Dear Katherine and all
Very glad to learn about your focus on communication artifacts as tools in
social power relations. Hopefully a systematic comparative study of the
relative efficacy of each of those tools will help your students designing
better ones. Please keep me posted on any output both from you and your
students.
Anyone else on this list focusing more on studying artifacts and their
effects?
Regards,
Francois
Kigali
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 9:16 PM, Katherine J Hepworth <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> Hi Francois and Ali
>
> Francois - I agree that investigation of designed artifacts is more
> fruitful than interviews with designers. I have found this to be true in my
> design history research. Interviews with designers can be helpful, but they
> need to be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism and carefully fact
> checked.
>
> Perhaps the ‘artifact first' approach has been neglected, but there are
> people other than David Sless doing work on this area. Like me!
>
> Ali - While I agree with your concerns about actor network theory, there
> are other frameworks for studying the influence designed artifacts have,
> without resorting to the claim that they have agency.
>
> A paper of mine that delves into one such framework for investigating the
> influence of designed artifacts has just been published in Design and
> Culture: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/G5ry4djAfawi5PCZBzyX/full
>
> Because I’m particularly interested in studying how design artifacts
> participate in human power exchanges (both big, societal and small
> interpersonal exchanges) I approach this problem using the Foucauldian
> concept of discourse technologies. The ‘discursive method' framework was
> developed for studying design historical artifacts, but I think it has
> potential to be adapted for studying present day artifacts in design
> research.
>
> Katherine Hepworth
>
>
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|