The conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) ‘Practicing Science and Technology, Performing the Social’ was held in Trento, Italy 2nd – 4th September, 2010. (http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010). Set in a beautiful environment and very well organized, the conference had 41 parallel tracks and over 800 delegates, a very useful pre-conference workshop for PhD students, interesting keynotes and plenaries from leaders of the field, some inspiring presentations and some boring ones. I have met new people, got new ideas to think about and some new references to attend, plus a nice alumium water-bottle (instead of ‘those’ conference bags) to take home, so it was worth the trip indeed.
At the PhD student workshop, I have learned from six senior researchers and journal editors about the business or art of journal writing. I intend to compile the notes and post them later. Below, I will mention some highlights for me at the conference:
At the track ‘Speculation, Design, Public and Participatory Technoscience: Possibilities and Critical Perspectives’, Emily Brown, a pubic engagement researcher, took a critical look at Critical Design. Her main question was who is the pubic that Critical Design engages. The chief agenda of Critical Design has been about creating debates and discussions through designing provocative objects. As Brown argued, despite its laudable aim, Critical Design has come short in achieving its goal as the public it engages is mostly ‘elitist’. Brown’s presentation led me to think: designed objects have always been in everybody’s everyday-life. It seems to me, Critical Design needs to leave the museums and galleries and return to the streets.
And on the streets to draw ‘things’ together was the theme of Pelle Ehn’s plenary ‘On (the) Doing (of) Things’. Ehn’s lecture was very much inspired by Bruno Latour and particularly Latour’s essay ‘A cautious Prometheus: A few steps toward a philosophy of design (with special attention to Peter Sloterdijk). http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL.pdf. (See also my notes http://www.designresearchnetwork.org/drn/content/bruno-latour-%40-design... . Ehn’s position as exemplified in his work is that designers might create ‘infrastructure’ to bring diverse stakeholders together to address issues and create innovative solutions. As my colleague Kathrina Bredies observes, Ehn’s interpretation and use of Latour’s ideas are the most sophisticated within Design and deserves our attention and discussion.
After having attended the track ‘What Objects Do: Design, Consumption and Social Practices’, Katharina and I were strucked by the fact that there was hardly any object in most presentations and the discourses on the objects were very abstract. Although we are aware of the ‘causality gap’ (via Wolfgang Jonas) between analysis and projection, we spent some time fathoming and discussing why these presentations seem so irrelevant to design practice. I will leave it to Katharina to report on our conversation.
SST and Design
I am kind of late with this, but -
Having enjoyed the EASST Conference very much, Rosan and I could not stop wondering why it was often so dissatisfying for us to hear the presentations. So much knowledge and yet so little clue of what to do with it... Sitting one off-conference afternoon around the giant fountain in downtown Trento, we came to the following points:
Disciplinarity of Knowledge: Some presentations referred strongly to a sociological discussion. They were very hard to relate back to design, often because they remained largely in discourse and observation. Hence they deliver answers, but not (design) questions that they intend to solve through their research. The relevance of the research remains within the discipline. Another aspect of this disciplinarity is the focus of the research: It lies in how an artefact affects social relationships, but not in the artefact itself. That is somewhat logical for Social Science. However, it is not always as meaningful to Design.
Incomplete translation of concepts: I was troubled with the use terms from those discourses that do not add much to design action, or at least not in the form they were discussed. At the conference, I learned about the term 'performance' as having its roots in speech act theory. It is very useful to reframe speech acts as social action, if you haven't done it before. But I was not clear about what it adds to design action to talk about it as performance. If someone could tell me, I'd be grateful.
Observation, not action research: I have seen many people that might have a Pragmatist point if view, but sadly, few of them were also action-oriented. And even more confusing, they would not be found in the (supposedly action-oriented) Design panels. In most studies, the aim is not to draw practical implications or to intervene. The attitude might be Pragmatist without being action-oriented. But why then?
Luhmann's idea of the different systems of thought, communication and organisms seems to fully apply here. What we do when we communicate is only loosely related to our conscious thoughts. Our body does things that we can only partly make sense of. Artefacts cut across all those systems. As Jonas has put it before, ANT reestablishes a quasi-causality between the closed systems with the notion of 'translation'. Many ideas in the presentations did not seem to translate well into other systems. They remained within their own discourse. This is not a crime, it's just a pity.
There are those projects and observations that carry the potential to influence action. Certainly, we are not talking about a one-on-one translation of a concept into a prototype. But high-level epistemological positions such as radical constructivism or pragmatism have those implications for design action that other accounts have not. I was just wondering why, and what really makes the difference. What does it need for Sociology and Philosophy to have this influence?