Taking [a] part. The politics and aesthetics of participation in Experience-Centered Design.
John McCarthy; Peter Wright. MIT Press, 2015.
Book review by Adeline Gil.
Same content in Portuguese: https://bit.ly/3rGLxKL
McCarthy and Wright are recognized authors in the Experience-Centered Design field, and in this publication, they develop a space for critical enquiry into participatory experience from a dialogical approach by researching, questioning and analyzing “what is made sensible” in some participatory projects. They consider the values, processes and consequences of reconfiguring participation in more experimental participatory projects. According to the authors, “the critical question for participatory projects is whether the sociomaterial configurations that they make sensible (…) create opportunities for the dialogic of differently placed experts that can bring about change”.
In this sense, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) can embrace more fully the aesthetics and politics of participation, especially in the context of projects that have not been designed to confirm already established knowledge, which is the case of the projects discussed. In a design enquiry, such as in participatory projects, there is a commitment to openness and this is pivotal to their argument about how participatory projects can create a step change in HCI.
In a dialogue with Rancière´s critical analysis of emancipation, the authors describe aspects in some participatory projects that have the potential to facilitate the emergence of creative activities in individuals and communities.
They raise questions about different approaches to creating platforms that make it possible to:
- Motivate members to engage at scale deliberatively;
- Support the emergence of grassroots issues and vernacular rhetorics;
- Facilitate the emergence of forms of social (re-) configuration.
The aspects described in several projects are related to a multilayered conceptualization of openness: how and when the project is open and whether that openness has been deliberately designed; what roles should people be given and what should be allowed to emerge. Also, “to what extent the relationships between participants and technology describe an architecture that is dynamic, responsive, and conversant”. The authors develop these constructions based on the previous works of Eco, Jenkins, Ahmed, Rancière, Bakhtin, among others.
There are some conceptualizations of openness that we can identify (examples will be given afterwards, along with the genres of participatory projects):
- Openness to readings and appropriations;
- Invitation to develop the work together with the author (composing, assembling, controlling): the user becomes creatively responsible for the work of art, reconfiguring designer-user relations;
- Authors construct platforms that effectively scaffold the participants to create, compose and perform their own works. These include platforms that support the emergence and growth of new configurations and forms of participation beyond the project. This is also related to some level of responsivity to the unpredictability of events.
From these visions, they present four genres of participatory projects, which could be defined in terms of similarities in style, form, strategy, situation or audience. In this enquiry, however, they are defined instead as “recurring, meaningful, dialogical patterns of going on with others in particular cultural contexts that co evolve with use”. This means that this classification in genres is not necessarily exclusive and that genres can be combined and evolve.
1- Understanding the other is the first genre discussed. Participation can be seen as a form of encounter with otherness, a dialogical encounter, open and unfinalized. From this encounter, new meaning and new ways of imagining social experience are brought about. In this context, it is important to make the participation sensible, which involves people, roles, the artifacts that mediate participation and the ideas that frame participation (including institutional framings).
Depending on the distribution of the sensible that shapes the modes of perception, different modes of participation are produced. Here, participants are invited to learn from this dialogical encounter in relatively “impersonal” experiments on collective participation.
One of the examples cited of potentially transformative ways to reconfigure social relations is the participatory musical performance Humanaquarium [1]: a form of enquiry that depends on keeping experience alive. It is open in two senses: it was completed not only by the audience but also by the designers — it was changed, redesigned and evolved during the lifetime of the project.
Another cited example is the work of Michael Asher, a conceptual artist, who made alternative social configurations visible, helping to create new possibilities for action and new ways of being through the action of individuals in a given situation. Asher’s work is about the emergence of subjectivities, rather than a coming together of preexisting selves.
2- Building personal relationships is the second genre. Here, participation is more personal and durational, identities are implicated and there is a focus on making lasting changes to interpersonal relationships. Rather than having an audience actively engaged in the construction of meaning or content, in some kind of “equality” between performer and audience, this genre is about difference. It is also about going beyond the function of providing “solutions to problems already given, toward a commitment to redefine social arrangements, challenge institutional norms, and make social relations possible”.
The main example for this genre is the project Personhood [2], which focuses on the maintenance of self-identity in dementia. In this project, designers, medical doctors and families together with patients helped to create objects that can act as agents for change in the way families or communities consider the maintenance of personhood in dementia.
In the conceptualization of this genre, McCarthy and Wright introduce Rancière´s approach to the “emancipated spectator”, which is about making existing patterns of participation sensible and perceptible, and redistributing the sensible, which means, redistributing power. From this conceptualization, they argue that “design is concerned with what modes of perception and participation are made available through the production, reproduction, and transformation of sociomaterial assemblages”, creating situations in which voices of dissensus can be heard.
Another example cited is the project BOSOP [3] — Better Outpatient Services for Older People — in which the research team designed a process for building commitment and mutual trust within the project, through activities that aimed at sharing experience and coming up with plans for improvement.
Along with Beech [4], the authors discuss the limitations of thinking in a binary logic, such as: participation or exclusion, performer and audience, active and passive, designer and user, which cannot accommodate the variety of relations and positions that develop. Through Beech´s qualitative approach, these relations can be expressed in complementary, contradictory, consensual or dissensual ways. Another author that participates in the construction of this multifaceted theoretical foundation is Forester [5], for whom the participatory dialogue is about sense making, not problem solving. In this sense, design should also be forward looking, more than problem solving.
3- Designing for communities is the third genre described. Here, the orientation is toward concrete, named others and the process is played out in social contexts in which experiences such as belonging, identification and disidentification are heightened.
Prayer Companion [6] is an example of a community participatory project. It was developed for nuns who live in a monastery in York, England, with the purpose of alerting them to issues that need their prayers. It is a device designed to be unobtrusive, considering the everyday languages and practices of older people living in a convent, minimizing its distracting potential.
4- Participating in Publics is the fourth genre which, according to the authors, is an increasingly salient participatory genre. With previous works of Dewey (1927), Warner (2002), Varnelis (2012), among others, they discourse on how a public is constituted primarily through relations between strangers and a public can emerge in response to a shared experience.
Within User Centered Design, it is standard practice that members of the public are involved in the design process as users. However, some projects tend to create a greater involvement of other governance structures, expanding the possibilities of participation of diverse actors. In this sense,
Design can be seen more and more as a discipline in supporting public engagement in civic and political issues.
Regarding the support of participation, it should be mentioned that there is a logic of inclusive design that consists in making it open to interpretations and appropriations, and another existing practice in the design field, which is led by “Design Thinking”, consists in making the methods of production of an artifact generalizable to other situations.
In order to define methods in Interaction Design as well as in Participatory Action Research, it’s important to consider what kinds of information or responses that each method is good for, and also, to include as outcomes not only the artifacts but the “complexities of multistakeholder outcomes”, including the collective experiences and shared understandings that have been gained. According to the authors, development is a politically sensitive area in which stakeholder organizations have influence on the practice and purpose of development projects, and it inevitably shapes the kinds of participative experiences that take place.
As cited previously, according to Rancière, the internal relation between aesthetics and politics is based on the partition and distribution of the sensible, in which two conflicting meanings coexist: a) the sharing of something common and b) censorship of this “common” in exclusive parts. It means, at once: participation and separation; union and division of spaces, functions, actions and so on. For him, politics and art can only update the principle of equality by means of dissensus: by breaking crystallized relationships of domination, creating a fissure in the established order, and thus, transforming a given configuration of a state of affairs.
It is still a challenge to create conditions for the emergence of new forms of participation, for the emergence of a self-organizing and internally regulating “community of sense” that generates its own thresholds through controlling what is made sensible within the community. For McCarthy and Wright, an innovative leap from the logic that governs situations requires imagining and articulating an alternative logic in a meaningful way. By designing on the threshold between the individual and the collective, HCI can be seen as a creative act inserted in common sense that seeks to nurture technological imaginaries, to reconfigure subjective positionings, and to reorder the power between and within groups.
[1] http://www.robyntaylor.com/humanaquarium.html
[2] https://www.jaynewallace.com/personhood-in-dementia
[3] http://www.uchd.org.uk/uchd-in-action/outpatient-services
[4] https://visualintosocial.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/include-me-out-dave-beech/
[5] Forester, J. 1985. Designing: Making sense together in practical conversations. Journal of Architectural Education 38 (3): 14–20.
[6] https://www.moma.org/collection/works/145526
- Originally published in:
GIL, A. G. S. Book review: Taking [a]part. The politics and aesthetics of participation in Experience-Centered Design. In: Interaction Design Association, 2016. However, this link is broken on the ixda website.
