Designing for Debate (Ph.D. thesis) (2024)

Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference - Volume 2, August 20–24, 2018, Hasselt and Genk, Belgium, 2018

In this paper, we join those in the field of Participatory Design (PD) that have become inspired by the “ontological turn” as captured in the proliferating discussions around relationality, becoming, and nonhuman agency. The paper offers an account from a PD case where a social media platform was designed with and by professionals for their collaboration around the topic of workplace bullying and harassment. Through this account, this paper reimagines PD in a “posthuman landscape” and explores how this ontological turn forces—and/or enables—a rethinking of ethics and politics in PD. In a timely conference which asks for scrutinizing the ways that the political heritage of democracy, participation, and equality can be enacted in the diverse terrains of PD, our short paper proposes the “politics of mattering” as a way of accounting for the design process as an always-relational becoming and its practices as already-political.

16th Participatory Design Conference, 2020

This paper presents an in progress PhD project interested in understand how activism strategies may rupture, by recursive and radical movements, the processuality of design. Argumentation of how necessary is to take this path if design wants to escape from the tentacles of a capitalocentric view, it is briefly presented a theoretical exploration around participatory design, design activism and concepts from sociotechnical studies. Inspired by grounded theory, it is presented the first fields of investigation (Vozes pela Ciência and Artedesignativismo) as spaces a) to identify activism strategies in self-declared agonistic spaces and b) to experiment practices of radicalism ruptures that (de)stabilize when, through a process of negotiation, they invariably gets friendly and flatten controversies. Also, the author presents advances to Participatory Design in 1) reestablishing potentiality to design plural modes of existence and 2) contributing to a strategic discussion beyond modernist narratives, propositioning others conceptions and understandings for the area.

Since the 1970s the sustainability movement has called on designers to address the ecological impact of the products they design. This reappraisal has led to a growing awareness amongst designers of the potential for design to engage in discourses concerned with global issues such resource depletion, large scale population movement, labour exploitation, threats to food and water sources, as well as more recently climate change. Some of the more prominent practices to emerge out of these debates have been political in nature. Guy Julier describes this renewed interest in politics as 'design activism.' Design activism is a meta-­‐discipline that has the capacity to transform the world by reshaping individual, social, and economic behaviour. One of the central tenets behind this heterogeneous movement is the certainty that people and objects actually inhabit complex relational assemblages that constitute particular environments and in themselves have designing agency. This is in direct contrast to earlier approaches such as eco design that remained largely subject-­‐centric, applying ever more sophisticated technologies that would lead to a reduction in the consumption of materials and energy. In recent times design has taken up a more critical and interrogatory whole-­‐systems approach to humans, materials and immaterial things. In this paper, we suggest that design can open up new forms of political representation and engagement, with a view to challenging dominant frameworks (habitus) that proliferate unsustainable practices. We will specifically draw on three case studies from Australia: 1) The Urmadic University 2) Natalie Jeremijenko and 3) Second Road to engage with future imaginings that adapt and mitigate potential possibilities through design. More specifically we have understood design activism as a political set of actions that materially and symbolically embody opportunities for change. These examples give rise to a multiplicity of affects, which include the emergence of new publics dedicated to critical and creative social imaginings; the creation of future scenarios that redistribute agency across non-­‐human things and recast the place of humans within ecological systems; and the co-­‐creation of new frameworks for equitable, transparent decision making within shared communities of interest.

METU JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, 2016

Practicable. From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art. MIT Press, Leonardo Book Series, 2016

Design Philosophy Papers, 2003

Architecture and Behavior Magazine

History is not neutral. It is the site of a power struggle between competing social and cultural groups who wish to see their own version of historical events become the accepted everyday version, the better to validate their own position in the hierarchy of social relationships we call society. This essay is largely about the recent history of design theory, and places the events that have happened since the 1960's into a social, political, economic and ideological context. This for several reasons. First, it is a history that has never been told from quite this point of view - a point of view which critically apprehends the education of professional designers and the role they inadvertently play in practice to support asymmetrical relationships of power and resource distribution. But there is another reason for writing this history. I hope to clarify some of the misunderstandings and misconceptions which have recently developed within design theory itself. Postmodernism is either embraced or vilified by members of the design community, but few seem to be fully aware of its deeper ideological significance and emancipatory potential. The meaning and social role of design have been contested since distinctions were first made between architecture and building, between art and craft, between design and manufacture. These distinctions express a struggle which continues down to the present to shape the thing we call "design" and express deeper social distinctions which operate on the basis of class, gender and ethnicity. The design disciplines have historically enjoyed the privilege of a social distinction which allowed them special status within the wider field of social relations mediated by the division of labour. They particularly enjoy the mythology that they contribute to the overall public good by virtue of their "purity" with respect to politics and ideology. This mythology is reinforced by recent theories of postmodernism which are prevalent in design practice, which express an essentially conservative ideology which seeks to sustain existing social hierarchies. In architecture for instance, postmodern design theorists have developed structures of understanding which reinstate design practice as a depoliticized sub-category of fine art production, which takes as its sine qua non the building-as-beautiful-object, founded upon what are reputed to be universally accepted aesthetic norms. In so doing they have at the same time divorced form from its social, cultural and political roots, and have presented it as a value free commodity, the embodiment of the postmodern conception of the "free-floating-signifier" to be bartered and traded in an ever-escalating attempt to transform the use value of buildings into the exchange value of speculative, designed environment. In this process, notions of how the shaping of the built environment might reflect and reproduce asymmetrical arrangements of power which benefit these theorists themselves have been entirely elided from the theoretical discourse. These theories are paradoxically represented as value-free, while at the same time their ideological roots have been masked in logical mystifications which inhibit critical interrogation. They have played a crucial part in bringing about the abandonment of scientific rationality as a mediating factor of architectural design, and their ideology now stands as the dominant belief system to a whole new generation of design students. Yet postmodern theory has been applied in the design disciplines in a partial and selective manner calculated to prescribe the ways in which the professional designer might operate as a public intellectual. Its proponents in the design professions seek to preserve a sacrosanct domain of professional expertise, based upon normative theories of aesthetics, through which the designer might exercise control over what stands for quality in the built environment.At the same time that this has been happening in architecture proper, a similar process has been occurring in the domain of Environmental Design. Environmental Design (as embodied in organizations such as the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), together with its Australasian and European affiliates (PAPER and IAPS) was originally conceived around the need to ground design in a rational methodology, and to eliminate the apparent arbitrariness of formalism. While not denying the legitimacy of formalism per se, Environmental Design has been viewed as a rationalist supplement to traditional conceptions of design, seeking the integration of Environment/Behavior information systems into the everyday knowledge base of the design professions. This model has worked with reasonable efficiency until recently, when, with the advent of Postmodernism and Deconstructivism in design, a new form of radical expressionism appeared, undermining the veracity of all forms of rationalism save those dedicated to the ethic of efficiency, performativity and maximum short term economic return. In response to this tendency, many environmental designers have themselves repudiated the principles of Postmodernism seeing it as the affirmation of irrationality in the designed world (Harris and Lipman, 1989, 68).In what follows, I will show how and why postmodernism has been conservatively taken up by designers, and will suggest an alternative model of the designer as public intellectual. This model will move beyond the selectivity and partiality of existing postmodern theories of design, and will take seriously many of the precepts of postmodern philosophy to re-insert the social and political into the theoretical discourse of design practice, design education and environmental design research. 2. WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?Most recent critical authors (Debord, 1968; Bell, 1973; Mandel, 1975; Lyotard, 1984; Harvey, 1989) agree that the last twenty years have ushered in a set of unique social, cultural, industrial and political circ*mstances commonly called "postmodern". This is variously understood to imply a radical departure from what is termed Modernism, which is itself taken to be an aspect of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment Project - the application of instrumental rationality to the social world, ushered in by the industrial revolution, and transforming permanently the pre-industrial feudal society which had dominated life for the preceding two thousand years. According to Enlightenment philosophers, rationalism was to liberate humankind from the servitude of inherited privilege, and to ensure that resources were socially distributed according to individual ability (Ward, 1991). Postmodern critics maintain that any social emancipation has been at the cost of a decrease in the quality of life brought about by precisely that modernist rationality which promised freedom. The "progress" normally associated with Modernism and science is partial. Hayter (1982, 16-17) notes that a very large proportion of the world's population is significantly worse off now than before the Enlightenment with 16% of the population receiving 63% of the world's income, and the rest doomed to dependency. At the same time, within the industrial nations, the number of middle income earners is contracting, with a minority moving up the economic ladder and the vast majority moving down. (Parenti, 1988, 10-11; Harrington, 1984, 149) Furthermore, the situation is getting progressively worse, and this is true both nationally, as well as internationally. Modernism, with its scientific rationality has, according to writers like Lyotard, acted as a kind of cultural imperialism for which "progress" operates as a code word for oppression. One of the significant aspects of Postmodernism, then, is relationship to this process. Modernism in design has a rather different meaning, usually being applied to a style of building which occurred during that period following the Russian revolution of 1917 and including as its primary influence the work in the 1920's and 1930's emanating from the Bauhaus (Blake, 1974). Postmodernism, in this more restricted sense is seen as a repudiation of many of the principles of this style, and the ideology which produced it (centralized socialist programs, factory housing production, an abandonment of ornament, etc). Wolfe, along with others notes that the high ideals of architectural Modernism, based originally upon the principle of universal worker housing have been an abysmal failure. (Wolfe 1981; Jencks, 1984, 1987; Venturi, 1977), and other postmodern design theorists have suggested that Modernism, with its emphasis upon principles of universal emancipation, is dead. Jencks, particularly, has rather dramatically pin-pointed the death of Modernism , "at 3.32 p.m. on the 15th July 1972" when the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri (a prize-winning design based upon Corbusian principles) was demolished as unliv¬able. In fact, the failure of Pruitt-Igoe has been recently shown to result not from design deficiencies arising from modernist principles, so much as from a dearth of capital financing, and a severe cutback of the maintenance programs of the St. Louis Housing Authority (Bristol, 1991, 163). For Jencks and Venturi, Postmodernism is a new formal style of architecture in which playfulness, and ornament have been reinstated. The style is characterized by a separation of form from content and by giving preference to the former over the latter. It is characteristic of such critics that they perceive the built environment as stripped of its social, political and economic reality, and see its social failure as a failure of form

Doctor of Philosophy - Thesis, 2020

This is a theory-based research which I intend to be a contribution to all practice of design that are, in one way or another, concerned with the question of democracy.Building on the critical accounts raised by scholars within the field of design for ‘making publics’ I propose, in this work, a departure from the thinking of John Dewey and an exploration into another strand of thought, that also investigates the link between democracy and social creativity, and which is based on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis.Dewey and Castoriadis moved from very similar concerns but the two thinkers also differed on key points, and the main difference between their two strands of thought could be found in the fact that whilst Dewey attempted to ‘socialise the political’, Castoriadis aim was rather to ‘politicise the social’. I open this monograph articulating the reasons for design practitioners and scholars to look into the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and I continue in my writing to describe what I have learnt by exploring how and if design has a role to play - through its repertoire of creative tactics – in order to advance creative democracy as an everyday practice. I will describe the issues I encountered in my two field-works within the area of design for mental health and I will articulate what I discovered about the limitations of current conceptions of creativity, as elaborated and practiced within neo-liberal modes of design practices.Through this work I will advance as my main contribution to knowledge a proposal for a renovated mode of design, which I have called ‘Design for the Radical Imagination’ and which has - as its main ambition - the creation and the nurturing of a collective subject that can interpret and change the world politically.

Journal of Urban Design, 2017

This paper examines the role of representation in mediating contentious developments. To the extent that contentions over form may arise from concerns about future development, design-based communication may minimize conflict. This paper argues the design process itself is mediation. Design arguments entail a rhetoricalact since all arguments require rhetorical postures. From discourse analyses of three twenty-plus-year-old and two contemporary Southern Californian developments that include interpretation of compositional contents of graphic representations, this paper posits the rhetorical purpose of design representations and how their styles, modes and technologies were utilized to mediate developmentdisputes presented in these case studies.

Libro de Actas - Systems & Design: Beyond Processes and Thinking (IFDP - SD2016), 2016

Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference on - PDC '10, 2010

The paper addresses the role of the designer in navigating through politics and power dynamics that can potentially hinder ways in which people have input into a design process. It acknowledges that such obstacles are common to design practices and much is already documented in organisational, business and management frameworks (Best, 2006, p. 97; Jones, 2003). However, the paper draws on the author’s doctoral research that explored how designers work within the complexities of politics and power dynamics and the agency they bring when working within such contexts. Firstly, the paper clarifies its use of the word politics by distinguishing between the Political choices that designers make, to the embedded politics of power dynamics and hidden agendas. It acknowledges how the Political content and intention of design is widely discussed in communication design literature where designers have created political content toward a purposeful political outcome. The paper therefore focuses more on another political aspect to communication design practice that relates to values, relationships and power dynamics. These human aspects of practice are complex, ‘messy’ and are often implicit. The power dynamics within projects can significantly influence the way stakeholders have input into the design process and subsequent project outcome. The politics of the individual, organisation, community or the society can often abruptly and unexpectedly surface through designing. Based on several interviews with a variety of communication design practitioners and project case studies from the author’s research, the paper highlights a role that designers can potentially play in addressing the ‘messy’ politics that can manifest through design projects. The research explored various design interventions to enable a variety of people with different values, opinions and viewpoints within a design project to collectively negotiate them through dialogue. It has discovered that such design interventions can be instrumental in facilitating the dialogic process amongst stakeholders to illuminate differences in values or hidden agendas. The paper proposes that the role of the designer, then, is to facilitate this dialogic process through design interventions to enrich the experience of dialogue and exchange amongst project stakeholders.

What role does participation take when engaging the public in communication design projects? What considerations and capacities in the communication design process and practice are required to enable participation? These questions are considered in this paper through critically reflecting on a project entitled Fashion City, which explored engaging the public as co-author of the communication content. The unexpected and confronting outcomes of the project provided valuable insights into designing for participation. The paper summarises three of the key lessons learned during the project that revolved around issues of releasing control and de-centralising the designer and the outcome of design. Following the understandings arising from the project, a ‘scaffold’ model is proposed. This scaffold can act as a framework that respects the individual’s agency and their participation as well as their rights to choose to ignore or interact, engage or disengage in a ‘conversation’ initiated through design. These scaffolds may be risky and unconventional to normative commercial processes, however, it is argued that they can lead to generative situations of uncertainty and indeterminacy to occur, enabling the discovery of new concepts, knowledge and practices in communication design.

Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Design at FAUL - Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon, 2020

This thesis is an exploratory study of moves and movements of the design discipline towards social and activist critical practices. It departs from a growing concern for design as a socially committed activity that has been around since the 1960s. The social turn, as we describe it, was a historical plea for designers to expand the nature and complexity of the problems addressed by design, moreover, to involve the users and stakeholders in designing processes. Turning to work with different sectors and diverse publics, the ‘social design’ movement emerged in opposition to the industrial and the commercial paradigms. As participatory and co-design approaches spread to general practice and for all kinds of purposes, social design became increasingly seen as a culture to represent a wider historical actualisation of the discipline. Still, in recent years, authors point to the difficulties of becoming socially engaged. Although literature on the ‘how of’ collaboration abounds i.e. the motivations, structure and techniques to involve others in design processes; it appears co-design entails ambiguous practices where designers often find themselves without a discipline. Struggles to craft a role for design in initiatives coordinated by networks of communities and institutions too often has led to actions imported from other fields hence the end of design.Coming from a background in graphic design, taking steps to become a social designer, we experienced how difficult it is to do away with the discipline. Specific gestures, actions and products in our social engagements that destabilized the visual communication design process also revealed visual communication design practiced in unknown or unexpected ways. Shifting the perspective to consider, beyond destabilization, it is indiscipline that happens to design in the encounter with others we articulated the question: what if choosing to become social is not to lose the discipline? This matter is worth to research because while social design became known for its risky participatory moves, some authors point to shifts in the politics of designing that have not yet been clarified. Through a mixed methodology based on action research and grounded theory we devised case studies to better describe, explain and explore, from a performative perspective and deeper anthropological stance, all that happens in co-design beyond exclusive attention to the design expert. While disclosing different social form-acts of social interaction within design, four images of indiscipline emerged. 1) IT’S ABOUT THE HOW, 2) DESIGN IS THE SITUATION, 3) BEGININGS NOT ENDS, and 4) DESIGN IS A LIVING THING, all point to different sides of the performative and politics turn that happens to design when it becomes social.Addressing the lack of discourse that does not treat the social as a irreducible complexity, this thesis develops a theory of design that reclaims the encounter with others as the space and possibility to grow the discipline in ways that even unexpected may also be radically social. The main conclusion is that indiscipline is not anti-design but an expansion of design possibilities in the encounter with others, which not yet seen or made visible can potentially represent moves from conventional practices towards critical socially engaged designing. Recommendations for future research are to expand the inventive and pedagogic potentials of indiscipline as a concept to understand the social turn and to practice becoming socially engaged in ways that are deemed better for others and ourselves. Another opening is to understand how indiscipline may be articulated in design education how and when students may be ready for design practice to become a more living thing.

Academic Design Management Conference ADMC18, 2018

Cyberspace is global; it allows for an unimaginable number of actors and interactions. The internet can be a place for creativity, fun and community, yet it is also a vehicle for criminal and damaging behaviour. It is, therefore, not surprising that on topics of cybercrime there are many stakeholders with contrasting perspectives. If, in a design-led approach to wicked problems, it is vital to involve people from diverse backgrounds, it is important to consider how to make the process of generating ideas based on frames accessible to them. A collaboration with a regional law enforcement agency provided the context for research into participatory design approaches that considered the question: what design-led approach and resources construct and present critical human conflicts as creative stimulus for participatory design events? This paper explores the challenges, limitations and value of a 'Creative Tensions' device that aimed to help participants develop solutions by offering 'frames' that they can 'look through', that may well deviate from their own experiences. Using a set of semi-structured interviews, this research presents an analysis of the device (its production, context and use) detailing practical steps and resources that support the development and use of frames in a multidisciplinary multi-stakeholder participatory design event. This abstract includes 202 words.

REVISTA DISEÑA, 2017

What has design to do with politics? The usual answer would be: nothing. At first glimpse, politics would be a realm indifferent and alien to design. While politics must deal with the governing of human interests for the sake of common good, design, instead, would be focused on form, the aesthetic and functional arrangement of the things that populate the world. The realm of the political would be populated by norms and values (liberty, tolerance, etc.), founding its duties on what Weber called 'the legitimate use of force' (Weber, 1944). The field of design, on its part, would respond to the rule of the needs of the user, focusing its forces on transforming, creatively and sensitively, the materialities into useful, usable or decorative products. It is precisely the separation between politics and design, deeply rooted in the thought and action of the latter, which this dossier attempts to thematise and problematise.

Societies, 2022

Controversies are an inseparable part of social systems which, if constructed properly, can create a unique condition for higher-order learning. In addition, design inquiry, as a process of thought and planning, is also a constructive process. This provokes the question of how to construct controversies from a designerly perspective in order to steer higher-order learning. This paper presents a theoretical contribution to the field of social system design by providing the first insights into design intervention to facilitate a network of allied construction. Through a systematic review of the concept of conflict and disagreement, the link between controversies and knowledge transmission is examined in order to highlight the benefit of controversies in a constructive way. Next to that, the essential steps for constructing a network of allies are proposed. These steps are compared with specific aspects of design in order to unfold the advantages of design for network construction. Finally, the paper wraps up with concluding remarks about the necessity of having a bridging step from theory to action in order to facilitate the construction of controversies in a real-life context.