Creative Research
My research practice circles around how we travel together in times of uncertainty and the role that collaborative designing might play as an improvisatory, collaborative way to practice caring for each other and the more-than-human-worlds.
In my own research practice, collaborative design has looked like co-creating a gathering place, where stories of lived experience can be shared and seeds of cultural renewal are planted in the midst of these transitional times.
I’m interested in making the intangible aspects of this practice more visible through drawing and visualisation. I like to map social atmospheres, ruptures and relations as they emerge and change. I do this because these elements are part of what I try to influence when I design with others.
Doctoral Research (PhD)
Designing in Transition: Towards intimacy in ecological uncertainty
My PhD research traces my attempts to re-orient my design practice from visual communication design to a more expanded participatory practice that supports intimacy in ecological uncertainty. At the inception of this research I was deeply unsettled by the global ecological crisis and searching for a way to respond through design. I joined a small fledgling community called The Weekly Service, that was exploring what it means to be human in these times of transition through storytelling and curatorial practices. After two years of close collaboration with community members and a core team, I developed a deeply relational practice concerned with emergent social processes. However, rather than focus on the outcome of this transition (the expanded participatory practice), this research attempts to reveal the messy, and sometimes painful, process of transition, what I refer to as designing in transition.
Link to thesis
Design in transition
Design has been and continues to be an accomplice to the extractive regimes that drive consumption and reduce the possibility of a future for humanity (Fry 2012). It’s this complicity that has been called into question in previous decades, and has led to a flourishing of discourses surrounding a new role for design in shaping the emerging future. While many of these discourses embrace emergence and open-ended inquiry, some still perpetuate the sense that the future can be predicted and controlled (Light 2015, 85). As a carry over, this modernist-type thinking continues to haunt design practice today (Fry 2012). This mindset views uncertainty as something to be managed, where design is situated as an instrumental means through which to secure a more certain and desired future.
“...communities need tools that can support both the cultural and idiosyncratic aspects of care, wonder and fulfilment. It is now everyone’s task to work out what that means in each community and with every design decision.”
Designing in uncertainty
As Akama, Pink and Sumartojo (2018, 2) write, uncertainty is ‘a way of being in and knowing the world that societies consistently seek to ameliorate, mitigate against, remove or deny – usually without success.’ They argue that such an approach, results in the temptation of utopian dreams that might act as a ‘haven of safety’ where ‘ethical truths’ can be known (ibid). However in their eyes, design, especially collaborative design, is a way of being with others in uncertainty, attuned to the ongoing emergence of possible futures, which can never be known in advance.
This PhD is concerned with the development of methods that reveal, open and inquire into the relational and temporal nature of collaborative design. Through practice I seek to make visible the tangible and intangible phenomena that surrounds environmental issues, and draw attention to the nuanced forces that contest for a hold over the present. In doing so, I reach towards an articulation of collaborative design as a practice that can counter such closures, and work as a force that generatively keeps the present open.
Codesigning as a way of being in uncertainty
Collaborative design has emerged over the past few decades as a practice for working with non-designers in different design fields, often in specific geographical contexts. It’s roots however run deep, stretching back to the workplace democracy movements of the 1970s that Participatory Design originates from (Agid 2016). Various accounts of codesign been developed by practitioners since the early 2000s. Sanders and Stappers (2008) initial work mapped the landscape of codesign that emerged from user-centred product testing and sought to recognise the creative involvement of non-designers in the design process (6). Halse et al developed a more performative approach, that explored ‘rehearsing the future’ through enactments and role-play conducive to bringing speculative designed things into the present (2010). Others such as Akama and Prendiville (2015) articulate a phenomenological approach that positions codesigning as ‘a journey and process of transformation in how we design our world, and ourselves, with others’ (31). Agid (2016) highlights the situatedness of designers positions, in relation to those that they are working with, and the world-views and contexts that shape the ways that collaborative designing is done. He writes that, ‘designers’ positions are dynamically situated, in constant movement in relationship to the multiple infrastructures in and through which we and others work together.’ (2016, 81) He refers to this as ‘relational practice’ – a way of practicing that is worked out over time and emerges through the nature of doing design with others, where a shared practice is:
‘…ultimately, a way of creating not just artifacts, systems, or services, but collective knowing and action. …it is the relationships participants create and the knowledge made through them that come to define how designing matters in participatory and collaborative design. (Agid 2016)
In building on these insights, I seek to develop an account of collaborative design that describes a way of being with others in the present ecological uncertainty, that holds open both the potential of the past and the future to fluid interpretations, which shift and are shaped as people participate in the making of emergent cultural forms.
Ontological transitions made visible through design
Through my research as an embedded designer with The Weekly Service, I trace how I have shifted from a perception of a designer as a ‘trigger’ for sustainable innovation (Manzini 2013) to accomodate more nuanced understandings of codesign – that required me to admit and work with emergent phenomena such as emotions, atmospheres and social relations. In doing so I move away from instrumental (and often optimistic) notions of design as a saviour, and search for a way of conceiving codesigning as a practice of negotiating the fog of uncertainty with others.
Over the course of two years, I developed a practice-orientated methodology for documenting and analysing transitions. This methodology draws on an amalgamation of Participatory Design and Design Anthropology approaches, which enabled me to travel along with others as we attempted to cultivate communal intimacy or relational ways of being-knowing-&-doing. Through written and drawn accounts I highlight how transition is an embodied, emotional and affective experience, that emerges through the relationships that we form with others, the things we make together, and the manner in which we travel together. In doing so, I suggest that these transitional times call for a greater recognition of how designers might adapt or develop methods that could enable and reveal the ontological transitions underway in their own practice. I offer this in the hope that it might also support others who are just starting their own journey towards redirecting / expanding their practice.
