Dear all,
my experience of, and interest in STS seems to be oriented in quite a different direction from what most of you who have responded seem to be speaking about. I suspect it’s because I don’t practice applied design, rather I undertake design research as a way of thinking/engaging in philosophy. I could be wrong though. In any case, my interests with regard Whitehead’s notions around the bifurcation of nature (the dualism I wrote of in the post that launched this thread) relate to Feminist STS and ecology: notions of care (de la Bellacasa, 2011, 2015), staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016), discussions of Ecology (f.x. Morton 2007, 2010), Stengers on Cosmopolitics (2005+) and on Whitehead (2011), new materialisms (Barad, 2003, 2007; Bennett, 2009), and more.
In reflecting on the comments people have made, I suspect that my thinking around what sits at the frontier of design research differs from what I have read here because I am not held to account for products or services I put in the world, rather I am held to account for how successful I may or may not be when thinking, when trying to articulate my thinking, and when trying to support diverse others to surface ideas and develop understandings? Some of the ideas I explore relate to how designers and scientists and materials technologists might work together well, or how technologists might think in other ways about the technologies they are developing, by engaging with materiality in new ways (Bertran, et al, 2018. OR Vannucci, et al., 2018), but I typically operate in very speculative spaces because this is where I am most comfortable, where I operate best, where I am most destabilised and excited to be (Wilde + Underwood, 2018 explores both of these ideas, but does so in a highly conceptual way). At the same time I try really hard to bring my speculations into very real spaces, and have recently undergone two turns in my research, towards biology as a design material, and food as a starting point for thinking...
Perhaps, those of you who work in very applied areas of design find my orientations out of scope, but from my perspective, if we don’t think, then what do we have? Humans are embodied, as such we engage with the world through all of our senses. We thus think through all of our senses all of the time, whether or not we are conscious that that is what we are doing. So when we make anything, we are thinking. I am not suggesting that those of you who have contributed to this thread so far are not thinking, quite the opposite, I am suggesting that, as designers, we are always thinking in divergent ways, and can always think little more.
The attraction I am finding to STS is that all they seem to do is think. While this would not work for me (thinking as an abstract activity, independent of material entanglements), I find some of the outcomes surprising and stimulating — destabilising in useful ways. Importantly, I am not looking for utility, in any pragmatic sense, rather I look for destabilisation—fruitful disruption, to help me arrive at something new. It gets back to a number of things Klaus has written in this thread, most recently: An ecology is always in motion. If an ecology is always in motion, then I need to be too. Even if it is to actively try to stay where we are (as proposed by David Sless).
So perhaps, rather than making this conversation a question of whether or not STS has value (which is an interesting conversation, but perhaps can only go so far in the context of this list), can I suggest we come back to one of my original questions, which was:
what do people on this list—at all career levels, including early career researchers and PhD candidates, as well as more seasoned researchers—consider to be the frontiers of design research at present?
whether or not you are into STS is not necessarily important here. The question relates more strongly to what individuals in this community (the community constituted around this list) might see as the frontiers of design research at present, how divergent/convergent or otherwise related or not those visions might be.
(and if you want to keep talking about STS, by all means do, but I’d love to hear a bit more about the above question)
best,
Danielle
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REFS:
Barad, Karen. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. duke university Press, 2007.
Barad, Karen. "Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter." Signs: Journal of women in culture and society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801-831.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press, 2009.
de la Bellacasa, Maria Puig. "Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things." Social studies of science 41, no. 1 (2011): 85-106.
Bertran, F. A., Jhaveri, S., Lutz, R., Isbister, K., Wilde, D. Visualising the landscape of Human-Food Interaction research. DIS2018, In Proc. Designing Interactive Systems. ACM (2018): 243–248.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Morton, Timothy. Ecology without nature: Rethinking environmental aesthetics. Harvard University Press, 2007.
Morton, Timothy. The ecological thought. Harvard University Press, 2010.
Stengers, Isabelle. "The cosmopolitical proposal." Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy 994 (2005): 994.
Stengers, Isabelle. "Thinking with Whitehead: A free and wild creation of concepts." (2011).
Vannucci, E., Bertran, F. A., Marshall, J., Wilde, D. Hand-making food ideals: crafting the design of future food-related technologies. DIS2018, In Proc. Designing Interactive Systems. ACM (2018): 419–422
Wilde, D., Underwood, J. Designing towards the Unknown: Engaging with Material and Aesthetic Uncertainty. Informatics 2018, 5(1), 1; doi:10.3390/informatics5010001
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