Off the top of my head, so without any research and as result leaving lots of people out, notes on relations between STS and Design, to help discern the lay of the land

sTechs

STS is diverse, so I’m mainly talking about sociologies of technology development; the Latour of Aramis rather than Laboratory Life, Akrich and Bijker, etc. The ‘research subjects’ in those cases are mostly engineers – mechanical and electrical engineers who don’t really think about technology development as design, or think of design as conflicting constraint management (engineering schools have only recently started teaching ‘design’ in the art school sense, and in most cases this is ‘design thinking’ not designing).

It is always frustrating to me how often those sociologies of technology seem to be talking about design without ever using the word or talking to the designers who were probably involved in the process.

My gossip understanding is that when Latour was asked to keynote the design history conference, he got his understanding of design from Sloterdijk who teaches at an Art and Design School. The paper (Cautious Prometheus) is great, but the suit is many sizes too big for practicing designers. Subsequently, Latour has worked with actual designing designers on visualizing controversies, etc, but I’ve not seen him actually talk of the design process.

Design

Design is diverse, so I’m mainly talking about non-architectural, human-scale artifact. There is strong sTechs work about architecting, such as Yaneva. Human-scale artifacts means for me Product Design, Fashion Design, Communication Design, some Interior Design, Service Design. For non-designers, especially #designthinking types, it is difficult to comprehend how distinct, and even incompatible, are the processes deployed by these designers even though they are all making ‘things’ (even if immaterial) of use.

Another thing non-designers, especially from other disciplines, don’t often get is that human-scale artifact design has been colonized by HCI and interaction design. Because computer science deliberately pursued establishing itself as a science, and so a discipline, with research publications as the primary measure of success, people doing applied research on digital technology development found themselves doing design, but found almost no literature on designing (other than Don Norman’s not so rigorous cog sci) so swamped in defining what ‘research of design’ entailed. The behemoth that is CHI still produces next to nothing of interest to what I call human-scale artifact designers, but google scholar design and you’ll only find CHI stuff.

The reason there is little by way of research in design is that design (on the art school side rather than engineering side) has and continues to be taught by doing. Designers teach design by getting would-be designers to design – in studios. As I tried to say in “Design Studies – What is it Good for?,” Design Studies remains missing from a lot of design teaching. In the US, the liberal arts side of design degree is of and by liberal arts. There is outside the US, some, but still very little, research of design beyond perfunctory design history, taught to designers. Design Studies research, as a sub-discipline, is aspirational at best. There is therefore little chance of Design Studies impacting sTechs when it can’t even impact CHI. A similar thing has happened in the Digital Humanities where Humanities people discovering the power of ‘research through design’ – coming to know through creative information visualisation – for example, start doing (very bad) design without any acknowledgement that there is a whole discipline and profession for doing this well (graphic design, visual communication design, information visualisation design). Anne Burdick has been fighting that good fight.

Design < > sTechs

On the odd occasion I’ve managed to get designers to read Latour, Akrich, Bijker, etc, on technical product development, there is the kind of reaction that says: “der, of course, how can you publish such obvious stuff, oh, I see, academia is always heavily jargonised accounts of the bleeding obvious.” What is puzzling to non-designers, that you can construct things, that you can make real what you make up (Scarry’s nice phrase, I’ll come back to), that you can modify people by modifying the form of their things, that social constructivism can be done, that you might need a whole Latourian manifesto called ‘compositionism,’ is not at all puzzling to designers since it is their everyday practice.

If there were more good case study articulations of designers designing (rather than self-serving picture books), this would make a big difference to sTechs I reckon. Though often also architectural, much of the too-positivist work done by the Design Thinking Research Symposium (nothing to do with #designthinking) should be required reading for sTechs folks: Bryan Lawson, Kees Dorst, Gabriela Goldschmidt, Nigel Cross, etc.

To my mind, the best account of artifact making is that of Elaine Scarry in the final chapter of her _The Body on Pain_. Given that Scarry is a kind of literature philosopher, it is interesting that those who understand the making of fiction are so rarely taken up by Design Studies (though see Yelavich’s book a couple of years ago) or sTechs.

An interesting story in that regard is that Buchanan, who founded the more design cultural studies journal, Design Issues (because Design Studies was already the title of the more cog sci of design journal), came to influence and be influenced by, people in the English Department at CMU, who had a very design-based approach to English: understanding composition as an interaction design task – see Dave Kaufer’s Designing Interactive Worlds With Words: Principles of Writing as Representational Composition.

New Service Design Foundations

An intensive short course designed to give people who have only ever experienced service design as a series of methods a new foundation for approaching the designing of services.

Short Service Design Foundations Aut2021Download

Designs for the Pluriverse Seminar

Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse [Duke University Press, 2018] brings design theories to questions of how to transition to more equitable and sustainable societies. Understanding the ideas Escobar is curating will allow social design practitioners to gain a richer understanding of the problems to which they are responding, and help them take more responsibility for the power of their designing.

Though the book is academic, the seminar is aimed at design practitioners. The aim of the seminar is to help practitioners connect their professional experiences to the concepts Escobar is drawing on and advocating for.  This is a slow reading of the book, and other key texts that Escobar draws on. A focus is explaining why design, especially service and interaction design, should be considered to be ‘ontological.’

Questions that the seminar seeks to answer:

– Why Design now, for a Post-Development Critical Anthropologist?

– What is a Pluriverse (i.e., why is politics ontological)?

– What is Autonomy, within a Relational Ontology?

– What is Autonomy, if Designed (i.e., what is non-heteronomous Design)?

The seminar will involve a one-hour discussion once a week. Cameron Tonkinwise will provide a 30min recorded summary of the readings for each week so that the discussion can be led by participants’ questions. Readings can be sent to any who do not have access.

Week One
1a
Arturo Escobar and his projects: Anthropology and Development
1b
Manfred Max Neef’s Matrix of Human Needs

Week Two
2a
From Anthropology to Design, pp54-62
2b
Design Practice according to Escobar, pp35-48

Week Three
3a
Ontological Design I, extract from Winograd and Flores Understanding Computers and Cognition
3b
Ontological Design II, extract from Spinosa, Flores & Dreyfus Disclosing New Worlds

Week Four
4a
Ontological Design III, Anne-Marie Willis “Ontological Designing”
4b
Ontological Design IV, extract from Tony Fry Design Futuring

Week Five
5
Ontological Design V, pp110-133, 15-19

Week Six
6a
Modern Rational Design, pp81-91
6b
Amodern Relationality, pp92-103

Week Seven
7a
Ontological Politics, pp62-75
7b
Transitions in the North and South, pp140-150

Week Eight
8a
Manzini’s Design for Social Innovation, pp159-164
8b
Transition Design, pp153-8

Week Nine
9a
Ontonomy and Autonomy, pp168-183
9b
Autonomous Design, pp184-199

Week Ten
10a
Decolonizing Transitions, pp205-222

Week Eleven
11
Urban Ontological Transition Design,
Escobar, Arturo “Habitability and Design: Radical Interdependence and the Re-Earthing of Cities” Geoforum, 101 (2019)

Week Twelve
12
Symposium
with Arturo Escobar, Tony Fry, Katherine Gibson-Graham, Ahmed Ansari,
and other

Cynefin Transition Design

The Cynefin Meetup in Melbourne kindly gave me the opportunity to discuss the overlap between Cynefin and Transition Design about a year ago. We streamed the talk to allow others outside of Melbourne to ‘attend’ so there is a low quality recording (it is unfortunately not possible to hear the audience questions and comments).

The gist of the talk is that:

• some misinterpretations of the Cynefin framework either suggest that it is desirable to always dwell in dynamically complex situations, or even that all situations tend to have dynamically complex qualities, in which case it is not possible or desirable to have visions for preferable futures (‘you can’t predict the force, learn to ride the rapids of neoliberal emergence!’)
• if the task is to change our situations into preferable ones rather than merely learn to tolerate our existing situations, we need appropriate forms of vision-based designing as forces for motivating, enabling and even guiding such transitions
• the visions of vision-led designing do always risk being procrustean (in Cynefin-speak, dangerously try to force complicated or even simple initiatives into dynamically complex contexts) so there is an emerging art to designing stories of preferable futures that are not seeing-like-a-state plans but do still have redirective force
• an important part of transitioning is not just the experimentalism (‘safe to fail’) that is fashionable in technovation discourse these days, but timespaces in which to practise modifying material social practices – i.e., living labs to rehearse transitions, entraining new ways of living and working, while also learning about all the adjacent sociotechnical regimes that will have to be also modified to form a more receptive ecosystem for those new practices.

Eulogy for my father

In August 2019, my father died. We only had a small casual gathering after as per his wishes, but I felt the need to say something formal. I am posting it here so that people know something of Geoffrey Theodore Tonkin.

I want to take this opportunity to honour my father by putting him in a historical context. He was significant beyond being a great father to me and my family. He embodied things that we as a society need more of. And we can honour his memory by trying harder to do the kind of things he valued.

In some ways, I am very like my father and I am immensely proud of that. He never got the chance to go university, so he idealized university. I have had the opportunity to work at some of the great universities, and when I fight for the idea of the university (as I am about to have to again – the conservatives have announced that they will now tie university funding to ‘performance,’ the key measure of which will be courses that lead directly to jobs), I think of all my father never got to experience. (One of the saddest moments for me was when, after being retrenched, my father enrolled in an online humanities degree program, only to find that his pleasure in reading fiction was being damaged by the arcane term papers he was asked to write.)

He more than made up for it, as a voracious reader of fiction and non-fiction. I am very not like father in that I have zero craft skills. He was a woodworker, a boat-builder, a book-binder, a rug-maker, a photographer and photographic developer. Everything he knew how to do, he taught himself, by buying and reading a book. As a child it infuriated me that on any topic, especially a practical topic, that I might mention, his refrain would be, ‘I have a book about that downstairs if you like.’ Nevertheless, people often ask me how I ended up in the discipline of design, and the truth is that when I was asked to help teach designers about sustainability, I realized that I needed to know something about design, so I went to Sydney University library and read every book they had in there on design.

While he crafted and especially while he sailed, my father would listen to the radio. The Science Show, the Goons – but mostly classical music. He loved music though I don’t think he ever learned an instrument. Some of my best memories are of incredible symphony concerts he took me to (whenever Mum wasn’t up for the concert, which often meant Mahler, or Shostakovitch, or Messiaen) – and listening to an orchestra perform is now something I strongly associate with my father. He took me once for a father-son trip to the snow, the only time I have ever skied – he must have been thinking we needed some father-son time; I remember another trip to go windsurfing around Lake Macquarie. On the way down to the snowy, we had a cassette of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto on one side and Brahms 2 on the other. At some point, he got booked for speeding and the policeman was mad that he had taken so long to pull over. My father hadn’t heard the siren over the Beethoven.

I remember another time, a school-day breakfast when I got mad at some piece Robinson (?) played on ABC FM; I was complaining about its inane repetitiveness. My father responded, again in a way that infuriated me, ‘well, it’s interesting, even if you do not like it.’ Of course, now I listen to almost nothing but such minimalist music.

As a self-taught reader, widely travelled, my father clearly brought that ‘it’s interesting, even if you do not like it’ attitude to most things. In fact, it clearly went beyond just his aesthetics. It goes to the core of his life values. Though raised in a society of apartheid, he knew it to be wrong, did what he could within his own networks, and then, on the basis of his beliefs, decided he needed to raise his family outside of that system. (Apparently, I, the ‘a bit later accident’ was part of that – being a male who would face conscription – though that coincided, if I remember rightly, with my sisters starting to evidence some indoctrination from school, and the regime beginning to act threateningly toward my father for his views and actions.) My own family moved away from our friends and family for a decade, but we did that of our own choice, always with a sense that we could and would come back. There is an amazing commitment to your values needed to be prepared to uproot. I wish I had that. I think there are plenty of things we now need to have the courage to walk away from, to make sacrifices in order to help stop them, to stop them happening to us and to others.

My father had a fierce sense of justice. I was telling my Mum in the hospital about the dreaded time my father once summonsed me after he had heard me swearing while playing a game with my sisters. He told me that swearing showed that I had a ‘lack of moral fibre,’ and that I needed be more disciplined about behaving in always respectable ways. Last weekend I was thinking about that phrase, ‘lack of moral fibre.’ Wikipedia tells me it was a diagnosis given to pilots who refused to go back into battle during the second world war. Pilots who became fearful or who were pacifist, were diagnosed with the psychological illness of suffering a ‘lack of moral fibre.’ My father must have got the expression from that context, though he did not mean it in that way. He meant that you needed to have the capacity to live visibly by civil values even when it made you stand out.

My father did that by not swearing, by not drinking, by being opposed to racism in a country with instituted systems of apartheid. Those principles gave him moral authority, sufficient to make him a very important figure in some of the systems that preserve our society, like reinsurance. My father’s rectitude suited an era of informal prudential restraint. In the end, his individual value commitments could not withstand the rise of the financially engineering MBAers. He was prematurely sidelined from his field of expertise – remember that because he couldn’t go to university he studied to become the youngest ever Fellow of Chartered Insurers – by greedy youngsters with their global risk algorithms, the very mechanisms that 20 years later would cause the Global Financial Crisis, which in turn have sent the world careering to right-wing authoritarianism.

But there is another quality that my father had, that I wish I had, and that I think we should all strive to have to honour his memory. He was not only self-taught, but self-transformative. When he was young, he decided to change his handwriting. He of course got a book, and practiced, until he had a very beautiful script that was his identifier for the rest of his life. I saw this self-change power much more significantly later in his life.

As a man with strong commitments, he used to be quite quick to anger. His temper would often flare, mostly when trying to deal with my sisters, I being the golden child. At some point, he seemed to make a very conscious decision to stop having a temper. This was well before he was cruelly retrenched, which could have been something to make him very angry. I don’t know how he did it, but he very much changed his personality. This always seemed to me one of his most amazing feats, one that shows that he was a man of strong values, so strong that he could change himself to be a better version of those values. I want to be like that. I want to have that capacity to change myself. We need people to be like that, to be a better society, a more sustainable society, one worthy of people like my Dad.

 

 

 

Interviewing Cliches

I received an email out of the blue with interview questions for http://www.artshub.com.au/. Late one Saturday night I composed some quick responses, but as I proceeded got increasingly annoyed. The published version removed the tenor of my frustration so that  the outcome was more palatable clickbait for this sad job market sustaining the worst marginalized version of ‘the arts’ (i.e., ‘cultural value,’ ‘community,’ ‘lite provocation’). So, in full:

– Why is it important that students receive a broad education in design and media arts, rather than focussing on one particular discipline?

Design is the process of materialising preferred futures. Materialising futures does not just mean making this or that new thing. It means changing the way people live, opening up a new world. Any design worthy of the name transitions a range of everyday practices into new ways of living and working. This will always be a complicated process that involves convincing a range of people that resources – whether investors’ money, suppliers’ natural materials, users’ time and attention, etc –  should be redirected into materialising that future in an enduring way. Any act of design therefore involves multiple kinds of persuading and making.  Any creative practitioner who only knows one particular discipline will only ever be acting in service of other people’s visions for the future.

– As the cultural and media landscape is changing, how do the UNSW design and media arts degrees prepare students for a workforce with increasing automation and digitisation?

For most people in the global consumer class, digitisation has already happened and automation will not happen, at least not in the ways we are currently scaremongering.

I take digitisation to mean the process by which almost all everyday practices are mediated through data-manipulating devices. Digitisation means that no thing is any longer just what it is. A screen can be a keypad, and a motion detector, and a healthy living disciplinarian. This morphability in things is something that UNSW Art and Design graduates, skilled in creative practices and media arts, understand expertly, as producers, persuaders and deciders. That same screen is also part of business models that depend on gathering locational data and on-selling it. How to live appropriately in that world of surveillance capitalism is not something that UNSW design and media arts degree programs prepare students for. No degree anywhere is currently adequate to that challenge. The kind of graduates who are adequate to that challenge will be the kind of graduates who find the agency to say to certain tech developments, like the version of automation we are currently being sold, ‘No, I would prefer not to.’

Many processes are being automated, as they have for the last century, but the current hype exaggerates the capacity for robots to perform many of the activities that we humans value. Fuller levels of automation will only happen if our societies conform to lowered expectations for more regularised ways of living. Fully autonomous vehicles for instance need less variable roads – i.e., excluded pedestrians and cyclists. UNSW Art and Design graduates are the kinds of people who prize variety in human society. They will be the ones who reassert the value of living in non-automated worlds, rich in creative practices.

– There is a perception of teaching that suggest “those who can’t do, teach”. Do you think this oversimplifies or undervalues the role of creative educators in Australia? 

This offensive cliche forgets that those who do were at some point taught. This offensive cliche ignorantly thinks teaching is not a (creative) doing. This offensive cliche has no understanding of expertise – that it is precisely a moment at which you able to articulate your own practice sufficiently to also then relearn it. This offensive cliche knows nothing of the history of apprenticeship, the history of the university, the history of social change, the nature of post-natural evolution. This offensive cliche celebrates a blind commercialist doing that is grinding this planet into violent inequality and uninhabitable depletion.

Personal Constraints on Design-led Change

A quick, incomplete note: As of January 2017, I will be relocating back to Sydney, Australia to take up the position of full Professor of Design at UNSWAD.

The move is primarily personal – ailing parents are deserving some close care. For me, this has been an untimely reminder that the capacity to make change in the world is always a contextual privilege. It is a truism, but without good health, or the good health of those around you – upon whom you depend and who depend on you – you cannot try to transform a profession and discipline like design toward more responsible futures. Or to put it the other way around, minimizing societal infrastructures for health care is a great way to limit people’s capacity to change that society, like for instance, improving health care systems – catabolic iatrogensis perhaps.

The work I have been doing on Transition Design with Terry Irwin, Gideon Kossoff and others foregrounds the disposition of the change-maker in systems-level change processes, what we have been calling ‘Mindset and Posture.’ But our focus so far has been on the voluntaristic aspects of that disposition, not the systems that in term make space for voluntarism at all. So I am now personally being forced to think through the more constraints side of ‘Transition Design.’

After nearly a decade away, I am excited to be getting back to a land, and especially a coast (since us invading colonialists mostly cling to the coastal fringes of that ancient country), for which I have only recently realized how much I have ‘Nostalghia.’ However, in my and my family’s time away, Australia has adopted a fair amount of US- (and now UK- and Euro-)style politics that I am not looking forward to: xenophobia and climate denial are mainstream, and pro-gun libertarianism and religious fundamentalism have noisy elected representatives.

I am joining a very large university that is justifiably proud of its world-ranking, but at a time when higher education policy is doubling-down on neoliberalism. There is for instance a beautiful catch-22 impending: government university funding will reward research activity, something that is measured only by the amount of research funding won (no longer for instance, publications – conferences were removed a while ago). I took a position in the US at the start of 2008 in part to escape the malaise of ‘middle-career research status’ in Australia which forces academics to work on other people’s funded research projects until you have enough track record to be a Principle Investigator in your own right. It was a real privilege – resourced by inequitable tuition-based universities in the US – for me to spend the last 9 years in a system designed around time – the Summer – rather than money. And it was a real privilege to be at universities that not only allowed, but promoted, the academic freedom to pursue critical research agendas. This is what has allowed me to produce a wide-range of speculative articles that have in the end fostered the new approach to sustainable and social design that is Transition Design.

My family circumstances have interrupted the special work that we have been doing at CMU School of Design. Since Terry Irwin brought me over to Pittsburgh, new curricula from undergraduate to doctoral have been introduced, but the first undergraduates to have experienced all 4 years will only graduate in May 2018, as will the first candidates in the restructured PhD program. UNSWAD has distinctively interdisciplinary design degree programs and a strong transdisciplinary PhD program, and the wider UNSW has a clear commitment (a 2025 Vision) to bringing a next generation of Design Thinking to all disciplines across the university. I am excited by these opportunities. As Transition Design is now a widely recognized idea, with other institutions joining the process of elaborating this approach to design-research-led structural change, I will build out a Transition Design applied research unit at UNSWAD. Formal partnerships between CMU School of Design and UNSWAD will see me returning to teach intensives at CMU in the first half of each Spring semester starting in 2018. I will continue advising CMU Design PhD candidates online and attending annual progress reviews.

But I am also disappointed that there are things that remain incomplete at CMU School of Design. For instance, the restructure of the CMU Design PhD and our new DDes program aimed at fostering Practice-based Design Research in North America. Before we can graduate candidates, it looks like a North American chapter of the Design Research Society will be established. From my limited exposure to this initiative, it looks to be committed to an unsustainable pluralism at best, and to the colonization of design research by HCI’s pursuit of funded research at worst. I wish I were remaining at CMU to help assert a strong alternative of social and sustainable, practice-led, critical design research.

There is much else to say, about what remains to be done, and about what will now have to be done in and from Australia and via partnerships. So, I will of course persist with my ‘fist shaking at clouds’ tweeting from the other side of the planet in 2017. For all of you in the North Atlantic, my vitriol for the way the techonomy is perverting design’s capacity to take responsibility for societal sustainability will now only be occurring at the Trump hour of the night. For those of you on the West Coast of the US, most of you have blocked me already, so no matter.

Some other ‘Near Future’ questions

The Near Future Laboratory has an FAQ which reminded me that exactly a year ago Julian Bleecker emailed me a preview of their Catalog to get my response. I wrote a typically grumpy reply that asks some questions not included in their FAQ:

TBD Response

This I Believe [given the (social media) fiction of an ‘I’]

Answer 1

The ‘projects’ I ‘like’ are almost always non-design.

> I am most enamored of beautifully formulated ideas (anything by Jean-Luc Nancy, Elaine Scarry or Francois Jullien, most of Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigary, Vilem Flusser and Donna Haraway, etc)

> I spend most of my money on music (contemporary classical, post-classical, minimalist, post-minimalist – anything by John Adams and Heiner Goebbels, most of Bang on a Can, Michael Nyman and Louis Andriessen, Simeon Ten Holt and Oliver Knussen, etc)

> I used to love cinema (anything by Andrej Tarkovsky and Peter Greenaway, much of Atom Egoyan, Lars von Trier and Tsai Ming-Liang, etc)

> I did some theater once (Bertolt Brecht, Howard Barker, etc)

> I have a pretentious but not that well-informed love of espresso-based coffees, but this may be a form of ex-pat nostalgia (e.g., to find good coffee when traveling, Google ‘Australian Baristas in [where you are]’)

 

Answer 2

I value critique. I think nearly all criticism – as opposed to abuse, belittling, or dismissal (though the line is blurred and I do often cross it when moving too quickly) – is constructive. Design happens, and is taught, via negativa because it is not possible to say beforehand what will be a preferable, useful, future satisficer. It is true that designers can and should criticize by offering alternatives. But it is also necessary to be critical before, in order to movitate, thinking of an alternative. Designing could benefit from being more articulate in its critiquing.

More generally, I believe that the world is losing the capacity to think critically, and that North America in particular is allergic to criticism – as opposed to partisanship. I like to think that a pedagogic aspect of my social media persona is modeling a critical reception of effervescent content. I think false optimism is more dangerous than wearisome pessimism. Liking – over and above how confused this interaction is in advertising-aggregating-centric social media – strikes me as mostly unreflective. For social media to attain Kantian cosmopolitanism, what is shared must be judgments. In this schema, ‘liking’ would not be a contagiously enthused affect, but an analysis of what is pleasurable in some ‘thing’ – which entails also discerning what is not pleasurable or well-done in that ‘thing.’ Critical ‘liking’?

   

Answer 3

The internet is subsidized by and structured by advertising for unsustainable business-as-usual. The social value of the internet (‘more of the planet’s population are connected to each other than ever before!’) is everyday undermined by attempts to monetize that sociality. To paraphrase Lacan, algorithms know no negative – or, at least, they are still very bad at picking them up: a link or product mention is a data point whether or not it is preceded by a negative sentiment, especially if expressed in ways just a little bit more sophisticated than ‘I hate X.’ (I gave a confused talk in this area once.) But real people reading internet content should be able to understand the qualification. So being critical about content is a way of having conversations with people that in some ways are unreadable, or get misread, by the commercializing machines (though also the idiots at the NSA – if I were to say ‘if only terrorists managed to terrorize the elites ’ will I suffer rendition because a computer missed the quotation marks?)

   

Answer 4

Am I bad person for not liking anything? Are my judgments invalid if they are all negative? Why must I be for something rather than against everything (so far – still waiting)? Is this a social norm (‘it uncivil to be so negative – you put yourself above everybody else you criticize’) or an instrumentalist one (‘you must be practicable – it is wasteful to not have a positive practice – at least identify what kind of thing you would do even if you can’t actually do it’)? I would prefer not to.

   

Answer 5

http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977

 

Answer 6

Design projects I like to tend to be:

1. not new – they were well done so we live them habitually because they are our habitats. Good designs withdraw behind the valuable practices they enable. They do not need to be redesigned. Enough already.
2. over time – they are not discrete products or events but a series of strategic design moves fostering social learning leading to structural econo-technical regime transitions – see https://www.facebook.com/transitiondesigncmu
3. service systems – they are processes, mostly complex and rarely static, something between Charles Spinosa and Fernando Flores’ Disclosing New Worlds and Shoshana Zuboff’s Support Economy (though both those texts are uncritically capitalistic).

 

Answer 7

I committed my life to Theory and then academia went violently Post-Theory. I backed the Sharing Economy and then it became a force for neoliberal evil at the hands of the Paypal Mafia and their Wall Street extortionists. So I have decided to keep my hopes and pleasures private from now on

some notes on Transition Design

CMU School of Design has started developing the notion of ‘Transition Design.’ A model has been developed (by Terry Irwin, Gideon Kosoff and I) that proposes the interrelation of Visions for Transition, Theories of Change, Posture and Mindset, New Ways of Designing. The following are draft notes on the first two.

Visions for Transition

When at A, you need a vision of B to motivate you to move. You might only get to C, but from C, you can see ‘around a corner’ as it were, to other possible futures D and E. With this idea of ‘seeing around corners’ you avoid the fact that B is never going to be that visionary because it is always going to be the product of worldview at A.

In sum:
1) we don’t do enough of visioning (nor forecasting)

2) when we do do visioning, it is mostly done badly (e.g., horrible architectural ‘artist’s impression’ photoshops), in ways that don’t inspire desire. (What we need is vis.comm design meets media design to create high fidelity futures that can compete with marketing’s visions, or cinema’s dystopias.)

3) when we do do visioning well, there is the converse danger that we are just projecting forward as desirable an idealized version of the current world-view (this is my worry that pictures of ‘cosmopolitan localism’ often look like ‘new urbanism’s slightly denser, and still very white, suburbia).

4) consequently, visioning should be self-consciously situational: B is desirable from A, but on the way to B,
you can glimpse D or E from C as more desirable than B.

Theories of Change

1) Despite design being defined by Herb Simon as intentional change to preferred states, or by Alain Findeli as transforming state A into state B, most designers do not see themselves as agents of (social) change. They see themselves as

• quality improvers: taking current situations/technologies and making them better (functionally and/or aesthetically)
  or
• problem-solvers: creating a communication/product/environment that better enable people to accomplish tasks within existing infrastructures/businesses

2) If designers do see themselves as change agents, it is often with only-ever-assumed rationales for how change will happen. For example:

• ordinary people, and especially business, policy or scientistic people, cannot see the outside-the-box short-circuit change possibilities that creatives like designers can
• since awareness is more than half the problem of change, designers with their skills in making the complex simple, and information affecting, can accelerate awareness-based change
• if it is sexy enough, people will buy it and so be changed
• technology is the answer, it’s just that people cannot take it up because it is not user-friendly enough

3) The field of social design, especially when following ‘research-based design methods,’ often has more articulated rationales for how what designers do enable change. The design process has a commitment to immersive qualitative research, even to the extent of participatory designing, that can empower people in change-making.

4) To be serious about change, as is the ambition of ‘transition design,’ designers need to have deep, well-articulated and applied understandings about how change happens. Transition Designers should always be able articulate the ‘Theory of Change’ that is warranting their interventions.

5) A ‘Theory of Change’ is a model of the system in which design interventions are taking place. It identifies key components and the relations between those components, as well as other systems that may lie alongside the focus system, or systems within which the focus system resides. The model allows responsible predictions about how interventions will change that system –  and those changes could involve the emergence of new components, relations, and contiguous or nested systems. A Theory of Change is never fixed or complete, but always being modified by what is learned about the system being modeled by error-friendly, more-or-less-reversible interventions into that system.

6) There are a range of sources of Theories of Change with which Transition Designers are familiar and from which they generate their design-orienting models:

• living systems
  especially principles of emergence and transitions in ecosystems, but also ideas about co-evolution, parasitism, virality and migration. Where the former is the slow result of chaos, the latter can be rapid when conditions of resilience finally tip into a series of changes that cascade chaotically through a system.
• socio-technical systems
  especially ‘Transition Management Theory’s principles of multi-level, multi-stage change. The multiple levels comprise: larger-scale path-dependent infrastructures and ideologies at the macro level, everyday practices – socially hegemonic, routinized constellations of devices, skills and meanings – at the meso level, and niche sites of experimentation at the micro level. Transition Theory, drawing on Sociology of Technology Studies and Diffusion of Innovation research, holds that change requires the staged convergence of a fracturing at the macro level, experiments with new devices at the micro level, and the redesign of practices at the meso level to develop the changed socially cohesive skills and meanings that could take up those experimental devices within new macro contexts.
• social systems
  especially all that is known the political history of community organizing and social learning.
• personal systems
  especially all that is known about the (social) psychology of behavior change and the managing of life-stage and health transitions (link to Posture and Mindset)

7) The Theories of Change of Transition Designers are necessarily design-centric. They privilege designerly aspects of change that are invariably missing from non-design, humanities and social science based models of change:

• – sense-making, making-visible-the-invisible and visioning-the-future (link back to Visioning)
• – materiality and usefulness (link forward to New Design Practices)

In other words, designerly Theories of Change see that what is missing from many existing Theories of Change is attention to the role of designed artifacts (communications, products, environments). In terms of ‘socio-technical systems’ above, designed artifacts materialize the macro, bind the meso, and so must be the site of experimentation at the micro.