 123 Business Excellence see EFQM Carlson, M. 159, 169 categorization 66–7, 100 change: organizational 63, 67; types of 16, 18–19 change management: improvisational 16, 18; organizational 51 clinical pathways: definition of 49; design 53–7, 203; introduction of concept 58–60; literature on 52; use of 49–50 CMM (Capability Maturity Model) 65–6, 71–4, 76 CMMI (CMM Integrated) 71 co-initiating 157, 160 co-production 57, 59–60, 101, 105, 109 CO2 emissions 1, 10 coding procedures 66–7, 75 cognitive framing 128 Coherence 161, 163, 165, 167–9 collaboration 6, 9, 36, 43, 185, 207, 210 communities, of scientists 34 composite goals 115–16, 118 computing, pervasive 95–9, 203, 208 configurability 19 congruence 87–8 consciousness: double 169; states of 158, 165–9 construction materials 127, 132, 134 constructivism 113, 174 consumption studies 187

214

Index

Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) 69 convergence 7, 85 conversations, reflective 2, 36, 138 creative class 8–9, 179 creative collaboration 158, 166, 169 creative process: areas of 148, 151, 153; origin of 153 creativity: and agency 113; and craft process 140, 153; in design 5; in design research 8–9; and emotion 158, 161–2, 162, 164; insights into 156; limits of 120; optimizing 166; and selfdevelopment 170; tools for 166–7 Cross, N. 5, 79, 203 cross-disciplinarity 7, 28, 55–6, 158, 172, 175, 179, 184 cultural economy 194 cultural entities 197 culture: design of 84; of knowledge 92 Danish Welfare Commission 109–12, 114, 116–19 Deleuze, G. 172, 178, 185 Deming, W. E. 68–9 design: definitions of 2, 49, 79, 201–2; clash between levels of 118; collaborative see collaborative design; concept of 138, 156; distributed 209; emergent 1, 10, 59, 181; evidence-based 161; and form 111; and iteration 18, 20, 31, 204–7, 207; and knowledge 59–61, 114; management tools for 156–7; materiality of 12; as middle ground 12, 44–6, 45; natural 124; networks in 36–7, 40; participatory see participatory design; of presence 88; quality in 88–9, 206; and real-use evaluation 29–30, 41; as relational practice 95–6; research-based see research for design; Scharmer’s phases of 157–8; science of 3, 64; science of (n2) 121; slow 85; sustainable 123–4, 127, 134; and tourist experiences 188–9, 199; and translation 119; undetermined problems of 184; urban see urban design; use of term 11–12; user-centred 95–7; without a designer 113 Design (creative genius) 4, 33 design concepts 63, 77, 110, 112, 114, 197 design constraints 8, 153–4 design critique 112–3 design decisions 1–2, 60, 77 design education 36 design exemplars 7, 52, 60, 75

design facilitation 4 design ideas 57, 207 design knowledge 5, 80–1, 92, 202 design literature 2 design methodologies 33, 51 design moments 113, 119 design processes: actors in 10–11; characteristics of 80–2, 202–4, 203; creating space for 160–1; dialogue in 154; distributed 124–5; and expert knowledge 109; illustrations of 207; and iteration 205, 206; and landscape 135; material and social in 11–12; and mindfulness 85; and mutual learning 31, 208; in organizations 49; pressures in 164; producer-user 128; radical 86–7; as reflection-in-action 16; and research 189; role of designer in 209; in valve making 43 design research: definition of 202; and actor-network theory 119–20; and change management 11; and design process 31; and intentionality 203; interdisciplinary 7–8; and knowing 79; and knowledge transfer 112–13; research part of 206; synergies in 201; synthesis in 51; types of 2–4, 80; and urban space 174, 184–5 design rules 50–2, 59–60, 64, 206 design science 3, 6, 9, 52, 63–5, 77, 120, 188 design spaces 123–8, 132, 134–5, 161, 164 design studies 123, 188 design theory 7, 64–5, 75, 77, 110, 119 design tools, user-centred 98 design vocabulary 111 design work 12, 49–51, 53, 57, 59–61, 119, 154, 208 designed objects see objects, designed designers: biographical trajectory of 37–8, 40, 46; diversity of 209; educating 210; graphic 138–9; identity of 46; studies of 36; and translation proposals 58 designing see design processes dialogue, types of 154 Digital Project 156–7 disciplines 2–4, 8, 49, 63, 79, 184–5, 201–2 discourses, web of 39 discursive framing 128, 130, 132 discursive practice 81 domain experts 16 double vision 159, 169

Index drawing things together 12, 35, 109, 111, 119, 184 DREAM-model 111, 118 durability, performing 39 eco-friendly design 9 ecological literacy 124, 126 economic experts 109–11, 114–15, 117–19 effects-driven IT development 17–18 EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) 66, 70, 73 Ego Roulette 163, 165, 169 Einstein, A. 166 emergence, aesthetics of 182, 183 emergent change 19, 23, 30, 205, 209 emergent strategies 59 emergent urbanism 172, 176–8, 182, 184–5 emotional space 156, 158 emotions 5, 44, 158–9, 161–3, 166, 169 empowerment 30, 66, 97 enactment 37, 79–80, 82, 84–5 engineering: design as 34; heterogenous 35–6, 40; use of term 35 engineers 6, 34, 42, 44, 90, 125, 189; social 110 epistemic structures 84 EPR (electronic patient records) 11, 16–17, 20–7, 21–2, 24, 29–30, 29 Eriksen, M. 131, 134 ethnographic analysis 17, 19, 23–4, 28, 30, 102, 113, 187, 207 ethnographic record 23–9 ethnographically inspired studies 16 evaluation: of design 205, 207; in real-use situations 20, 29–31 evidence-based practice 50–1, 54, 59–60 exhibitions 138–40, 143–4, 143, 197, 203 experiences, designing 187 expert studies 109–11 faith, leap of 86, 205 financial balance 115–16 flax 11, 123–4, 127–34, 130, 132, 203 Florida, R. 8 Frederiksberg Hospital 50, 53–4, 57 Fredrickson, B. L. 158, 161 Freetown Christiania 174 functional relations 173 fundaments 158 Garfinkel, H. 87 Gehry, F. 156–7 general equilibrium 112, 115–18

215

generalized symmetry principle 34, 44 Geography 8, 188 Gill, B. 147 globalization 176, 194 graphic design 5, 139, 147, 155 grounded theory approach 66–7, 75, 201 habits 82, 84, 174 heart research 156, 159, 161 Heidegger, M. 81 hemp 128 hierarchy 36, 77 hospital plans 53–4 human-computer interaction 17 humanities 2, 5–7 hybridization 110, 119 ideas: decontextualized 60; materialization of 156, 158, 166 imaginations 45–6, 172, 180, 189–90 imitation 9, 36 immutable mobiles 12, 35 improvisation 5, 9, 40, 46, 157, 206 improvisational change 16, 18, 31 information exchange 30 information systems 7, 16–19, 29–31, 63–5, 89, 203, 208 information transfer 39–41, 44, 46 innovation: and networks 127, 136; and niches 126; process of 44, 53; and quality 81; and sustainable design 124 inscription devices 35, 41, 184 inscriptions 33, 35–6, 39, 41, 44–6 institutionalization 71, 86, 123 insulation materials 127–34, 130, 132 insulation workers see trade unions intentionality 82, 115, 120, 203, 205 interaction, organization of 12 interactional strategies 53, 55 interdependencies 126 interdisciplinary approaches 4–5, 7–8, 12, 22, 109, 170, 178–9, 188, 210–11 Internet 1, 198 interventions, relational 96, 106 intimacy 163, 165–6 irritation 151, 165 Isen, A. 158, 161 ISO 9000 65–6, 69–72, 75 iterative design process 19, 204 iterative development process 104 iterative prototyping approach 16–19, 20, 30 Jolly C(h)ora 163, 165, 167–9 joy 159–60, 163

216

Index

judgments, implicit 85 Juran 65–6, 71, 74–5 Kairos 163, 169 Klaverfabrikken 167–8 knowledge: contextual 85, 92; density of 60; divisions of 33; and evidencebased practice 51; expert 109, 111, 120; management 51; prescriptive 64; production of 41; regimes of 33, 41, 44–5, 45; robust 90–1; shaping 109, 111, 114–15, 119; sharing 58; tacit 55, 75, 138–9, 154; tokens of 38–9; transfer 33, 109–13, 116–17, 119, 203; and design see design, and knowledge knowledge objects 119 knowledge society 6, 179 Koolhaas, R. 172, 184–5 landscape 126, 135 landscape urbanism 172, 175–8, 182, 184–5 Latour, B. 11–12, 34, 38–9, 111–13, 119–20, 120n1, 184 Lawson, B. 138, 154 leadership: active 84; creative 164–5; transformational 69 learning: collective 24; continuous 84; double loop 209; mutual see mutual learning; problem-based 201, 210 Lefébvre, H. 173 Lolland 129, 133 Malmö 172, 178–80, 182–3 management: creating future through 159; and design science 64–5, 77, 203; replacement of 87; of safety see safety management; strategic 126; symbolic 89 management practices 39, 84 management research 52, 63–5 mapping 39–40, 63, 175–6 master-class format 36 master planning 12, 172–5, 177–84 material culture 12, 188 materialism 172, 174 materiality 11–12, 36, 113, 161, 180, 189 mediators 34, 36–7, 39–41, 43–4 mental health 83 meta-analyses 50, 61, 177 meta-design 9, 123–4, 126, 135 meta-models 184 meta-systems 176 mind, definition of 40 mindfulness 34, 85, 89

mobile inscriptions Mode-2 production 4–5, 9 models, architectural 37 modernism 114, 173, 176, 181 multidisciplinary teams 49 museum work 192 music 4, 159, 167–8, 198 mutual learning 16–17, 28–31, 29, 204, 208 narrative: of identity 33; of production 38 NEETs (not in education, employment or training) 95, 99–100, 102–3, 106 networks: engineering of 40; persuasive 35; socio-technical 113, 120, 127; study of 34 neuroscience 156, 159, 166 niches 9, 126–9, 133–5 non-control 114–15 nonlinearity 81 Norman, D. A., 12, 159, 161–2, 188, 190 nursing handovers 21, 22–4, 28–30 objects: boundary 35; designed 6, 105, 154; fluid 95; humility of 12 observation 75 open source 6 opportunity-based change 11, 16–17, 19–20, 24, 28, 30–1 Oracle Healthcare Transaction Base (HTB) 19, 21 organizational design 51, 57, 61, 88, 169 organizational strategies 59 PalCom 95, 98–9, 101–4, 106 parallel commissioning 178, 181, 183–4 participatory art 95–8, 100–1, 103–5, 203 participatory design: definition of design in 2; and configurability 19; and empowerment 102; and innovation 6; methodology of 96; models of users in 99; normativity in 7; and participatory art 97; prototyping in 17; and reflection-in-action 16; research in 207; scaleability of 11; sustained 16–18, 20, 30–1; and urban space 178, 184; workshops 21, 204 participatory planning 173–4 path dependency 84, 124–5, 128, 134–5 patients: input into design 54; psychiatric 54–8 patterns in actions 60 performance: evaluation of 159, 164; media 195, 197–8; and tourism 187–9

Index performance design 8, 156–7, 159, 164, 166–7, 169 performance theory 159 person making 39–40, 46 persona 98, 208 perspectives 81 phenomenology 3, 82, 88, 92, 138–9, 161, 199, 210 plurality 81 points-of-attention 153 positivism 50, 210 post-disciplinarity 7–8 posters 111, 139–40, 140–1, 143–6, 143, 148, 150–1, 164–5, 168, 203 potentiality planning 172, 179–85 pragmatic regimes 174 praxiology 202 presence giving 40 presencing 157–8, 163, 168 pressure, types of 163–4 problem solving 50, 59, 124, 179, 202, 204–5, 210 process aesthetics 184 process improvement: and agendas 72; approaches to 65–6; models for 66–71, 68, 74–5; practical implications of 76; theory 68; and TQM 69 processual methods 138 professional communication 155n1, 192 professional gaze 37 professionalism 38 prototyping 17–18, 31; iterative see iterative prototyping approach psychic compass 163, 165–6, 169 psychology 139, 156, 158 public management 55, 58 public policy 110 public service 97–9, 203 public space 176, 179, 193 qualitative approach 3, 55–9 quality: in design see design, quality in; in safety management see safety management, quality in quality assurance 69–70 quality control 68–9, 71 quality development 54–7 quality improvement 69–70, 88 quality management 65, 68–71; total see TQM quantitative approach 55, 57–8, 60 randomized controlled trials 50 rationalism 110, 172–4

217

rationality, bounded 119–21 redesign 18, 73, 114, 116, 119, 193–4, 199 reference course 114, 116–17 reflection-in-action 16, 30, 138–9, 153–4, 159, 169, 187, 189–90, 198–9, 201, 209–11; collective 17, 31, 204 reflection-on-action 159–60 reflective practice 4, 10, 16, 159, 169, 189, 210 relational practice 95–6 Remode 159–60 research: design-based see research through design; funding of 97; iterative 201; user involvement in 10 research for design 3–4, 80, 202, 207 research into design 80, 188–90, 199, 202, 207 research through design 3–4, 7, 11, 80, 90, 158, 190, 199, 207 rhetorical technologies 116–17 risk 32, 83, 86, 90, 163, 197 robustness 83, 85, 89–91, 93, 205 rubber 12, 33, 42–4, 203 Running Stitch 95, 100–1, 103–4, 106 safety management 8, 79, 82–92; quality in 85, 88, 93 scaling, in architecture 37 Scharmer, O. C. 157–60, 163, 165, 168–9 Schön, D. A. 2, 4, 6, 36, 138, 153–4, 159, 169, 210 science: as design 64–5, 80; as design see also design science; natural 2, 5–6; network of 39; regime of 41 Science Studies see STS scientific practice 6, 35, 39, 45–6 scientific work 33, 40–1, 113 selective coding see coding procedures self-organization 176–7 semiotics, material 95, 113 sensemaking 79, 82, 84, 89, 93, 135 Shewhart, W. 68 Simon, H. 2, 50, 120n2, 156 Six Sigma 65–6, 70, 73–5 SMS messaging 10 social sciences 2, 5–7, 64–5, 75, 96, 113, 211 socio-technical regimes 127–9, 133–4 sociology, interpretive 10, 79 software development 71, 96–7 Sørensen, Signa 157 standardization 82–4, 123, 128 STS (Science and Technology Studies) 6–7, 33–5, 41, 45, 109, 188, 207

218

Index

subjectivities 36, 38–40, 161 suspension 86 sustainability 2, 123–4, 126–7, 135; financial 115–18 symmetric analysis 33 synergies 5–8, 11, 201, 210 synthesis 51, 67–8, 75–7 Task-Artifact Cycle 18 Taylor, F. 51, 60 team conferences 22–4, 26–30 Technological Board 139, 143, 145 technological regimes 9, 123–5 technological rules 9, 49–50, 52, 60, 63–5, 74–7 technology, symbolic meaning of 125 testing, alpha and beta 52 time, as creative tool 180–1, 183 top-down approaches 57, 59, 173 tourism studies 11, 187 tourist experiences 8, 12, 187–91, 193, 197–9, 203 tourist sites 188–9, 199 tourists, as co-designers 198, 209 TQM (total quality management) 68–71 trade unions 131 transformation: inner 157, 163; urban 175 transition fields 126–8, 135 transition processes 125–7 transition theory 123–5 translation: definition of 113; in clinical pathway design 57–8, 60; deep 117; in design spaces 126; in Latour 12; neutral 117; and production of knowledge 33, 35, 38–9, 41, 114; relational 10, 208; of rules 59–60; sociology of see actornetwork theory (ANT); substance-text 45; and user roles 99 transparency 37, 46, 110, 182–3

trust, as precondition for design 80, 83, 85–8, 92–3 uncertainty 86 unconscious 166 unintended consequences 1, 195, 203 unpredictability 12, 114, 204, 206, 210 urban design 6, 165–6, 172, 174–5, 178, 182–4 urban planning 2, 11–12, 106, 175, 178, 184, 203, 207 urban space, design of see urban design user-driven city 173–4 user involvement 95–6, 101, 173–4, 181 user participation see user involvement user-producer relation 103 users: conceptual status of 95–7; construction of 10, 96, 98–102; as creative device 102–3; knowing 97–8, 105; make-shift 96, 105–7; representation of 96, 102–3, 105–7, 208–9 value traps 153 valve making 41–4 Van Aken, J. E., 50–2, 64, 75 Varvsstaden 172, 178–80, 181, 183–4 Viking Ship Museum 187, 189–99, 195–6, 203 violence, symbolic 100, 107 VMT (Viton moulding tool) 42–3 vulnerability 86 Wallas, G. 166 welfare paradox 112 welfare reforms 110–12 wisdom 156, 158 Wizard of Oz techniques 21 work environment 88–9, 91–2