³Users²
I consider the terms users and user groups, stakeholders, constituents, and
shareholders under discussion as all being central to the political
structure of designing. The variation in their use and meaning is probably
mostly due to an historically situated professional semantic. But they all
relate to the power of deciding who and how people participate in
transformative processes - who initiates and how a process is initiated -
how an existing situation is described and who gets to do the describing -
who decides and how it is determined that a situation has been resolved.
From my perspective as a planning and urban design consultant, the political
dimension of designing is a major contributor to the wickedness of
³problems² in designing. The social construction of ³existing conditions² is
hardly ever tidy, and the designer (usually a design team of consultants)
plays an important role in setting up a process in which ³problems² evolve
and everyone learns one of the public ways I prefer to explain designing
(instead of having to say heuristic).
In the 70s and 80s, I worked with ³users² and ³user groups,² mainly as a
result of the University of Oregon¹s ³Oregon Experiment² with the pattern
language. The process as most everyone remembers had ³users² doing the
designing. Deans and others with administrative responsibility weren¹t
considered ³users,² at least initially, and professional designers were
asked to try to keep their experience to themselves so as not to corrupt the
process.
It is more common these days for the design teams I am a part of to work
with stakeholders, Citizen Advisory Committees, and Technical Advisory
Committees. The makeup of these groups is every bit as political and
power-oriented as ever, with interest groups all maneuvering to put their
people in a position to influence the outcome. It really does matter what
mind sets are brought to the table. People who view themselves, to use
Terry¹s example, as investors in a university conceived as a business, tend
to process information, describe situations and desirable outcomes from that
point of view.
Which is why I believe that theoretically it is important to see designing
(of the kind that I practice, anyway) as a valuing experience from
initiation in the poly-perception of difference with a will to do
something about it - to a state of resolution in some manner of politically
achievable formative expression.
Best to all,
Jerry
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Jerry Diethelm
Architect - Landscape Architect
Planning & Urban Design Consultant
Prof. Emeritus of Landscape Architecture
and Community Service € University of Oregon
2652 Agate St., Eugene, OR 97403
€ e-mail: [log in to unmask]
€ web: http://www.uoregon.edu/~diethelm
€ 541-686-0585 home/work 541-346-1441 UO
€ 541-206-2947 work/cell
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