Month: February 2023

I liked a passage in a Kees Dorst paper on “academic design” so much, I turned it into a little diagram.

Note that these tensions are independent of each other. The diagram does not imply two “sides” of design. At any given moment, a design activity can be plotted on each axis independently. This is also not an exhaustive list of tensions. Finally, Dorst claims these tensions are irreconcilable.

The original passage:

Contemporary developments in design can be described and understood in much the same way. The professional field that we so easily label ‘design’ is complex, and full of inner contradictions. These inner tensions feed the discussions in the field. To name a few: (1) the objectives of design and the motivation of designers can range from commercial success to the common good. (2) The role and position of the designer can be as an autonomous creator, or as a problem solver in-service to the client. (3) The drive of the designer can be idealistic, or it can be more pragmatic (4) The resulting design can be a ‘thing’, but also immaterial (5) The basis for the process of designing can be intuitive, or based on knowledge and research… Etcetera… The development of the design disciplines can be traced along these lines of tension – with designers in different environments and times changing position relative to these fundamental paradoxes, but never resolving them. Ultimately, the real strength and coherence of design as a field of professions comes from recognizing these contradictions, and the dynamics of the field is a result of continuous experimentation along the rifts defined by them. Rather than a common set of practices and skills that designers might have [Cross, 1990] it is these inner contradictions in design that define its culture, its mentality. Design research should be an active force in these discussions, building bridges between them where possible. Not to resolve them into a monolithic Science of Design, but advancing the discussion in this dynamically shifting set of relations.

Dorst, K. (2016, June 27). Design practice and design research: Finally together? Proceedings of DRS 2016. Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference, Brighton, UK. https://www.drs2016.org/212

Below are some choice quotes on “citizen participation” from chapter 8 of The End of the End of History, a recommended book on our recent global political history. I feel like many of us in the participatory technology design space are complicit in these practices to some extent. I continue to grapple with alternative models of mass democratic control over technology.

The Center-Left will propose a range of measures designed to promote “civic engagement” or “community participation.”

Citizens’ summits, juries and panels all aim at participation rather than power, at the technocratic incorporation of the people into politics in order to manage away conflict.

Likewise the popularity of deliberative modes of engagement, deliberative stakeholder events or workshops are characteristic tools of technocratic do-gooders as they create the simulacrum of a democratic process in which people are assembled to provide an ostensibly collective solution to a problem, but decisions lack a binding quality or have already been taken in advance.

Though unable to gain traction at a transnational level, the Left may find some success in municipal politics, following the 2010s example of Barcelona.

Sidestepping […] animus toward Big Tech companies, [tech solutionism (Morozov, 2013) and the ideology of ease (Greenfield, 2017)] may come to be applied to non-market activities, such as solving community problems, perhaps at the level of municipal government.

Sovereign, national politics – which neoliberalism was designed to defang – will remain beyond the grasp of the Left. Progressives will prefer instead to operate at the municipal, the everyday or the supranational level – precisely the arena to which neoliberalism sought to displace politics, to where it could do no harm.

Hochuli, A., Hoare, G., & Cunliffe, P. (2021). The End of the End of History. Zero Books.