Table Of ContentDesign as
Sociopolitical
Navigation
A Performative Framework Brendon Clark
for Action-Oriented Design PhD Dissertation
Participatory Design (PD) and the emerging fi eld of Design Anthropology have each dem-
onstrated the essentiality of the involvement of users in the design process and designers’
understanding of users’ work for the success of the technology under development. However,
both of these fi elds, in giving due emphasis to the power that designers have in shaping the
technologies that users will use, have tended to underplay the larger organizational context
in which design work itself is undertaken. In contrast, this study highlights the organizational
accountabilities inherent to design projects.
Design work is conducted within a fi eld of relations between various parties, and designers’
work is accountable to each of these participants with their different stakes, backgrounds,
authorities, and/or organizational responsibilities, which often come with contradictory per-
spectives, agendas, ways of working, and values. Design as sociopolitical navigation refers
to the ways in which designers organize activities in relation to these various actors through-
out the design process: navigating socially and politically charged environs is part and parcel
of design work.
While PD has provided designers with a host of techniques and practices for including users
in the design of technologically-supported practices, it has not bequeathed to designers a
framework for organizing and analyzing design activities as they unfold in real time. This
thesis draws on dramaturgy and performance theory to create a framework for planning and
analyzing design events that make central the format of the activity, how the people and
materials are prepared to participate, and how their participation prepares them for future
activities.
Mads Clausen Institute for Product Innovation
University of Southern Denmark
Design as Sociopolitical Navigation
A Performative Framework for Action-Oriented Design
Brendon Clark
PhD Dissertation
Mads Clausen Institute for Product Innovation
University of Southern Denmark
PDF Note: Prepared for page size
165 x 238 mm (6.496 x 9.370 inches)
Submitted for partial completion of Ph.D degree at the University of
Southern Denmark.
! Brendon Clark
Mads Clausen Institute
Sønderborg, Denmark
2007
Ph.D Supervisor:
Jacob Buur
Assessment Committee:
Thomas Binder
Ilpo Koskinen
Pelle Ehn
Dissertation on record at Denmark’s Royal Library.
ISBN 978-87-991686-2-0
Cover designed by Kim Holm (www.designastronaut.dk). Front cover
sketch by Niklas Andersson and back cover sketch by Brendon Clark.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work presented here is inseparable from the personal and professional
relationships I have been lucky enough to develop over the last several
years. I owe special thanks to Mette Kjærsgaard for luring me back to
Denmark in the first place and for introducing me to the possibility of a
design anthropology. Since then (2002), Jacob Buur has continually
provided me with the resources and professional support to pursue my
sporadic initiatives. He has also demonstrated to me a conscientious
approach to organizing multidisciplinary research activities that has forever
changed my view of what it means to engage with others.
Jeanette Blomberg’s valuable critique just before I embarked upon this
four-year journey was a needed wake-up call for me that has helped me
ever since. To this I attribute a process of depersonalizing my work, while
striving toward developing a rigorous research practice.
I am indebted to Ben Matthews for his ceaseless willingness to articulate
the details of good research and to find value in mine (or to “mine” mine
for value). He and the rest of my colleagues at the Mads Clausen Institute
have provided a lively practice environment for which I am deeply grateful:
Karen Anderson, Jette Tofte Iversen, Mads Vedel Jensen, Nico Daams,
Werner Sperschneider, Kirsten Bagger, Wendy Gunn, Chris Heape,
Marcelle Stienstra, Tom Djajadiningrat, Jared Donovan, Birgit Fabius, Kyle
Kilbourn, Larisa Sitorus, Mette Mark Larsen, Rune Christensen, and guests
such as Thomas Binder and Daniela Sangiorgi. Also the students of the IT
Product Design program (and students from the Interaction Design
program in Umeå) who kept me on my toes by challenging me to make
sense of my material. And, my colleagues at the Umeå Institute of Design
who welcomed me with open arms, especially Niklas Andersson & Mike
Stott for taking a chance on me. In Umeå I learned a great deal from the
diverse participants of the CUPL project and my project teammates.
Joachim Halse & Jens Pedersen are the core of my PhD student cohort. My
work would not be as exciting or valuable without mixing with them the
personal & professional, theoretical & practical, leisurely & frantic. None of
this would be the same without my amazing wife Diana. Meeting her was
one of the “preliminary results” of my PhD study (we met after my first
year), and clearly the best result. Among everything else, Diana has the
unique ability to make what I say and do feel so very valuable.
i
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Participatory Design (PD) and the emerging field of Design Anthropology
have each demonstrated the essentiality of the involvement of users in the
design process and designers' understanding of users' work for the success
of the technology under development. However, both of these fields, in
giving due emphasis to the power that designers have in shaping the
technologies that users will use, have tended to underplay the larger
organizational context in which design work itself is undertaken. In
contrast, this study highlights the organizational accountabilities inherent to
design projects. Design work is conducted within a field of relations
between various parties, and designers' work is accountable to each of these
participants with their different stakes, backgrounds, authorities, and/or
organizational responsibilities, which often come with contradictory
perspectives, agendas, ways of working, and values.
Design as sociopolitical navigation refers to the ways in which designers organize
activities in relation to these various actors throughout the design process:
navigating socially and politically charged environs is part and parcel of
design work. While PD has provided designers with a host of techniques
and practices for including users in the design of technologically-supported
practices, it has not bequeathed to designers a framework for organizing
and analyzing design activities as they unfold in real time. This thesis draws
on dramaturgy and performance theory to create a framework for planning
and analyzing design events that make central the format of the activity,
how the people and materials are prepared to participate, and how their
participation prepares them for future activities.
The performative framework is developed through analyzing a design case titled
Design for Cultural Pluralism (CUPL). The Swedish government supports
efforts to improve integration of children from non-Swedish descent into
Swedish society. CUPL was a nine-month project sponsored by a local
municipality aimed at exploring issues surrounding cultural integration and
developing design solutions to support practices in that area. From the
inception of the project until its end, the design team organized and
participated in a range of activities within their own organization (design
institute), the sponsoring organization (municipality), and the project field
(i.e. schools, libraries, sports clubs). By analyzing a series of activities that
led to the financing of the two proposals of the project, the thesis
iii
Abstract
demonstrates the value of the performative framework for both analyzing and
planning design activities.
Goffman’s work on the theatrics of everyday behavior, and Turner and
Schechner’s work in performance studies, provide a theoretical foundation
for analyzing design activities as performances illuminating the use of
space, prepared materials, the format of the participation, and the impact of
an activity. This broadens the PD focus from who may be involved in an
individual activity and the immediate outcome of the activity, to include: (a)
how and with whom participants develop their roles and what resources
they draw upon to do so; (b) how their roles vary in relation to when,
where, and with whom an activity unfolds and how the structure of an
activity is created and maintained; and (c) how participants interpret an
activity afterward with other people and how they draw upon it as a
resource for participation in subsequent activities. At the same time, the
thesis argues that the performative framework’s attention to the fluidity of
participant roles from one activity to another, the structure and
interrelationship of activities, and the process of assessing how activities
give value to their participants, provides a resource for organizing design
processes.
Strategic corridor, performance map, and performative task are three concepts
developed in the dissertation for planning and assessing action-oriented
design activities: A performance map is a tool for analyzing the various levels
of interaction among project stakeholders (i.e. design team members,
funding decision-makers, intended beneficiaries) based on who organizes
and attends an activity and its function in relation to other activities.
Activities at the strategic corridor level are organized to provide project
stakeholders a format for collaboratively exploring new possibilities that
inform and define the content and structure of subsequent activities.
Performative task is an organizational unit for planning group activities that
manifest in shared performances. It can refer to tasks such as an exercise
given to participants during a workshop, or on a broader scale such as
design team members working toward a presentation or workshop. In
addition to introducing a framework for analyzing and proactively
organizing design work and activities throughout a project, this dissertation
opens a (historically) neglected aspect of design work in research to analytic
scrutiny: the negotiation of project resources with stakeholders.
iv
Table of contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS_____________________________________i
ABSTRACT ______________________________________________iii
PREFACE
A design research exhibition _____________________________xi
CHAPTER I
User-oriented design and the Scandinavian Approach________1
The Scandinavian Tradition of Participatory Design___________ 7
Xerox PARC’s contribution to Participatory Design ____________ 8
Expanding the user-oriented design focus___________________15
Including decision makers in design_________________________17
CHAPTER II
A social perspective on organizational relations____________23
The study of political processes____________________________25
UMEÅ CASE___________________________________________32
Design institute and municipality partnership________________34
CHAPTER III
A performative analysis of design meetings ________________41
Developmental sequence of performance_____________________44
Goffman’s dramaturgy of impression management _____________46
Design institute and municipality partnership________________49
Frontstage: Presentation through a dramaturgical lens ___________52
Performance is “restored behavior” ________________________57
Liminality in Schechner’s workshop-rehearsal _________________57
Backstage: Making the steering committee meeting performance___62
vii
Table of contents
Rehearsal: Irene visits the design institute_____________________71
Assessment: steering committee meeting revisited ______________76
Aftermath and post-liminal identity ________________________79
“Steering committee meeting” aftermath _____________________79
CHAPTER IV
Action-oriented design ethnography ______________________85
The integration of ethnography and design__________________86
Ethnographically informed Tangible Analysis Kit____________100
Creating action-oriented representations ____________________102
Format for tangible analysis______________________________112
Workshop as performative task ___________________________115
Action-oriented representations for tangible analysis ___________116
CHAPTER V
A performative framework for action-oriented design _____121
Performance map of social interaction______________________122
Strategic corridor: Creating liminal spaces ___________________129
Three versions of the rehearsal/performance relationship _______133
Revisiting the social drama in the design partnership ___________136
CHAPTER VI
Design as sociopolitical navigation _______________________141
Negotiation process as viable research domain______________142
Participatory design and ethnography as resources for action __143
Performative framework for action-oriented design___________144
I. Performative framework for action-oriented design __________144
II. Strategic corridor level of interaction_____________________147
III. Performative task___________________________________148
REFERENCES ___________________________________________151
APPENDIX______________________________________________161
viii
Preface
PREFACE
A design research exhibition
We arrive at a Swedish city of 110,000 inhabitants of whom 30,000 attend
the university. We join this year’s version of the university’s design school
exhibition where the bachelor and masters students proudly display their
greatest achievements. We find car interiors and exteriors displayed on
screens and in models, household products such as an ergonomic golf bag,
a sailboat, a vacuum cleaner, mobile phone, and beautiful sketches and
renderings of process and product. Each display, whether in a glass case or
free standing, is accompanied by a poster or video screen, and name tag.
This year’s exhibit is extra special for a variety of reasons. Most of all, it is
special for those in attendance because it is “this year’s” year-end
extravaganza. Opening night has its share of glitches. As 9:00 pm roles
around, some students continue to add pieces of glass to their display cases,
clear away cardboard or peel away the last pieces of tape from a model
hoping that the paint is dry. At the same time, they are fighting the
swarming crowds of spectators with their wine glasses and plates of cheese.
The buzz in the air is palpable as parents, students, local residents,
professors, and the media mill around three floors of the design institute.
On the second floor, in the far corner, there is a different type of display
this year. The institute’s design researchers have a presence among the
student projects. Similar to the other exhibits, there are screens, and
posters, and prototypes with arrays of colors. Yes, the posters are different
sizes from the others, but there is also a patch of grass exemplifying an
indoor patio area and there are extra posters that are not necessarily
attached to individual projects. Some people walk into the room taking a
quick glance around and quickly leave; others stay and read through a
comparatively large amount of text, approach a prototype and listen to an
explanation of how it works while the researcher at the side of the table
attempts to get her to please sit down and “Give it a try! Say something
into the microphone!”
xi
Description:framework for organizing and analyzing design activities as they unfold in real sketch by Niklas Andersson and back cover sketch by Brendon Clark.
