View source for Introduction Figuring Things Out Together

= Figuring Things Out Together: On the Relationship between Design and Collective Practice = 

== Introduction == 

=== Context ===

I make websites. I teach. I design platforms. I host workshops. I write.
I organize events. I build tools. I make books. I am involved in an
array of activities at various organizations, institutions, and in the
context of self-organized groups. It can be disorienting and difficult
to speak about my work in a way that is easily packageable. All of the
activities that constitute what I do and the contexts I do them in, come
with their own specific vocabularies, manners and expectations.

There are many of us who work this way --- people who blend practices
rather than choosing one specialization or one fixed definition of their
practice. Sometimes we form collectives; conglomerates of ambiguous
practitioners who come from domains that may seem ostensibly separate.
By coming together in this manner, we diffuse disciplinary boundaries.
We challenge the divisions between user and maker, product and process,
friendships and work relations, student and teacher.

For nine years, I have been working closely with the collective Hackers
& Designers (H&D). Due to my close involvement with this collective, it
has become central to my practice-based inquiry into the relationship
between design and collective practice. H&D started as a workshop-based
meetup series in Amsterdam in 2013.<ref>I have been organizing workshops with H&D since its inception in
    2013. H&D started as a meetup-series organized by James Bryan Graves
    (software developer) and Selby Gildemacher (visual artist) and
    myself (graphic designer). Since 2016 other members have joined,
    such as André Fincato (2016), Juliette Lizotte (2018), Heerko van
    der Kooij (2019), Karl Moubarak (2019) Loes Bogers (2019), Margarita
    Osipian (2019), Christine Kappé (2020), Pernilla Manjula Philip
    (2022). James left the collective in 2018. Margarita left in 2021.


Abdullah, Dana. "Disciplinary Disobedience: A Border-Thinking Approach to Design." In: *Design Struggles* edited by Claudia Mareis, Nina Paim, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021.</ref> Since then, we have been organizing workshops, sometimes self-organized, sometimes by
invitation.<ref> A recurring activity for H&D, which usually involves all members of the collective, is the H&D Summer Academy, a self-organized 1-2 week-long workshop program that takes place in the summer, in Amsterdam since 2015.
    [[https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2015]{.underline}](https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2015),
    [[https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2016]{.underline}](https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2016),
    last accessed March 2022.

    [[https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2018]{.underline}](https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2018),
    [[https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2017]{.underline}](https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2017),
    last accessed March 2022.

    [[https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2020]{.underline}](https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2020),
    [[https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2021]{.underline}](https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Summer_Academy_2021),
    last accessed March 2022.</ref> H&D workshops are informal get-togethers and usually
follow a hands-on practical approach. Attendees mostly work at the
intersection of technology, design, art, and education. Along with
organizing workshops people involved with H&D produce on and offline
publications and build open source tools and platforms.

Collective practices, as I understand and discuss them in this thesis,
lean into the complexity of issues while resisting the impulse to
''solve'' anything. Moving through a variety of contexts (from
institutional to grassroots informal) collective practices are
responsive to changing conditions. They are mutable and at times fragile
structures that, notwithstanding, manage to hold together fragmented
practices, multiple places, schedules and economies. Collectives are
constantly in-the-making, and along the way, they develop "terms of
transition"<ref>Lauren Berlant, "The commons: Infrastructures for troubling
times*," *Environment and Planning D: Society and Space*, Volume 34, no. 3 (2016): 393--419. University of Chicago, USA </ref> -- socio-material conducts that help them navigate, and 'stay in touch' in uncertain times.

Open source spreadsheets and notepads become administrative tools for
decentralized collective organization, subject or site for a workshop,
and design and publishing tools. Shared anecdotes, distributed
documentation practices, asynchronous writing of workshop scripts,
unstable technical infrastructure are all part of what holds collectives
together. Such relational utterances cannot be considered products or
examples of collectivity in the sense that an example could be a
blueprint. Collective practices are site, context, and time specific,
and so are their expressions.

====  Research Question ====

This research investigates the relationship between design and collectivity. I argue that this relationship is one of mutual entanglement and therefore requires perspectives on working and designing together that resist linearity, and a progress-based understanding of the design process. The central question that I will return to throughout this dissertation is: How to design ''for'' and ''with'' collectivity? I propose the notion of 'designing ''with''' (rather than through or by means of) to open up design approaches and perspectives towards processes of designing with ''others'' (other people, other things, other environments) that are non-successive and contingent as they are constantly emerging.

==== Problem ====

Collective practices are difficult to align with conceptual, material
and organizational confinements currently upheld in the field of design
and formal design education. I found that conventional design
vocabularies are not capable of expressing and accounting for
collectivities\' resistance to fixation and stabilization. In existing
design discourses much attention has been paid to modes of designing
together. Yet, in my view, these accounts fall short of addressing the
nature and meaning of collective practice. For instance, there is a
difference between collectivity and collaboration or teamwork.
Collectivity is not a design method, or an antidote to an
individualistic design approach. I argue that collectivity should be
considered a condition that is intertwined with certain issues and their
material consequences such as fragmentation and flexibilization of
cultural work, in addition to the economization of art and design
education.

==== Contribution to design discourse ====

Design approaches such as 'participatory design', 'cooperative
design', and 'co-creation', have been discussed at length,<ref>Erling Bjgvinsson, Pelle Ehn, Per-Anders Hillgren "Design Things and Design Thinking: Contemporary Participatory Design Challenges"
''Design Issues'' Volume 28, no. 3 (Summer 2012). Susanne Bødker, Kaj Grønbæk, and Morten Kyng, 'Cooperative Design:
Techniques and Experiences From the Scandinavian Scene,' ''Participatory Design: Principles and Practices'', edited by Aki Namioka and Doug Schuler (New Jersey, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995).</ref> in urban
planning, industrial design, and human-computer interaction design.<ref>Tad Hirsch, 'Contestational Design: Innovation for Political Activism', PhD in Media Art and Sciences, MIT, 2008, 23.</ref>
Participatory Design (PD) derived from the 1970s Scandinavian labor
movement, and shifted attention from top-down design approaches to the
"politics and ethics of 'workplace democracy'".<ref>Mahmoud Keshavarz, Ramia Mazé, "Design and Dissensus: Framing and Staging Participation in Design Research,\" *Design Philosophy Papers* Volume 11, Issue 1 (May 2013): 7-30.</ref> PD introduced methods of joint decision-making regarding the implementation of new
tools, technologies and organization models in the workplace. These
decision-making processes involved those most affected; the workers in a
factory for instance. The workers were to use the newly introduced
technologies in their daily work routines. The PD approach brought into
focus how collaborative processes, across different positions,
organizational hierarchies, and diverging skills, can be considered an
essential part of the design process. It also introduced social
questions into the design process, actively involving different
perspectives in order to improve design objects and their
implementation.

PD has been critiqued by design theorists<ref>For instance Tad Hirsch wrote that in some contexts, participatory
    design processes only reinstate the division between experts and
    laypeople ("In most cases, designers' status as experts confers
    relatively greater authority in decision-making than laypersons.")
    Tad Hirsch, 'Contestational Design: Innovation for Political
    Activism', PhD in Media Art and Sciences, MIT, 2008, 23.</ref> for only inviting some to
participate in the process while excluding others. Furthermore, it is
argued that PD builds upon consensus models for decision-making, which
can be implemented in ways that affirm established power relations,<ref>Furthermore, Keshavarz and Mazé wrote that "to approach design in ways that do not merely affirm the current constitution of society,
    along with exclusions and differentials, we seek alternatives to
    concepts such as consensus." Mahmoud Keshavarz, Ramia Mazé,
    "Design and Dissensus: Framing and Staging Participation in Design
    Research," ''Design Philosophy Papers'' Volume 11, Issue 1 (May
    2013): 7-30.</ref>
while maintaining the appearance of an inclusive process. Design
theorists such as Ramia Mazé, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Carl DiSalvo and Tad
Hirsch, have problematized PD, building upon the work of political
philosophers such as Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, and have
advocated for design approaches that privilege difference over
consensus. Like PD, their propositions for adversarial,<ref>Carl DiSalvo, *Adversarial Design* (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012).</ref>dissenting<ref>Mahmoud Keshavarz, Ramia Mazé, *Design and Dissensus: Framing and Staging Participation in Design Research*, 2013.</ref> and contestational<ref>Tad Hirsch, 'Contestational Design: Innovation for Political Activism', PhD in Media Art and Sciences, MIT, 2008. </ref> design pays attention to design
processes rather than products, and the politics inherent in such
processes. Yet they emphasize the importance of sustaining the
possibility for different positions, including potential friction and
conflict as part or even an aim of the design process.

Furthermore, Mazé and Keshavarz offered useful tactics for resisting
generalization around tropes of collaboration in design by challenging
the presupposition that positions, identities and preferences are
pre-constituted and well-defined. Drawing on Rancière's concept of
'dissensus', as "a process concerned with the potential emergence of
new political formations,"<ref>Mahmoud Keshavarz, Ramia Mazé, *Design and Dissensus: Framing and Staging Participation in Design Research*, 2013.</ref> Mazé and Keshavarz argue "for
increased criticality -- and dissensus -- in contemporary practices of
design and design research."<ref>ibid.</ref> Other design theorists have put
forward design philosophies such as Ontological Design or Xeno Design,
which displaces the human/designer as the apex of the design process in
an attempt to fundamentally question the complexity of designed worlds
and design's implications for social, economic, and ecological issues.
Design theorists such as Anne-Marie Willis, Johanna Schmeer, Danah
Abdullah, and Tony Fry further complicate the pluralistic design
approach of being and working together 'in difference', by appealing
to a multilayered design perspective that transgresses boundaries
between disciplines, timelines, geographies, scales, human and non-human
entities. Such theories call for "new imaginaries and design approaches
that question human-centrism, and open up paths towards
alternatives."<ref>Johanna Schmeer, *Xenodesign --- Towards Transversal Engagement in Design*, PhD Thesis, Royal College of Art London, 2016-2020. [[https://johannaschmeer.net/johanna-schmeer-phd]{.underline}](https://johannaschmeer.net/johanna-schmeer-phd), last accessed January 2022.</ref>

All these critical design accounts have contributed to greater
self-reflexivity in design perspectives and articulations, and as such,
have also been important orientation guides for my research trajectory.
Yet, these design theories -- perhaps because they evolve within and
respond to the established design discourse -- are in my view still too
attached to, and therefore insufficiently question, the notion of a
'purposeful' relation between design and collectivity.

As I will discuss in my first chapter 'Design and Collectivity', it is
often during moments of crisis, for example increasingly porous
disciplinary boundaries and specialization in design, that collectivity
becomes an alternative proposition, or a potential resolution to the
issue at stake. The tropes of design and collectivity, in their various
interpretations and meanings, tend to uphold each other.

==== Approach ====

Throughout the different chapters I will make the thresholds of
collective practice legible. I will do this by discussing the ways
collectivity weaves together a range of places, legacies, objects and
people across practices and disciplines, and timelines. Drawing from
personal experiences and my involvement in ''collectivity-in-action'', I
will analyze different formats, utterances and social-technical conduct,
in order to critically question how collective practices negotiate their
relationships with the material conditions of everyday life.

'''Chapter 1: 'Design & Collectivity''''

> The chapter 'Design & Collectivity' sets the scene by locating my
> personal affinities with collective practice. I trace the ways in
> which my understanding of collectivity has changed over time, and is
> intertwined with personal experiences and frustrations with the
> established design field. I will contextualize the main research
> question of this thesis (How to design *for* and *with* collectivity?)
> by approaching collective practice not as a result of successive or
> comprehensible processes, but as resulting from and implied in
> particular socio-economic, socio-technical conditions that pervade and
> shape collectives, often in unforeseen ways. Collective practices
> therefore require articulation that does not presume collectivity to
> be a resolution to a problem.

In the following chapters, I will discuss three concepts: "Workshop",
"Tool" and "Platform", dedicating a chapter to each. They are all
ubiquitous and hazy terms that travel through a manifold of contexts
with ease. They are also implied in the ways the H&D collective has been
(mis)understood and actualized. All these terms -- workshop/tool/platform -- have been overused and so these chapters seek to clarify their meaning specifically in the context of collectivity.

'''Chapter 2: 'Workshop production''''

> The chapter 'Workshop production' interrogates the pervasiveness of
> the 'workshop' as a concept and format within a vast range of fields
> and raises the question: "Why and how are workshops valued and
> practiced?"
> As a format for time-boxed collaboration, as well as temporary and
> dynamic learning environments, 'workshops' cross many boundaries,
> for instance between art and activism, between different disciplines
> and institutions, between commercial and educational contexts.
> Supposedly, workshops can be applied to any context. In this chapter I
> will discuss the different perspectives on workshops including the
> workshop as a site for specialized material production, in addition to
> its meaning as a format for bringing together groups of like-minded
> people; to meet, spend time together, work on a specific topic, or
> explore new techniques or tools. Furthermore, I will address the
> tension between, on the one hand understanding and practicing
> workshops as egalitarian learning formats, and on the other hand
> workshops' role in reinforcing neoliberal conditions. I will argue
> that the workshop is a format that is implied in the economization of
> education and the learning economy, and perpetuates a culture in which
> self-employment, self-improvement, and self-reliance is normalized.
> Drawing on different workshop situations I will exemplify how
> possibilities and pitfalls of the workshop as a format for cultural
> production are being dealt with within collective practice. Central to
> this chapter's inquiry is the question; can workshops can be
> organized responsibly? Can they resist this neoliberal impulse?

'''Chapter 3: 'Tool building''''

> In this chapter I will discuss the question: Are
> other-than-utilitarian relationships to tools possible? If they are,
> how can such relationships be articulated? H&D hands-on workshops feed
> off and nurture communities of tool users and makers who consider it
> relevant to 'open up' tools and tool-building processes, to learn
> about the ways tools are constructed in hands-on practical and often
> playful ways. The practical and experimental approach to
> conceptualizing and building tools *differently* allows for imagining
> and testing out other scenarios for tool-designer relationships and
> interaction. The chapter 'Tool building' analyzes different
> understandings and functionings of 'tools'. More specifically, I
> will discuss an ongoing / non-conclusive process of collectively
> imagining, building, and modifying a set of digital tools entitled
> 'Feminist Search Tools', that yields a growing repository of
> prototypes, workshops, documentation, and recordings of conversations.
> In this chapter I argue that the articulation and actualization of
> 'tools' within the context of the Feminist Search Tools project, is
> driven by a certain resistance towards tools as merely practical and
> discrete objects.

'''Chapter 4: 'Platform-design issues''''

> The starting point for the chapter 'Platform-design issues' is the
> question "Do you want to design our platform?". This request, as it
> has been recurrently posed to the H&D collective, extrapolates the
> complicated relationship between design and collectivity. That is, the
> way platforms are discussed in this chapter, puts into focus the
> manner in which technical objects and context-specific social conducts
> are composed together and are therefore deeply intertwined with a
> collective's characteristics and functioning. These self-made
> platforms involve and converge content management systems, chat
> applications, collaborative writing tools, online spreadsheets and
> file sharing systems. They are actualized on-the-go and in a manner
> that caters to the particular needs, curiosities, and abilities of the
> collective, which makes it difficult to separate them as technical
> objects from that context. The question that will be discussed is: If
> such platforms-in-the-making are inseparable from a collective's
> functioning, including their characteristic of constant emergence,
> spontaneity, and unreliability---can such platforms be designed at
> all?

The title of the dissertation "Figuring things out together" evokes
the collective effort of working through the complexities of our times,
as well the effort required in disentangling and disambiguating certain
metaphors and tropes that occur in the context of collective practices.
Living and working conditions are increasingly complex, fragmented, and
precarious. Can collective practices like H&D develop, uphold and
support critical, ethical, and sustainable ways of working and being
together?

Each chapter will take a different approach in order to ascertain what
binds us together in collective practices. While these chapters appear
in a linear order, they are also intertwined with each other. For
instance, I will discuss workshops that took place on experimental
platforms and I will discuss platforms and tools that took shape in and
through workshop situations. The structure of the thesis resists a
linear narrative of collectivity (forward-moving, progressing,
improving, innovating) and invites the reader to remain alert, and on
the look-out for *other,* multiple, and parallel collective utterances.

=== Bibliography ===

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>
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> times\*.\" *Environment and planning. D, Society & space* Volume 34,
> no. 3 (June, 2016): 393-419. London: SAGE Publications.
>
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> Things and Design Thinking: Contemporary Participatory Design
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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