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Hi, Victor.
The productive thread on the social consequences of design has me
working on a note concerning thick discourse and how we frame design
research. I hope to get to something worth posting before long. Your
questions and propositions have been especially helpful.
Even so, one issue in your notes bothers me. This is the boundary you
seem to draw between design research located in art and design
schools and design research in other design fields.
I agree with you on the need for this kind of work. While I also
agree with you that not enough has been done, I'd agree with David
Sless on the case that this is true of nearly everything we hope to
learn about the natural and social worlds we inhabit.
I disagree with you modestly on one point. Much more has been done in
design research fields than you seem to recognize. Or, perhaps better
put, this involves fields that some of us categorize as design fields
while you label them as fields outside of design.
In my view, the failure to encompass this work within design research
leads to real problems. The first is he fact that people in some
design research sectors overlook useful research results because they
think of it as something other than design research. The second is
that we can often map methods and even sometimes map results from
some design research fields over onto our work in others. This means
we are missing important opportunities to move information from one
area of design research to other areas of design research.
(This is a fairly long post on work being done on the social
consequences of designed artifacts. I also discuss ways to locate and
benefit from the extensive design research literature in this field.
I'm addressing the list as well as addressing Victor. Given the fact
that Victor argues that this information does not exist, I'm
providing resources and URLs. This is not a digital recorder talking
to another digital recorder, though: I take Victor's query seriously
and I am stating, seriously, that some of the information he seeks
exists. I am also proposing ways to make it more accessible. If this
seems too lengthy or detailed, please delete this post and move on to
the next entry in the thread.)
Some of this research takes place under labels that do not
necessarily incorporate the word "design." However, this distinction
is fuzzy in the case of design fields that do not label their
research side as "design" while they DO label applied work and
professional practice as "design." Human-computer interaction is one
case in point. Another is organization theory.
You mentioned Donald Norman as working outside of design. You haven't
responded to the mention of scholars such as Bonnie Nardi. Given that
their kinds of research interests and focus are reasonably typical,
this suggests that you would presumably place everyone who works
explicitly on the social rather than technical consequences of design
__from an HCI perspective__ as working outside of design. If so, this
would explain why you are overlooking a rich and extensive design
research literature on the social consequences of designed artifacts.
It is useful to distinguish between your Mac list and an HCI research
discussion list. Your Mac list may focus on the technical functions
of products, but most user lists are technical features lists rather
than research lists. Some HCI researchers also focus on technical
functions.
Nevertheless, much work in HCI focuses on social consequences, with
an explicit interest in the kinds of topics you mention. You are
right that we don't know enough, but there are serious research
activities under way that study the questions that interest you. You
offer a good example: how do products like the iPod change social
relations and commercial practices? While the question is good, the
way you structured the examples suggests a focus anchored in
"art-and-design" design research on artifacts rather than the kinds
of design research that focus on the social use of products.
Let me use your example of music downloads. Downloading music
personalizes SOME music experiences. It does not personalize ALL
music experiences. Phonograph record sales have died outside
specialty markets and CD sales are shrinking. Much of the money these
sales once represented has gone into community experiences and social
experiences as ticket sales for concert situations and dance
situations. This revenue stream is growing. Even though music
programs on the radio may be going off the air, music programs on web
radio are increasing. Radio, however, has not been a social
experience for more than half a century. Since the advent of cheap
radios in the 1950s and 1960s, music programs have generally had only
one listener at a time. This also happened with the advent of
inexpensive phonographs and low-cost individual tape players in the
1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. You and I are old enough to remember the era
when a family might listen to the one radio or watch the one
television in a house. We are also young enough to experience an era
where any household in North America or Europe might have several of
each. In this era, a journey by car is the only time when most people
listen to the radio together. The public experience of discovering
new music and listening to it takes place in live formats for many
people, even as they also discover and listen to music privately on
the web.
How does this question and others like it relate to the literature
you seek? This literature is a form of design literature, and it is
widely available to those who work in the design fields that generate
this literature. The kind of research you want to see done on the
social consequences of design is being done in HCI and in the entire
range of research sectors labeled informatics, information studies,
and information science. In these fields, we study the social effects
of informated products and information technology in exactly the
terms you describe.
Several journals focus on these issues including New Media and
Society, or Information, Communication, and Society. Both are a
decade old. The Information Society is two decades old! More recent
titles include The Journal of Community Informatics and the journal
Artifact, established last year. This is also a central concern of
the journal CoDesign. (Both Artifact and CoDesign are partly located
in art and design, with editors and editorial advisors to each
subscribing to this list.)
The social consequences of designed products and services is a
central theme of several conferences, including the Cultural
Attitudes towards Technology and Communication series, the
Association of Internet Researchers conferences, and the biennal
Participatory Design Conferences sponsored by Computer Professionals
for Social Responsibility dating back to 1992. Come to think of it,
most of the research and activities of CPSR involves the _social_
consequences of computing and technology.
Many participants in the Scandinavian informatics and HCI traditions
base their work on the understanding that our tools are inextricably
linked with the social uses of our tools. Many of our best scholars
and scientists take this as a starting point. Some people here are
technologists and engineers with no sense for the social consequences
of their work. Others like Erik Stolterman and Pelle Ehn focus on
this.
When I started at the Norwegian School of Management, much of the
work in my department focused on information science, including what
later came to be labeled knowledge management and the related field
of organizational learning. Several of us worked primarily on the
social effects of information technology with special emphasis on the
kinds of social and cultural structures that resulted from different
kinds of informational and organizational structures and technologies.
A distinguished scholar once argued that all technologies are social
technologies. This is the foundation of a wide range of research
traditions. Many of these traditions ask explicitly how the ways we
design artifacts influences the social consequences of the way people
use them, others ask how these artifacts shape the cultures and
societies that use them, while still others ask how designed
artifacts influence the behavior and being of the people that use
them.
If we move beyond the products we design to the systems and social
artifacts we design, there is even more work being done.
In this regard, Karel's comment on "approach[ing] areas like
'organizational management' and 'policy development' as design as
well" is quite apt. There IS a field of organizational management
that works with organization design. The field dates back over a
century now, beginning in some of the aspects of Max Weber's work,
developed extensively by Mary Parker Follett and others, and most
recently typified by such thinkers as Peter Drucker or Tom Peters
among widely known writers, or by Karl Weick, Herbert Simon, or Lucy
Suchman whose work interests specialists. Among the kinds of
questions we ask in organization theory are: "how can we best design
an organization for purpose [x]?", "what sources of tension are
inevitable in balancing two factors when we design an organization
for a certain activity?", "under what circumstances does making an
organization more efficient make it less effective?", or "how can we
shape social community processes in organizations to enhance
individual learning and personal growth while making the organization
more robust and better fitted to its stated goal?" On the applied
end, we try to design the organizations that will help the people who
work in them to achieve the purposes for which we design the
organizational structure.
An organization chart is a conceptual model for organization design
in much the same way that a series of design drawings, electrical
diagrams, and representations for chips and software, etc., are the
conceptual model for an iPod or a PowerBook. The literature of this
design field is so extensive that I won't even begin to list the
journals, organizations, conferences, web sites, etc., that focus on
organization design. We teach this subject -- organization design --
in thousands of business schools and we study organization theory in
most sociology departments as well as in most business schools as
well as in some places where we work with economics, behavioral
science, public administration, or political science. If you are
interested in seeing some examples of how we design organizations and
why we make some of the choices we make, Richard L. Daft's (2003)
survey text Organization Theory and Design will give you a rich
overview of the field. Along the way, Daft discusses how we
purposefully design organizational structure and organizational
culture to achieve specific goals, and he presents or refers to
hundreds of cases and articles on the results of this design activity.
Even without getting to this larger field that Kaarel mentions, there
is a rich literature on the "social consequences of products." This
topic is under-researched in the art and design school sector of the
design research community, but other sectors of the design research
community have years of research and a vast literature to their
credit. Some of this literature covers the same kinds of topics and
products that we might profitably study in our art and design schools
-- and much of it explicitly uses the term design, even though the
sector goes under another label in the departmental structure of most
universities.
The names we give to the places we study and teach design do not
always indicate the kinds of design issues we study in our research
or teach for professional practice. For example, we research and
teach organization design in three departments at the Norwegian
School of Management -- the Department of Organization and Leadership
(my former department), the Department of Communication, Culture, and
Language (my current department), and the Department of Strategy and
Logistics. We do research on this, and we teach students how,
specifically, to design organizations and social structures for
specific consequences. In one of these departments, Organization and
Leadership, a large faculty group studies how to design information
systems and computer systems in organizations. Much of their work
involves the social consequences of the products they design or
configure.
The literature of all these fields is extensive, and much of it is
collected in bibliographies and data bases. One problem in the "art
and design" sector of design research is that some of us don't look
at the literature of other design research sectors. Admittedly, this
is a failing that our bibliographers and data base organizers do not
correct. As an advisor to ArtBibliographies Modern, I have been
trying to encourage a broader range of design journals that study
function and consequences without much luck -- we cover design
criticism and design history, but we miss many of the journals that
we ought to cover. This is, in part, a result of the origins of ABM
as an abstracting tool and database for art and architecture
libraries serving a primary audience of librarians and art
historians, including design historians. If enough design librarians
and design historians were to call for a richer base of abstracts and
titles, we'd get it. In fact, today's information technology would
make it easily possible for publishers to exchange the necessary
information in a quasi-automated form.
If we are going to advance the conversation as we should, we should
broaden the conversation to include the design research fields
outside art and design. This might also help our budgets --
relatively few art and design schools can afford to teach all the
courses we need if we are to expand this inquiry to the undergraduate
level. We can borrow teachers from other departments and schools to
work on these issues. This is something the Oslo National College of
Art and Design is considering now together with the Norwegian School
of Management.
One example might be teaching organization theory to design students.
This would have two benefits. One is a better understanding of how
products and services move from conception to production, with an
emphasis on processes that designers need to implement them. (This is
a political process, and knowing how to use this political process
helps designers to work effectively, as Danny Butt pointed out.) The
other benefit is an explicit literature that shows how design choices
lead to and shape social outcomes. This second benefit may not map
directly onto product design or graphic design, but it will help
design students to learn to think about the questions you propose we
ask.
There are some successful examples already at work in Christena
Nippert-Eng's courses at Illinois Institute of Technology or Liz
Sanders's courses at Ohio State University. I'm sure there are more.
And there is also something to learn from surprising design fields.
Take the example of homiletics, the art of preaching. Preachers learn
to design sermons to generate both a flow of attention and a social
response. The larger art of designing a worship service includes the
placement and use of music, the use of narrative preaching as
contrasted with prophetic preaching, and a wide range of issues that
might usefully help us better to design technologies and tools for
music, software for community practice, or web sites for social
communication. I'm just offering one example that comes to mind from
hundreds, and I do so to show that there is a specific form of design
research and design practice taking place in a field so far from art
and design school studies that some people reading this paragraph are
shaking their heads while others are just waiting for me to end the
sermon with an apt verse. I'm not going do it. I just wanted to
provide an example. Incidentally, church history provides an example
similar to that of the iPod in the shift from public reading to
private reading that took place with the development of the printed
Bible. Much like public music activities, people still got together
for preaching, prayer, and singing.
I'd apologize for this long post, but I think this follows so
significantly in generating the kinds of conversation you advocate
that I'll simply thank those who decided to read the whole way
through.
One of the ways to enrich our conversation is by speaking with and
listening to colleagues from different fields of design research.
Some examples and resources appear below.
Yours,
Ken
--
References
Daft, Richard L. 2003. Organization Theory and Design, 8th edition.
South-Western College Publishing.
Resources:
ArtBibliographies Modern
http://www.csa.com/factsheets/artbm-set-c.php
Artifact
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17493463.asp
Association of Internet Researchers
http://aoir.org/
CoDesign
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/15710882.asp
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
http://www.cpsr.org/
Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication Conferences
http://www.it.murdoch.edu.au/catac/
Information, Communication, and Society
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/1369118x.asp
Information and Society
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/01972243.asp
The Journal of Community Informatics
http://www.ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej
New Media and Society
http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsProdDesc.nav?prodId=Journal200834
Participatory Design Conferences
https://www.cpsr.org/act/events/pdc
Victor Margolin wrote:
--snip--
1) the social consequences of products is an under researched topic
within the design research community
2) the work that has been done on this subject thus far is still
little known and has certainly not been collected into bibliographies
or data bases
3) there is a need for courses on this topic at all levels of design education
4) in certain product fields, criticism is intense but it usually
centers on technical functions of products. This is the case in the
computer field as I can attest to from belonging to a Mac list. Apple
takes it on the chin every day but also receives praise for good
moves. Such intense and informed feedback makes Apple products
better. But we still don't know enough about how products like the
iPod are changing social relations and commercial practices (i.e.
downloading music, personalizing all music experiences, shutting down
music programs on the radio, turning what was once a more public
experience of discovering new music and listening to it into a
private one.)
5) we need to think more about the personal social norms that we as
researchers would use to develop critiques of products. these will
not be the same for everyone but they will and should become
articulated positions in public debates about how we do and might
live. The product world in all its forms should be part of that
debate.
--snip--
--
Prof. Ken Friedman
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management
Oslo
Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School
Copenhagen
+47 46.41.06.76 Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat
email: [log in to unmask]
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