Design as Democratic Inquiry: Putting Environmental Civics Into Practice

Critical Analysis

Introduction

In the introduction to this text, the author describes a particularly view of design, one that is related to civic engagement but that questions the claimed importance of design as a prime mover.

The author begins with a point of reference: design, as a popular set of methods that “are useful for structuring and amplifying creativity.” The intent of using these methods is typically a “relentless pursuit of innovation” which is often uncritical and focused on embracing things that are new, viewing design as a solution to all problems.

There are alternative views of design, such as critical and speculative design. These approaches consider the designer as an author, someone who is permitted to integrate a particular view into the actual content of the work that is produced. Often, these projects are conceptual in that they are not actually produced or implemented—they are ideas with form. Another view of design is one that emphasizes its social qualities, where design approaches are used to address important societal issues.

The author intends to look at design through a series of projects that intertwine between these, and other, views of design. Yet the view that design is a cure-all is questioned. The author is “resistant to the idea that design should be operative and convenient.” It should be challenging and provocative. Design does not need to be integrated with the expectations of government or industry, and academic designers who engage in this form of design do not need to commit themselves to existing norms and expectations. Ultimately, the author will tell stories “in ways that eschew heroism and authority, to instead attend to the tenuousness of design and democracy.”

Chapter 1: Design Experiments in Civics

In this chapter, the author introduces the idea of design experiments, and the role they play in civics and democracy. Design experiments “use creative practices to explore how we might make and experience our communal lives differently.” They can be viewed as events, experiments that are not intended to be proof of an outcome but instead to be viewed as an imaginative proposal.

Designers, and other people, make things. The things that are made are typically the point of focus, but making as a verb is a “way of doing inquiry and politics.” One example of this is with traditional participatory design efforts, although the author notes that these have been distilled to “simply enrolling potential users into facile activities of cocreation, without committing to the politics and values embedded in the philosophies of participatory design.” Still, however, participatory design “remains committed to democracy, labor, and equity” and is indicative of design at work.

Similarly, design has been viewed as a universal way of approaching problems; “there seems to be no limit to how design is employed to solve problems or foster innovation. Global design consultancies regularly work with national governments and civil society organizations to develop programs, strategies and policies.” These are large activities that are well publicized, but design can also occur more locally, which is the focus of the author’s work.

Democracy is agonistic: it calls for constant questioning and challenging of the way society is civically organized. The author introduces design experiments as forms of this challenge—as ways to “envision and explore how we might refigure governance and governmentality.” Experiments are typically considered positivist in nature, and the author works to distinguish this theory from more traditional views of the word. Experiments are “any intentional endeavor that trials ways of knowing and doing,” which is largely the quality of design inquiry. They can be viewed as pragmatism, and indicate that democracy is something that is constantly made and remade through everyday life.

Experimentalism typically implies a sense of verification. A pragmatic rather than positivist view of experimentation asserts that verification isn't necessary, as it is a creative exploration of provisional ideas intended to encourage further inquiry. A design experiment is not intended to lead to a larger assertion of how things are. Instead, is acts as an event or moment that is imaginative. These experiments question technological practice, but do not reject it, and he author treats “the relationship between the imagination and technological practice as a way to imagine other ways of living together.” They are similar to speculative and critical design in their imaginative qualities, and they are pragmatic in their enacted and experienced nature. They are events.

Chapter 2: Stories

In this chapter, the author describes the way stories are used in civic conversations to provoke imagination and discussion, emphasizing that typical design stories show the positive nature of technology rather than offering the real, lived experiences of those impacted by technologies.

Stories are “design things” that “give form to what the use of technologies entails.” Designers leverage stories to imagine things that might be, and tell stories that are about new technologies that might come to be introduced.

The example the author leverages to show the nature of stories is that of smart cities and their introduction into the city of Atlanta. These stories often ignore the voices and perspectives of those living in the neighborhoods that will be impacted by technology. Design experiments are ways to “cultivate diverse civic imaginaries” and can be used in situations like the introduction of smart cities to provide a more inclusive and realistic view of technological introduction. These cities include data collectors, sensors, and other ways of collecting content about what is happening in a city; while they purport to be beneficial to all, there is a threat that they may simply be used to reinforce and amplify existing forms of policing.

Designing, and who designs, becomes complicated when thinking of stories within civic subjectivities. Designers often paint a picture of someone else (a user), without recognizing the realness of people included and impacted by new ideas. The stories that are offered, and those who tell them, “matter because they are how we imagine other worlds and the subjectivities that inhabit and comprise those worlds.” They are typically captured by designers in scenarios—written descriptions of an imagined new product or service. The “scenario is regularly used for early-stage conceptualization of a product or service. Scenarios are commonplace when technologies are nascent or otherwise unfamiliar… the scenario functions as a sort of narrative prototype—a device that sets a horizon while also immediately serving as a boundary object.” They are often overly clean, proposing a problem and then solving that problem with something new.

The author offers a case study of work that leverages scenarios in the context of the Atlanta smart city initiative. In the example, design kits are used as ways to engage participants in a workshop; they are “design games,” but without rules. The case study describes the scenarios that emerged from workshops held with residents and other stakeholders. These scenarios can be considered “objects of design.” They show concepts that may or may not be desirable, but that are plausible in expressing what might happen when technology is introduced. They are not just “familiar stories of success” and some describe “broken world thinking.”

Stories should not be thought of as commodities; they are emergent, not fixed, because of their power to trigger imagination. Civic stories can be used to purposefully produce friction, which is not a friction of technology—instead, a friction of where society and technology join: when “technology is introduced to fix the social, it breaks the social” and that results in awkward moments. There are no “heroic or innovative moments” and instead the space of friction is left for readers of the story to complete. These are forms of discursive design, intended to act as provocation. They are also different from traditional discursive design, as they are not spectacular; they describe the mundane. They are not the “corporatized stories and imaginaries” that are commonly created by designers. They are pragmatic, recognizing the circumstances in which they fall.

Chapter 3: Devices

In this chapter, the author presents two examples of computation-based design experiments (both in the context of foraging for fruit), concluding that activities like digital prototyping are ways of examining possible futures in a civic context. The prototype acts to “query possible futures,” not to necessarily to drive towards the realization of those futures. The experiments “elicit and nurture our considerations of the potentials and consequences of refiguring civics practices.”

Foraging is an example of a civic practice, and is a way of examining smart cities from a new perspective. The author presents it as an activity of the commons, where natural resources like trees and fruit become shared resources. The commons, the author argues, is “hope and potential for employing design towards ends other than commodities for the free market.”

The author presents two case examples. In the first, a device was introduced into the practice of foraging, which “expanded and changed the constitution of the commons” and led the design team to become “differently attentive to people and objects around us.” The intention was to help delegate work, but the introduction of devices created new forms of work: “one effect of making and using these devices, then, was to instantiate a potential consequence” or adding new technology to a space that previously did not have it. The devices that were made shed light on the ideas of access, beliefs, desires, tactics, and strategies. A device can be judged based on its capacity to “contribute to the conditions of inquiry,” not in its functional success or failure.

Design experiments, the author explains, are incomplete. The thing that is made is not the point or main subject of the experiment, and the goal is not to sell the result. Instead, it is to try out new ways of examining civics or imagining a civic future. This is how they should be evaluated: did they actually help people imagine a new way civic engagement could work? Design experiments foster conversation about how we, collectively, want to live. The author warns that there is risk when these experiments are tied to technology, as technology is often “overbearing, if not oppressive.” We should pay attention and question “whenever human labor is delegated to machines.”

The author concludes that “imagination is not a carte blanche” and with imagining comes a responsibility to envision and provoke discussion of the consequences of the experiments.

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Positions design as a discipline that can be entirely removed from industry and innovation
• Questions the positive nature of innovation
• Offers another view on what design education might teach
• Describes scenarios as ways of provoking imagination, and shows how they can be used to question the value of technology