Complicating Design

(From a panel talk presented at the SLSA 2018 conference)

If Inclusive Design is, as Jutta Treviranus has stated, "design that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age, and other forms of difference," then we have to consider, too, the paradox at the heart of this definition. Inclusion is, in one sense, impossible. Systems are constituted by that which they exclude. Inclusion, treated as a generalized policy and driven to its direct and logical ends—rather than revelling in its creative detours and distances travelled—would seem to imply the erasure of identity, difference, and community.

No, not like this. Inclusive design's processes place an emphasis on the margins, the diverse contexts, situations, and environments in which we live, work, commune, and create. Inclusion can never be total, it longs for an environment in which to grow. The margins, here, are germane. There will always be, of course, some communities we can never be part of. So how can we create networks across and amongst the margins, of people working for fairer labour, social justice, sustainability and governance of cities and natures, for new modes of creative participation? Judith Butler: "The point isn't to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones... which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of authorities."

So, let's break it down. Start with design. I'm not sure, I confess, that I even know what design is. Is it a compromised creativity, forever implicated in capitalism's continuous, processual reinvention and expansion? Or perhaps, via McKenzie Wark, the creation of new forms and vectors of expression, a healing of the rift between form and content? Can we somehow imagine that design's closure, in the form of finished consumer products or industrial "best practice" methods, might be wedged open a little bit by the desire we have, as designers, to give up some of our creative powers as a gift to those who design usually takes as its subjects.

Design is a material and situated practice of making. We think via our engagement with a medium—its materials and its constraints—and it thinks us, as "users," "customers," or, hopefully, something more whole. This invites us to consider the nature of our practices, their histories and powers. In today's workshop, we'll consider the design of digital and social systems of one kind or another—how these systems intersect with our neighbourhoods (as Sepideh will discuss), our policing and justice services (as Sharmarke will elaborate), or with ownership and technical power (as Antranig will expound upon). 

So here, in practice, I'll risk another kind of definitional recursion. For the pacifist theorist of technology, Ursula Franklin, technology—and by extension, then, its design—is a practice. "Technology is the way things are done around here." This is to say, and perhaps I’m pointing out the obvious, that the ways in which we create our technologies—the techniques and values and social dynamics that we practice with, and invest within them—will have fundamental shaping effects on the kinds of designs we can create, and on what can be done and expressed within them. Put simply, too simply, how we design is what we design. But processes can't be unlatched—the means have ends. Felix Guattari: "But to what end? Unemployment, oppressive marginalization, loneliness, boredom, anxiety and neurosis? Or culture, creation, development, the reinvention of the environment and the enrichment of modes of life and sensibility?" (Three Ecologies).

One fledging root sprouting at inclusive design's base can be found in disability and accessibility. We're all different, we're always in motion and changing, and we each need different things at different times and we depend on each other in different ways. This, for me, is the starting point for a different kind of practice of design; one which allow us to refigure disability into something that is not just a individual barrier—a failure, broken body, medical pathology, a categorical generalization of who and what we are—not just an individual barrier that we experience alone but as part of a larger context or system.

Disability and accessibility are integral to identity and community, and simultaneously are a vector for creating new modes of being in and out of our bodies, our minds. Inclusive design makes explicit the relationality of disability, the ways that we all experience and negotiate mismatches at different times and in different situations, between our needs and the ways the environment or system are designed to meet them. We need to measure a design by its ongoing ability to adapt itself to suit our differing needs. This, then, is the essential challenge of inclusive design: to create the environments and the means to make our systems—cultural, social, technological—more reflective of, and adaptive to, this full range of human diversity.

Conventional design methods are often implicated with modelling, of productively reifying homogenizing abstractions like "the user." Outmoded anthropological and scientistic myths, like the idea that a design researcher can be an objective, impassive observer of real-world practice, and that their primary role then is to expertly synthesize, extract, essentialize, and then model the people they observed into things like "personas," or fictional characters. But what kind of clarity can be really gained by taking many people—people in motion, in different environments, people with different needs and perspectives and stories, and trying to boil them down into a quick, fictional snapshot? This kind of abstraction is storytelling cliché—it is retelling the same story over again. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, "The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."

A persona stands in for the people who design erased—those with their own specific stories who actually use and live within our designed spaces. So if a persona reinvokes, via computational and marketing abstractions, the absent particularlities of use, then where are they, really? Can we imagine other ways of designing that can include those people, and their lived experiences, directly? Can we let them tell the stories themselves, in their multiplicity and dynamism?

Throughout our panel's sharing of perspectives, you'll hear more about "co-design"—the practice of design with rather than for. A reconfiguration of the power dynamics of design that aims to support new forms of "citizenship" within design, at the higher rungs of Sherry Arnstein's ladder of participation: delegation, partnership, and so-called "user" control. Co-design is admittedly challenging and uncomfortable. As designers, it means that we can't just take on that distancing role of "expert," of the person who knows best, who has the finest aesthetic discernment. Instead we have to be participants within a messy design situation—not just managers or facilitators of a prescribed process. We have to invite people into our design practice from the start and throughout, to negotiate roles and relationships, and to remember to ask, "what role would you like me to play in this process?" 

I dream of a way of designing that always leaves space—is productively incomplete. A situation in which the people who live in our designed spaces have the power and agency to continue the design process without us—to rearrange, adapt, and make themselves at home in what we've ostensibly already "finished" or "shipped." Something like artist Amy Twigger-Holroyd's knitting practice, which she calls re-knitting. Here, Amy has taken a mass-produced, machine-manufactured sweater, and turned it into a completely different kind of sweater, and singular. She was able, using her reknitting techniques, to cut, splice in, and pick up stitches from the original sweater, and to add her own features, embellishments, and personalizations. And in turn, the owner of Amy's re-knitted cardigan is able to make her own changes and modifications too. Imagine a design like that, where, simultaneously, from one perspective it's complete, and from another perspective it forms the material from which someone else can freely add, subtract, modify, personalize, and then share with their families and communities.