Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design

DESIGN AND CULTURE VOLUME 4, ISSUE 1 PP 27–54 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY © BERG 2012 PRINTED IN THE UK ABSTRACT This article argues for an active role for theory in designing, especially feminist theory and cultural studies, both as a means of theorizing design through the work of designers and as a means of reflecting on the complex contexts in which designing takes place and designs take hold. This has particular relevance in the participatory and user-centered frameworks increasingly favored in design practices and education. Changes in design methods, the emergence of “design thinking” in a range of fields including but not always linked to design, and the growth of contemporary “social design” over the past two decades have greatly shifted design practices and contexts. This article argues that Donald Schön’s exploration and theorization of “reflective practice” should be expanded to include a framework Design and Culture Shana Agid is an Assistant Professor in Art, Media + Technology at Parsons the New School for Design. Her work focuses on relationships of power and difference, particularly regarding sexuality, race, and gender in visual and political cultures. He has an MFA in Printmaking and Book Arts and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts, is the Art Director for Radical Teacher, and is on the board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS). [email protected] 27 Shana Agid DOI: 10.2752/175470812X13176523285110 Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design Shana Agid for seeing what designers are “reflecting through” in relationship to their own position and location. Building on Lucy Suchman’s argument for “located accountability,” the author proposes that critical engagement with a range of theories of worldmaking and worldknowing to increase and ground design and designers’ points of reference is critical to practice and, therefore, education in design fields. KEYWORDS: situated knowledge, reflective practice, design education, race, identity, power, critical studio, critical design In design we can see the representation of arguments about how life ought to be lived. Design is the result of choices. Who makes those choices and why? What views of the world underlie them and in what ways do designers expect to make a world view manifest in their work? Victor Margolin, “Design Studies and the Education of Designers” (1991) 28 Design and Culture Design/Learning/Theory/Practice In a 1991 article, “Design Studies and the Education of Designers,” Victor Margolin argued for shifts in design education to do three things: acknowledge a broader conceptualization of what “design” is and might include; press design and designing into a more deeply theorized space that takes into account the influences and potential impacts of other disciplines, especially in the humanities and cultural studies; and teach design students to see design and their work as designers as both reflective and productive of “social values and policies.” Margolin called for design education to look more closely at design in new or multiple contexts: through the lenses of parallel and intersecting design fields; through “theories such as literary studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, feminism, and the broader field of history,” which he noted were playing a significant role in “shaking the foundations” of art history in ways that were pushing art students (not just art historians) to become “more literate, critical, and self-aware artists”; and, finally, through “designed objects, services, and techniques in society” themselves (1991). Twenty years hence, many of these themes and ideas about where, how, and with what (and whom) design and design education ought to engage are prevalent and even commonplace. Design for “social change” has become both an organizing and rhetorical framework for individual courses and programs in design schools, as well as for small non-profit design groups like Social Impact Studios in Philadelphia, major global design consultancies such as IDEO, and government initiatives such as the UK’s Design Council. Design 29 education is rapidly expanding to include trans- and cross-disciplinary programs that are explicitly linked to the changing requirements of design practice. The concept of applying the design processes of proposition, prototyping, and iteration (often reflecting changes gleaned from failures), generally referred to broadly in these contexts as “design thinking” (Tonkinwise 2010), is being rapidly taken up by businesses and in the education of managers (Dunne 2009; Martin 2009).1 Despite this adoption of the sometimes rigorous, sometimes reflexive, consideration of the multiplicity of venues and possibilities for design, some foundations of design have not been made to shake. Margolin posited that engagement with critical theory was one of the key shifts to be made in design education. Such an engagement would, first, place design in a broader context of social and cultural inquiry and production. Secondly, engaging theory in designing would develop a vocal engagement with designers’ roles, and the implications of their work, in such production while also challenging that work to be theoretically informed (1991). As design and designers have taken up the social and inter-disciplinary as primary sites of, or contexts for, designing, it appears at times to be at the (sometimes explicit) expense of meaningful engagement with theoretical and contextual approaches that might productively problematize and ground these new design practices, especially as they make legible issues of power, politics, and the impact of designers’ own positions other than that of being a designer. Margolin’s argument appeared in the first of two issues, published eighteen years apart, of ELISAVA TdD2 focused on design and education. In the second, published in 2009, the majority of authors now take for granted variations on his proposals: that the present and near future of design education is and ought to be focused on a multifaceted approach to design that facilitates both broad and in-depth knowledge, an ability to work with practitioners and researchers from other fields, including the social sciences, and an orientation toward what the AIGA called “responsible outcomes,” modified by one author as “seeking sustainable solutions and adopting a human-centered approach” (Collina 2009). Over half of the articles consider either specific projects or general trends in design education that are focused on “social design” (Collina 2009; Lodaya 2009; Szentpéteri 2009; Tamayo 2009; Tomico 2009).3 Another article, written by David Dunne (2009), faculty at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, Canada, discusses the role of design thinking in reshaping MBA education. While this issue of ELISAVA TdD is in no way all-encompassing, it acts nonetheless as a compelling locus of contemporary conversations about designs’ futures as well as the education current designers and design teachers imagine is needed to ground them. And so the conspicuous absence of theory – ideas and propositions that challenge designers not only to expand their tools for Design and Culture Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design 30 Design and Culture Shana Agid designing, but to also critique or place in context all these tools (old and new) – is striking, especially given the clear saturation of the idea of design’s social focus across design fields. These gaps in the role of theory in designing (and design in rendering or making theory) are being meaningfully considered in some areas of design practice and theory. These include, for example, work in Critical Design by practitioners and scholars such as Dunne + Raby and Alex Wilkie and Mike Michaels, Lucy Suchman’s (2002) consideration of situated accountability in design, which has been taken up by designers and scholars in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), in particular, and considerations of theorizing in and through design by Anne Burdick (2009) and Carl DiSalvo (2009). I will discuss these more specifically below, but I also seek to build on their proposals and interventions to insist on the relevance to designing and design education of cultural theory and theorizations of power and difference (including constructions and materializations of race and racism, capital and class, and gender and sexuality, for example). In this article, I am interested in positing an active role for theory in designing, both as a means of theorizing design through the work of designers and as a means of insisting upon retaining the complex contexts in which designing takes place and designs take hold, especially in the participatory and user-centered frameworks increasingly favored in design practices and education. How might literacy in not just big-T Theory, but in the act and practice of doing theory – making grounded ideas – deepen design’s engagement with the social and political worlds in which it is embedded? If one piece of the work of designers is to learn from existing and accumulated knowledge of things in the world in order to make, represent, and imagine new or differently designed things in the world, how can deep critical engagement with theories of world-making and -knowing increase and ground a designer’s points of reference? What role can we imagine for design education in productively destabilizing assumptions of the situatedness of the designer or designing? Relationships between design education and design practices have long been an important factor in shaping how design education is imagined and articulated (Jaffee 2005). Historically, this link primarily focused on design education as technical preparation for industry, an approach that of course is prevalent still today. Even as this is the case, a number of designer educators have, like Margolin, made a range of arguments for additional, if not alternative, ways of both conceiving and shaping design education and its connections to professional practice (see, for example, Buchanan 1998, 2004; Faiola 2007; Hanington 2010). As this relationship of education to practice is reworked, it has become ever more important to conceptions of the aims, boundaries, and requirements of design practices, with some authors arguing that design education, increasingly, will lead practice and both anticipate and build capacities for the roles that design and designers might play in a range of fields Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design and circumstances (Buchanan 1998; Faiola 2007; Ward and Wilkie 2009). Articulations of the relationships between design education and practices have continued to evolve, especially as design has become both more integrated into broader university programs and is envisioned and structured to include ever more “general” liberal arts attributes (Bendiner-Viani and Maltby 2010; Buchanan 1998; Hanington 2010). This move in design education both reflects and predicts broad calls for design practices to work in and through science and social science (and in teams with those practitioners), and, to a lesser degree, work with and through other disciplines, especially in relationship to contextual analysis and thinking. An appreciation of the significance of the ongoing link between design education and practice – the specific notion that design education prepares students both for design practice and increasingly for other forms of making and doing – inflects the approach I take in this article. By focusing aspects of my discussion on specific teaching and learning situations (my own and others), I intend to make explicit the ramifications for professional practices and design broadly of what are or are not engaged as central questions and practices in classroom-based and educational experiences. I begin by working through Donald Schön’s (1983, 1987) highly influential educational and professional theories of reflective practice to imagine what might be missing from his already nuanced understandings of the role of reflection in the work of designing. Building on Donna Haraway’s (1991) argument for a feminist theory of “situated knowledge,” in which the history, location, and relative access to or lack of privilege of an observer is understood to impact both what is seen and how it is considered relevant (or not), I argue that there is a critical role to be played in developing and engaging theory/practice practices beginning in educational situations as a means of challenging and informing design practices, and, indeed, design futures. 31 Donald Schön’s exploration and theorization of “reflective practice,” including his work in two important books, The Reflective Practitioner (1983) and Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987), has been widely cited, engaged, and critiqued across a number of fields, including design, health care, social services, and education (Tonkinwise 2004; Kinsella 2007). Schön’s observations of architecture studio courses as part of educational research led to his formulation of linked ideas about how knowledge both functions and is formulated – and ultimately professionalized and taught – in various professional disciplines, using design as an exemplar. While ongoing discussions of Schön’s work, including its impact on research about design processes and design education and its use and misuse in the past two decades, are relevant to the current discussion, they are beyond the scope of this article. Here, I will focus briefly on some of Schön’s key working theories for design-making, what Schön calls Design and Culture Reflective Practice/Situated Practices: -in, -on, -through Shana Agid “knowing-in-action,” “reflection-on-action,” and “reflection-in-action” (1987: 25–6). Schön defines the first of these, “knowing-in-action,” simply as “the sorts of know-how we reveal in our intelligent action … we reveal [knowing] by our spontaneous, skillful execution of the performance; and we are characteristically unable to make it verbally explicit” (1987: 25). In this way, Schön begins to articulate his conception of forms of knowing that are neither predetermined in the mind, then carried out in action, nor demonstrated through articulations in language or description (Schön 1987; Kinsella 2007). This knowing-in-action can shift into one of two forms of reflection, Schön argues, when our use of this knowledge hits an unfamiliar obstacle, a new situation, or begins to “feel odd … because, for some reason, we have begun to look at [it] in a new way” (26). One way of reflecting in these instances can be a looking-back-on the situation to discern what might have happened and what might be learned from it; what Schön calls “reflection-on-action.” Alternatively, we might do something more reflexive, as it were; what Schön describes as reflecting “in the midst of action without interrupting it. In an action-present – a period of time, variable with the context, during which we can still make a difference to the situation at hand – our thinking serves to reshape what we are doing while we are doing it” (26). In Schön’s development of his theory of the reflective practitioner, then, he brings his attention to the ways in which professional practices, of designers and others, are shaped through reflection on this reflective process, which produces in itself new knowledge and new capacities. As Cameron Tonkinwise notes, Schön was making an argument (sometimes against himself) for a kind of hyper-reflexivity of the designer, or other reflective practitioner in any field: 32 Design and Culture Schön is forever in a bind; on the one hand, he wants to insist that reflection is inherent to being a human, a human subject; yet, on the other hand, he wants to reserve reflection for the expert practice of designerly professionals. The difference will be the techniques of reflection which the latter use in disciplined ways. To put this another way, if being oneself means being reflective, being a reflective practitioner involves techniques for reflecting that take one beyond your self. (2007: 2) Schön’s insistence on the general relevance of reflection as a human practice, not only a professional one, came in part through his attempts to challenge what he referred to as “technical rationality” (1987: 34, for example), or the notion that a good professional practitioner is working in reference to more broadly recognized rules and truths, against which incongruencies in the practitioner’s experience will be measured and resolved. Rather, Schön argued for a “constructionist” approach in which, Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design This concept of “worldmaking” becomes especially important when considering a question I will engage with more fully below, namely, when designers engage in worldmaking in the course of their design practice (or education), what worlds are being made? And through what sorts of reflections are they shaped? In Schön’s 1988 article, “Designing: Rules, Types and Worlds,” he argues that in order to theorize the working methods of designers – and, he suggests, “professional practitioners” more broadly – one must look at design practice through four “tensions”: tacit and explicit knowledge, uniqueness and generality, generativity and cumulativeness, and, finally, pluralism and commonality. As we have seen, Schön argues that designers’ knowledge of their practices as designers is tacit, even as they work through problems and provocations in a reflective mode. In the first pairing, then, he poses a problem: how do designers clearly know and yet not have the capacity to articulate that knowing to make it explicit (except perhaps through the designed thing itself)? Linked to this is the way in which designers’ practices are simultaneously shaped by a designer’s general knowledge and their approach to each design problem as a unique case. Schön asks how one can then explain or understand “design reasoning” in relationship to designers’ judgments and the contexts for those judgments; if a designer asserts a thing works or doesn’t work, “is matched or mismatched to its environment,” what are the reference points against which it is being measured if each case is unique? Third, Schön argues that designers are working from knowledge that is acquired through experiences over time and at the same time make new decisions and determinations in relationship to new projects or problems, leading to a question of how such cumulative knowledge, “design principles,” also lends itself to making new things, previously unimagined. Finally, Schön notes that design professions utilize groups of people to accomplish any major design goal, requiring communication sometimes across technical languages or areas of interest and investment. How, he asks, does this communication take place in such a way that makes possible the end result of a designed idea, space, object, etc? I am primarily interested in raising Schön’s design “tensions” here in order to consider them as part of a framework for broadening a consideration of what already does or what could impact any designer’s (or design student’s) engagement with these tensions in their work. Additionally, I want to suggest that there is a role for design education in working to explicate and expand the questions 33 Design and Culture … our perceptions, appreciations, and beliefs are rooted in worlds of our own making that we come to accept as reality [as opposed to the objectivist presumption of an absolute reality or set of facts]. Communities of practitioners are continually engaged in what Nelson Goodman (1978) calls “worldmaking.” (1987: 36) [emphasis in original] 34 Design and Culture Shana Agid Schön raises. It seems important to consider that each of Schön’s four areas highlight other areas of tacit belief, not exactly the tacit knowledge he describes, but other working knowledges, presumptions, and effects of experiential learning that go unremarked upon in Schön’s analysis, and, I would argue, in much of design and design education more broadly. Specifically, Schön explicitly marks areas in which the impact of designers’ own assumptions becomes central to the practice of designing (through tacit knowledge, judgment, problem-setting, and communication and collaboration) (1988). These kinds of “working knowledges,” however, are not formed in a vacuum, nor are they in any way limited to the peculiarities of design-making. Donna Haraway’s (1991) theorization of “situated knowledges,” is instructive here, as, like Schön, Haraway suggests that a researcher’s way of knowing shapes what is known. However, her notion of position is explicitly a political one, where position is determined by the standpoint from which one sees, itself structured by relationships of power, especially, in her articulation, structures of race and gender. Unlike Schön, Haraway does not imagine the world of researchers to be one “of our own making,” but rather describes situated knowledge as making worlds knowable through “partial, locatable, critical knowledges” (191), which, taken together, allow meanings – and not totalizing meanings, but still partial and provisional ones – to be determined. In a 2002 article, “Located Accountabilities in Technology Production,” Lucy Suchman takes up Haraway’s theory in order to consider the relationships of designers and their colleagues in design processes to “users,” especially by working to denaturalize the designer/user dichotomy and “[reconstruct] relevant social relations that cross the boundaries between them” (94). Suchman argues that using a feminist theory of situated knowledge allows for an alternative way of coming to objective knowledges through “multiple, located, partial perspectives that find their objective character through ongoing processes of debate” (93). Following on Haraway’s assertion that all knowledge is knowledge from somewhere, she stresses that these processes, and the project of locating the somewhere(s) of design and designers’ practices, means also taking some responsibility for those practices and their effects (92, 94). Indeed, she notes that the designer/user opposition “closes off possibilities for recognizing the subtle and profound differences that actually do divide us,” and that working from this feminist framework of multiple situated knowledges “offers a way to replace [it] with a rich, densely structured landscape of identities and working relations within which we might begin to move with some awareness and clarity regarding our own positions” (92). Suchman’s argument focuses primarily on the sets of relationships among a range of people in a design process and in the multinational corporation in which she worked, and can be read in many ways as a complex and nuanced approach to, and critical rethinking of, the tenets of collaborative design and human-centered design, both staples of contemporary education and practice. However, the specificities of positionality in her argument – “that densely structured landscape” of “subtle and profound differences” – are articulated largely in terms of the location of a designer, or participant in design processes (Suchman herself is an anthropologist), in working relationships, and in the flawed designer/user dyad (see 93–4, for example). I want to extend Suchman’s analysis to more explicitly include the impact of knowledge situated by, for example, race, class, gender, sexuality, or immigration status on what can be seen and imagined. Adding back this aspect of Haraway’s argument allows an examination of what possibilities and limits extend from these located forms of knowledge to design processes and design questions and proposals.4 Along these lines, Marcel Stoetzler and Nira Yuval-Davis (2002) helpfully expand the notion of situated knowledge to the “situated imagination.” They argue that in order for a person to develop knowledge, one must also be in the process of imagining as a kind of development of seeing and knowing, so that what we “are ready to perceive and admit as (valid) experience depends on the particular mental setting that lies within the faculty of the imagination – which in this sense both constructs and is constructed by experience” (326). While Schön clearly argues that there is neither utility nor merit in the kind of objectivity Haraway describes as “the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere” (189), what is left out in his analysis is an interrogation of the social and political frames that structure what, as Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis put it, we “are ready to perceive and believe is valid.” Suchman’s work gives us a strong frame for complicating the position of designers as designers and considering the responsibility and accountability this role requires vis à vis that position in relationship to others. But design education must also begin to consider, and to teach in reference to, the ways in which designers’ assumptions are constructed and maintained through designers’ and design students’ positions as people in the world whose experiences outside design impact their tacit knowledges, their judgments, their problem-setting referents, and their approaches to communication and collaboration (including their sense of access or entitlement in contexts that require them). Jeffrey Hou, Isami Kinoshita, and Sawako Ono’s article about their collaborative, cross-cultural design studio taught between the University of Washington (UW) in the United States and Chiba University (CU) in Japan is a useful example of these kinds of specificity. In their discussion, the authors address the ways in which creating and discussing both exploratory assignments and design proposals brought differences in cultural and social positions and experiences to the fore through the work itself (Hou et al. 2005). The faculty gave an opening short assignment called “Homescapes” to 35 Design and Culture Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design Shana Agid Figure 1 “Tanada (rice terrace)” – a “Homescape” project depicting the agricultural landscape of the student’s hometown. Created by Masahiro Shimizu. Photograph by Jeff Hou. 36 Design and Culture students in both schools in which they were asked to “create physical representations of their home landscapes, using only a single sheet of paper” (130) (Figures 1 and 2). This exercise was designed to “introduce each other’s personal cultural background” and ultimately initiated a discussion about students’ “differences in terms of cultural background and design approach” (130). While this set the stage for an explicit acknowledgment of cultural and experiential differences, it neither negates nor eliminates those differences; rather, as the authors argue, it put them on the table as one factor in the design and collaborative processes. Figure 2 “Death to the Suburb” – a “Homescape” project representing the student’s critique of her suburban neighborhood. Created by Lisa Ostendorf. Photograph by Jeff Hou. As the course continued, students from UW and CU worked in pairs to propose designs for parks in each locale. In one instance, some of the UW students wanted to incorporate traditional Japanese architectural features into the Japanese park design, surprising their CU collaborators, who noted that the gates suggested were both used inappropriately and that “it was not customary at CU to explicitly incorporate iconic reference in design” (135). The authors note that this moment produced a learning opportunity about design as a “fundamentally cultural practice [that] embodies and serves as expression of cultural influence and preferences” (135). Indeed, the earlier exercises that put ideas of cultural and experiential difference into the learning environment may have paved the way for this design-specific conversation about difference and cultural representations. The design presumption that the UW students made that it would be appropriate and desirable to introduce traditional Japanese features into a park in Japan grew from their own perceptions of what might define that space, perceptions constrained, perhaps, by their presumptions about what might visually describe “Japanese” spaces. The capacity of a designer (and design fields, broadly) not only to see, but also to engage, questions of position and context as critical to designing is of central importance to the shifting terrain of design education. This in turn will require building into design education – and into studio learning, specifically – at least two major theoretical entanglements. First, we must understand and work in reference to structural and relational systems of power and their impact on our working “common sense.” Second, we must contend with the relationship of making and representing things to critically seeing existing and historical social/cultural/political worlds and, also, to making, representing, and imagining possible future worlds (or pieces of them). The experiences that design students bring to school as people whose socio-economic, race, gender, sexual, national, embodied, etc. positions likely have produced different ways of seeing, different sets of assumptions, and, importantly, different access to the privilege of not-seeing the impact of these positions, will necessarily affect their relationship to the tasks required of them and their perceptions of the contexts in which they are asked, encouraged, or made to work (Crenshaw 1991; Haraway 1991; Williams 1991; Harris 1993; Ellsworth and Miller 1996; Gordon [1997] 2008; Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002; King-Shey 2005; Alexander 2007). For design education to tackle this first area of theory – which perhaps could be broadly considered as in and around critical studies of identity, difference, and the systems of power that produce and maintain them – will mean re-imagining the practice of the “reflective practitioner” to include a broader consideration of social and political factors that might influence everything from how to design a design process to the shape and proposed impact of a designed thing. Additionally, it 37 Design and Culture Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design 38 Design and Culture Shana Agid could mean building into design studio work a critical engagement with one’s own unexamined or tacit “knowledge,” where the idea of what is known is, in fact, made an additional factor in the complex problem-setting process.5 Building skills to reflect on structural and relational systems of power will also mean teaching students how to learn about these systems and their impacts in different contexts, as they manifest both systemically and interpersonally. This consideration is not limited to those instances when it is precisely issues of difference, power, access to resources, etc. that are central to a design task. One could argue these are always already present if designing itself is a social practice in which people must work together across different professional and cultural languages, as Schön suggests (1988), and a political practice in which designers are “making arguments about how life should be lived,” as Margolin (1991) does. If the first of these proposals for an increased theorization of design and designing in design education focuses on the relevance of academic and other work on the role of identity, difference, and structures of power in producing and maintaining both personal orientations to events, things, and problems, and the ways people make sense of the same thing differently, the second argues that this, too, must be placed in broader theoretical and historical contexts. As one example of how this contextualization might impact ideas that determine forms of design education, Nicholas Addison (2007) makes a compelling argument in his article “Identity Politics and the Queering of Art Education: Inclusion and the Confessional Route to Salvation” about the limits of approaches to teaching art and design in secondary education that place examinations of identity in direct relation to self-expression and not in the broader context of theories of identity formation. Addison asserts that simply focusing on the “confessional” aspect of making work “about identity” in relation to the self can lead students both to “redeploy what may amount to stereotypical representations of difference” (13) through reference to art historical and contemporary media symbols and markers of race, gender, ethnicity, or religion, and produce “heavily self-censored” work, “especially in relation to non-heteronormative, queer sexualities” (11). While focused on the specific (romanticized) use of “making” for self-expression and self-invention in secondary school curricula, Addison makes an argument with critical relevance to the higher education context, as well. He notes that such a decontextualized approach to identity “expression” through making (often the making of self-portraits) not only reifies the idea of art and design as constituted by making practices alone, but misses an opportunity to “engage students in discussion and investigative practices” (15) that unpack “the process of identity formation and the way people (not the students themselves) represent identity through visual signs” (15) [emphasis added]. Addison asserts that the distance provided by historical analysis and contemporary critical theory facilitates an understanding of art and design as not only practices of making “expressive” things, but of communicating, investigating, and formulating and articulating critical ideas (18), echoing Margolin’s challenges to design higher education some sixteen years prior.6 So, if Schön’s work helped us to understand that the work of a designer, and the education of a design student, happens through a series of reflections-in- and reflections-on-action, as discussed above, this proposal suggests that another question must be asked and critically evaluated in terms of the structures of both “design thinking” and design education: What lenses and which frames are designers reflecting through? Or, following Haraway and Suchman, what kinds of locations inform those reflections? In his argument for the constructionist nature of the working methods of reflective practitioners, Schön argued that it is the very contextualized and relational nature of reflexivity that produces the possibility for reflexive designing, as practitioners – through their work together and the knowledge production it involves – create the worlds of (and for) their practices. And it is also in this process that designers, in our case, might “reveal the usually tacit processes of worldmaking that underlie all of their practice” (1987: 36). For the sake of illustration, I will close this section with a story about a moment in which I noticed how a difference in worldview might, in fact, impact the factors Schön says here are at play in the worldmaking practices of practitioners, and began to think how important to design the capacity for listening and interpretation might be. In November 2009, I sat in a packed auditorium at Parsons the New School for Design to listen to a conversation between Bruce Nussbaum, a columnist on design and innovation at Business Week and Fast Company, and Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO (the aforementioned global design consultancy). Nussbaum and Brown were on stage discussing Brown’s new book Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (Brown 2009). Their conversation turned to the then-recent US government bailout of General Motors, and Brown talked frankly about how for decades the way General Motors ran its operations had worked well. While he did not explicitly detail the aspects of GM’s business practices required for it to have run all those years, we can presume this would have to include GM’s corporate structure, labor management, factories, and the company’s overall business and development plans. Brown explained that all of this worked fine until, one day, a system that had been working well stopped working and collapsed. Brown suggested that what design thinking had to offer businesses like GM was a new approach in which flexibility and adaptability help to produce stability in a changing world. What Brown framed as GM “working” may have made sense through the lens of a specific worldview. However, prior to the 2009 government takeover, things were not going well at GM for everyone. 39 Design and Culture Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design Shana Agid There had been widespread layoffs, for example, in the 1980s, impacting not only the tens of thousands of auto workers who lost their jobs, but devastating the town of Flint, Michigan itself, famously depicted in Michael Moore’s film Roger & Me. The presumption that GM’s systems were working might have been questioned by people whose worldview maintained that GM was working only for a small number of people who benefited from its wealth, and was, in fact, maintaining inequalities through its very structure. Everything at GM had been working well, but for whom?7 How does the answer to this question, and the presumption that it was the collapse of GM in the face of a shuddering global capitalism, not the upturned lives of tens of thousands of laid-off workers (or even the dissatisfaction, over decades, of users, some of whom were undoubtedly also those workers), that defines the moment in which the company’s methodology – or design – no longer worked, illustrate the limits of even contemporary design thinking and its contexts? Brown was not likely arguing against the workers who were laid off to keep GM “working” well, but his perspective as a designer assessing what worked and what didn’t in GM’s case depended on a normalized logic of capitalism, or treated the desires of GM’s management as the primary frame. From another perspective or experience, a GM worker perhaps, or today, a shrimper in the Gulf of Mexico, the company’s success and failures, and therefore the parameters of any redesign of its operations, might be figured through an entirely different set of lenses. How, then, do we make capacities to listen and interpret across difference and to see our frames of reference and their impacts, beyond perhaps existing articulations of (and toolkits for) human-centered design practices, a prioritized part of design education and designing? 40 Design and Culture Theory/Practice Practices in Design In her 2009 article “Reconsidering the History of Design Survey,” Sarah Lichtman argues that the traditional role of the survey is to “elucidate significant ideas, events, objects and practices and at the same time encourage students to think critically and analytically about what they see and read” (341). Acknowledging that some students have a difficult time seeing the relevancy of design history to their own making practices, Lichtman seeks to think through what might stand in the way of this connection, and what pedagogical and curricular practices might shift both students’ perceptions and history faculty’s ability to facilitate such a link. If, as Lichtman writes, the history of design survey is “an opportunity to address basic ideas of what design is or should be” (342), such a course – or the material taught in such a course – seems useful for raising concerns about how design operates in the world and how designers’ own experiences and perceptions might affect their designing. In the last decade, the focus and organizing principles for many history of design courses and textbooks have tended, in United States contexts, to be focused on an overwhelmingly Western design history and perspective featuring the work of primarily white, male designers (346). In her own class, Lichtman focuses on “intersections of design with the economy, industrialization, changing ideas of taste and modernity and changing patterns of production and consumption,” along with writing and work on issues of race, gender, and class (343), but it is not obvious whether students are making clear connections between these conversations and their own work. If the purpose of the survey is to build both historical understanding and critical looking, reading, and writing skills in students, it is absolutely important that such a course not be limited to the work and perspectives of white, male, and Western conceptions of design. At the same time, if students are not making a connection between their work and critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, and class, or a broader and more challenging conception of what counts as design being taught outside the studio, at least some part of the ultimate value of these courses is lost in the big picture of design education’s aims, and possibly to design practices, more broadly. In her conclusion, then, Lichtman proposes the possibility of making history of design surveys into “critical studios,” pairing faculty teaching history (and I would add here, theory) with faculty teaching making, where “learning and doing can be combined to deepen the course for the design student” (347). Lichtman begins, then, to propose an interruption to the accepted side-by-side alignment of design practice – understood, for the sake of argument, as ways of making things – and theoretical or contextual practices – understood, again, for the sake of argument, as ways of making and knowing ideas. Lichtman proposes the critical studio as a space in which the two can be brought together to make the part that students resist (history/theory) more immediately relevant to the piece they embrace (studio). I would take this argument one step further, and propose that the two could stand to be more intertwined, so that designing is making things that are also explicitly ideas, and theorizing is making ideas that also have the capacity to be or influence things. Of course, most people in design would argue, probably, that designing is already making ideas, but I am suggesting here a different approach, one in which the meaning-making practices of design and designers contend more directly with the ways in which the objects and systems they propose and make are part of larger epistemological processes with material effects. The analogous proposal for theory, then, is that theorizing should enable, through its own practice, the means to propose not only new ideas but ideas that can become objects, images, and systems (designed things) that might shift the material realities such theory is seeking to describe and make known. This brings a level of change and contingency to design and a degree of grounded applicability to theorizing, perhaps enabling each to more 41 Design and Culture Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design 42 Design and Culture Shana Agid meaningfully infiltrate the other. Such an incorporation of theory with practice and practice with theory is not only an academic intervention, but also a baldly political one. In the footsteps of scholars in social science, humanities, and cultural studies fields who have asked how they can be scholar-activists (see, for example, Gordon 2004; Hale 2008), or of the increasing number of makers in art and design who are engaging the realm of practice-based research, this argument suggests prioritizing forms of design learning (and designing) that engage both critical analysis of existing world-contexts and proactive, if reflective, worldmaking. Designers such as Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who work in the realm of Critical Design, have taken on aspects of this project, specifically drawing on theoretical engagements with data, technology, biology, and other culturally and scientifically constructed contexts to design objects and proposals that seek to elucidate, expand on, or put into tension ideas and their possible manifestations. In his discussion of Dunne and Raby, and Onkar Singh’s exhibit (with photographs by Jason Evans), Is This Your Future?, Carl DiSalvo explains that the designers “employ design to express possible outcomes of pursuing current themes in the science and technology of energy production” (2009: 54). The exhibit built on contemporary scientific research and theories and extrapolated what some might consider outrageous designed outcomes of that research – a human refuse energy production system in which kids carry a two-part container that holds “lunch” in one compartment and “poo” in the other, for example – into fully designed products and scenarios aimed at engaging children in the question posed in the title of the exhibit (53–4) (Figure 3). Matt Ward and Alex Wilkie bring a similar provocation to their students in the studio by asking them to consider Dunne and Raby’s conceptualization of design’s “challenge … to blur the boundaries between the real and the fictional, so that the conceptual becomes more real and the real is seen as just one limited possibility among many” as they engage in a project in which they are asked to design for a future scenario as (potentially) presented by statistical research the students collect and analyze with “a critical eye” (2009: 4).8 Design that proposes “the real” as contingent and itself a situated form of knowledge is working through the kind of intertwining I propose above, rendering meanings and explorations of some critical topics and ideas through design processes and, importantly, in more or less traditional design spaces and discourses. It is instructive for the political and ethical project I am proposing here, and can serve as both a teaching literature and a means of further exploring the question of contingent and situated knowledge in design. I want to turn below to an expansion of this approach, to consider the possibilities and concerns that are perhaps added by coming back again to Haraway’s political frames – those questions of power and difference, especially in relationship to race, class, and, in this Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design case, their manifestations in notions of safety, punishment, and “opportunity.” In a service design course I teach (and have also co-taught), students work with a local organization that provides a range of services – from education to drug treatment to job training and placement – for former prisoners and people in an alternative to incarceration program. The nature of the collaboration has changed in each iteration. We began in the first course with a specific brief from the organization asking us to look at possibilities for creating a more intimate and “family” feel that some staff were concerned has been lost with the increasing size of the organization. In that course, students focused on locating moments in the “journeys” of current and former clients when they felt “at home” in the organization and began to trust the people around them. Students then proposed designed service opportunities within the organization that could move this moment up, creating more possibilities for clients to feel connected and experience some trust earlier in their time there. In the second iteration, students’ projects were less focused by an organizational brief and therefore proposed a range of ideas about introducing new or improved services within the organization. In the current class, we’re working in teams with students in the education program, some of whom are there by choice and some who are mandated to be there via the alternative to incarceration program. Most if not all of the students with whom my class is working are 43 Design and Culture Figure 3 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. “Human Poo Energy Future.” Photograph by Jason Evans. Courtesy Dunne & Raby. 44 Design and Culture Shana Agid aiming to get their GED (general equivalency diploma) and represent a range of ages and experiences. The students in my course are traditional-age college students, also representing a range of experiences and areas of specialization in their design majors. In all three classes we read and discussed the Prologue and Introduction to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007) in the first part of the semester. This text was intended as an introduction to, and opening up of conversation about, the contested context and history of the prison boom in the United States beginning in the 1970s and 80s; the role of race and racism in the current incarceration in the US of 2.5 million people, most of whom are people of color and poor or working class; and, finally, a broader analysis of ideas of the “systemic” in a course explicitly focused on designing services in urban areas. While students in the first two iterations of the course expressed interest in the issues raised in the class discussion of Gilmore’s text (students in the second year noted that this had been one of the first times they’d been engaged in conversation about structures of race and racism in their studio courses), when it came time to interview, observe, propose design scenarios, and work with clients and staff in the organization in a “co-design” process, the questions that most captured their attention in the reading and discussion seemed difficult to remain open to – or remember – as they embarked on their design work. Ideas raised in the “seminar” session that we’d spent discussing the text, which in that moment bloomed into a set of questions about who ends up in prison (and therefore in the organization with which we were working) and why, disappeared into students’ previously held ideas about what would “really help” the clients in the organization “reintegrate”: job training, a willingness to work, discipline. For example, one group proposed a system for distributing free resources, but both they and critics – including some from the organization – suggested it would need to be locked or have access carefully guarded and regulated. In other words, many of the same ideas built into the logic of the prison system that the organization’s clients were seeking to leave behind – ideas critiqued, in part, by the class in the discussion early in the semester – became intrinsic to the service designs that students proposed. In some cases, discussion and critique shifted some of the presuppositions and challenged students to be more inventive and move beyond overarching logics of punishment and control intrinsic to the common sense that governed their (and sometimes in-class critics’) thinking. The group that proposed the carefully guarded space for free resources also proposed, and ultimately worked to develop, a system for marking the complex city streets where the organization’s main building sits in order to assist people who might have a hard time, both literally and figuratively, finding their way there get to the building without giving up. This proposal, while a relatively simple, straightforward service design (or enhancement), began to reflect a kind of listening across the systemic pressures facing prospective clients and a specific practical issue raised by clients and staff (Hawney et al. 2009). In other cases, however, the gap between discussion of the systems of policing, prison, and Gilmore’s definition of racism as “the differential vulnerability to premature death” (on which, admittedly, we spent just one session in a fifteen-week course), was evident and more or less intractable. Students weren’t outright hostile or even indifferent to the ideas discussed in the readings, far from it, but when the designing started, the complexity of that context seemed harder to integrate into anything that seemed like it could “really happen” or “really work.” What we experienced in the class was precisely the difficulty of hearing what Tonkinwise (2007: 3) calls back-talk, “words, metaphors, conversational phrases, sensations [that arise from a design in progress] that have a cognitive component, but also an affective or performative component,” when the language being spoken is either new and unfamiliar or complex enough to seem like it is more in-the-way-of than intrinsic-to a design process. How, for instance, can the students in my class design ideas that don’t take the prison as a starting place when many enter the class presuming, without knowing it, that prisons are one clear and permanent piece of their design world, and that the reasons for their existence are unchallenged? These experiences of the first two semesters of the course, along with a mutual agreement with teachers in the education area of the organization that creating a tighter and more consistent way of working together would benefit our students and theirs as well as the work itself, prompted some changes in the current semester. One of the primary changes we made has been in the structure of the semester, both to accommodate a longer period of engaging with contextual texts and experimental assignments in service design in the city and to better align with the organization’s education sessions so that we might work with a more consistent set of students in a more explicitly collaborative way. Given this new structure, with its benefits (more time to work on contextualizing and preparing students for the project) and drawbacks (waiting longer to begin working directly with the organization), I introduced a new text prior to the Gilmore in an effort to bring some basic representational theory into play prior to explicitly going after a challenging discussion about representations and constructions of the prison and prisoners in the US. The new text, “The Work of Representation,” is the opening chapter in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, a textbook edited by Stuart Hall ([1997] 2009). Hall (who is also the author of this chapter and another in the book) discusses formative ideas in cultural studies, from semiotics to Roland Barthes’ concepts of myth, about the ways in which images and words – as texts – come to represent commonly held assumptions 45 Design and Culture Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design 46 Design and Culture Shana Agid about what things mean and why. It seemed possible that having an early conversation about how images and texts become ideas, and how they do that in ways that we both see and take for granted, might help us to hear the range of back-talk in a service design project organized around the needs and experiences of people with extensive contact with systems of policing and imprisonment in a major city, a context in which both signs and mythologies are defining structures. As of this writing, students are beginning to develop initial design proposals, and are evidencing a similar struggle to maintain a link between the readings and discussions in the first third of the semester and the design challenge presented by working collaboratively and specifically around issues of specific relevance to people with an experience of prison and regular police contact. At the same time, they have become deeply involved in trying to design their design tools and processes, shaping the kind of co-design work they’re doing and directing both their desires for the design proposals (something that they can do or make happen with the students with whom they’re working) and the frequency of their joint brainstorming and work sessions with those students. This investment in the process, even though it is difficult, provides openings for me as the teacher to actively draw them back to the readings we’ve done and to pieces of the discussion between them and the students at the organization that they might not hear clearly or think to take meaning from at first. Using the texts as tools to reflect on their practices and the design of their practices, whether on their own or through prompts by their peers or their teacher, might shift their modes of reflection and the kinds of back-talk they hear as they work. Indeed, after a visit to the organization, one student sent me an unsolicited response paper in which she posed a critical design question informed by her reflection on a range of contexts, both academic and personal: “How can we design something to transition people from a system that doesn’t want to let them go?” The struggle to integrate all the reading and talking in the first third of the semester with the co-design work of the rest of the course would benefit, in hindsight, from more specific linking of each reading to a student-designed process or outcome. Doing a thinking design sketch that incorporated key points of a reading, for instance, might allow students to build the muscle of theory-/practice-making in specific and narrow exercises, where the stakes are relatively low. This might help ground the design process undertaken once the class begins the doubly complex experience of co-designing with “real people” whose lives are, in some cases, shaped by systems of power previously unexamined by some students. Additionally, this kind of work will become increasingly possible and therefore nuanced with a greater integration of this kind of theory/practice practice, itself a specific set of skills, across students’ learning in design education. Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design The possibilities for theory/practice practices in design and design education seem to be at least two-fold. First, designating a studio course space that uses theory, or a seminar space that uses design making, creates a specific space to evolve methods of teaching and learning that engage designing and critical analysis through lenses external to design and traditional liberal arts frameworks in explicit and experimental ways. In this sense, these types of learning environments – critical studios, albeit imagined a bit differently than Lichtman’s proposed critical studio – facilitate an emphasis on contextualizing design practices and outcomes (reflection-through) that requires defining both terms (for example, empathy) and practices (for example, seeing from another’s perspective) using historical and theoretical approaches that insist on engaging the political. At the same time developing this form of critical studio space and method brings to critical analysis in cultural studies, humanities, and social science fields the practice of imagining possible futures, and, importantly, the skills and risk-tolerances required to render what is imagined (the move-made-world) in a multitude of ways that propose its legibility and potential, as well as allowing for testing and iteration. This version of critical studio uses the classroom to ask how the making practices of designing can challenge the knowing practices of theory and criticism to produce and test critically grounded and inventive propositions through a range of reflective practices.9 Secondly, critical studio methodology, as proposed here, relies on, and can be shaped by, a pedagogy which de-mystifies the “creative process” for the purpose of seeing designing as generative and inflected – by the lenses imposed by the designer, by external ideas and assumptions – as well as fundamentally relational; what Tonkinwise calls the critical role not of the reflectivity of the individual designer on their practice, but of “intersubjective, shared reflections” (2004: 5). In this aspect, the critical studio has the goal of facilitating critical design (that is also functional) and intellectual designing by making the process itself more layered, more critically reflective. 47 Both within and outside design education and practices, design is conceived as a form of worldmaking or future-casting – sometimes utopic, at others dystopic, often based in market-driven logics or socially-driven goals (or, at some nexus of these). Increasingly, through the work of speculative or critical design, this engagement with possible worlds and futures is also a reimagining of design as a language for exploring the multiple shapes and ramifications of these possibilities. Ward and Wilkie argue that designers might be considered “material-semiotic storytellers” who create “fictive scripts” in which “propositions about the future are articulated in the present” (2009: 5). DiSalvo proposes that designers can use “projection” as a tactic that is “an advanced indication of what might be, informed by knowledge of the past and present, and rendered Design and Culture Conclusion 48 Design and Culture Shana Agid by means of a skilled supposition of how the ‘yet to come’ might occur and to what effect” (2009: 52). He differentiates “projections” from “prescriptions,” aligning the latter more closely with scenariobuilding, which, he suggests, “direct[s] possible courses of action” (53). The differentiation between “projections,” as suggesting a range of possible futures, and “prescriptions,” as designating one or a set of specific possibilities, presents a complex and nuanced set of questions about power, location, and the nature of the situations through and into which designers are working. This delineation is a valuable one for understanding that design can and does work in a range of ways to understand, represent, and conceptualize both present conditions and future possibilities, and to acknowledge that there is, in fact, a difference in stating (or making) how things “should be” versus how they “might be” (DiSalvo 2009: 53, citing Margolin). However, Haraway’s and Suchman’s engagement of feminist conceptions of objectivity as not only contingent, but constructed through the interaction of and debates between a range of politically, socially, and experientially situated positions, is especially important in a consideration of how any designer or design team begins to imagine or know the specific pasts, presents, and futures under consideration. In my example above, the students in my course were given a set of design tasks, not the least of which was essentially a brief to work with students at the organization to identify a range of concerns and then propose some service design(s) that might speak to those concerns. This work was happening in the context of systems – policing, courts, prisons, even education – that are always already prescriptive to some greater or lesser degree. To design back into those contexts (or away from them, as the case may be) required the students from Parsons to embrace the idea of making determinations, or statements. In other words, while the design students in this scenario were explicitly not meant to prescribe the behavior or options of the students with whom they worked, the project of the class was absolutely to suggest and design prescriptive measures for a broader social structure. Understanding the difference between these two, additionally, was in part dependent (for better or worse) on spending time in class with cultural and political theory that put all these relationships in context. Design and design education that does not grapple with the prescriptive nature of making things (whether objects or systems) that deeply influence people’s lived lives and does not incorporate practices that theorize or tell the stories of those lives and their contexts risks perpetuating precisely these prescriptive frames through the constrictions of the worldviews of the designers themselves. If designing is worldmaking then it is often prescriptive, even if that work takes complex and nuanced forms, is actively in resistance to this mode of production, or engaging with it in specific ways, for example, designing from a notion of what values “should” determine a system design. As Gilmore notes with reference to the build-up of Acknowledgments The author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of Design and Culture for their excellent discussions and critiques of this article in progress. Special thanks to David Brody for multiple 49 the systems of policing and prisons in the US, the development of institutions and practices over time in social and political environments is often not conspiratorial, but is, “without a doubt” systemic (2007: 24). Rather than turn from design’s role in larger social, political, and cultural systems, it seems critical to look at how design practices might both be influenced by and come to influence ways of making meaning of the world, in part as a means of critically impacting what it means to make things in the world. This includes critical design practices, but is not limited to them, importantly, as it may be even more essential an engagement in design that is intended to more literally and specifically “make change.” This may be one way of thinking about what Suchman, building on Haraway, asks us to do: “become answerable … for what we learn how to build” (2002: 96).10 A growing number of writers from both within and outside design professions and education argue that design fields bring new and highly relevant forms of researching and problem-setting to more traditional fields of social science, and even scientific practices (Heapy and Parker 2006; Rosenberg 2007; Brown 2009; Dunne 2009; Szentpéteri 2009). Design practice methods include tools and aptitudes for working with unstable problems and imagined futures in which the object of study and inquiry is, nevertheless, real (Jones [1992] 2009). This approach requires that designers work with and value failure and iteration as elements of research in ways that could meaningfully expand work in other fields. It is the work of designers to routinely make new things through reflection and invention. This is no doubt a set of skills, processes, and possibilities that can have a profound impact on a range of academic – as well as social, political, and cultural – arenas. But if cultural and political theory, or theoretical practices broadly, are also seriously considered a part of studio work, how might this impact the conceptualization of the design student and, consequently, the designer? The recognition that things are, in fact, at stake when we work to understand the relevance of differential languages, ideas, experiences, and constructions of “worlds” and the things that go into “worldmaking” carries with it a challenge for designing that both engages and exceeds the limits of designers’ own experiences and worldviews. The process of design, or engaging in this kind of reflective practice, can allow for, or perhaps produce, a shift in the frames of and for reflection in the designer, in a design, and, more importantly, in designing broadly. In other words, which voices, or what materials, are talking back in the studio and how might they be heard, especially if they insist on conflicting or unfamiliar knowledges or worldviews? Design and Culture Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design Shana Agid readings that greatly impacted and deepened my arguments as I worked. Many thanks also to Lara Penin, who invited me to join her in teaching this course twice and to continue working closely with her in the Service Design Area of Study at Parsons. 50 Design and Culture Notes 1. Additionally, ideas of “design” and of the aesthetics of designed objects and spaces – along with certain popular arbiters of design taste – are flooding consumer consciousness, mediated by television and “design for all” campaigns at stores like Target, which contract with elite designers to make “affordable” limited edition clothes and accessories. While this last example is usually situated outside academia, more or less, students’ presumptions of the roles of design and designers are informed by design’s increasingly public conceptualization in ways that certainly impact how design is taught (or un-taught, as the case may be). 2. ELISAVA TdD is a web-based journal of design published out of ELISAVA Escola Superior de Disseny in Barcelona, Spain. 3. This embrace of the “social” in the sense of “social responsibility,” or “social design,” is a matter that deserves more consideration, and is the topic of another research project on which I am working with colleagues at the New School. Suffice it to say here that there are serious limitations to current approaches to contextualizing design and its effects and to the language and practices that currently shape “social design” work, where the emphasis is often on working through “empathic” methods to design tools that help under-resourced users, but where there is often little attention paid to incorporating complex issues of systems of power and control determining the day-to-day conditions the design work is meant to address in the design process itself. 4. Suchman does include a reference in a footnote to “positions within more pervasive geographies of class, race, ethnicity, and gender,” as articulated by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), and the “pain and power associated with living on these borderlands” (102, n.6), and her discussion of a case study of her design/research team’s position in relationship to workers with very different statuses in a legal practice wrestles with what can be presumed to be issues of class as much as status, all of which became relevant positions in the design process and outcome, which Suchman discusses in compelling detail (98–9). 5. As many have argued, design is particularly well-suited to looking at both “wicked problems” and problems that are unstable to begin with (Buchanan [1992] 2009; Jones [1992] 2009). What I propose here calls for adding the position of the designer themselves into that realm of complexity and trouble that makes up the frame of the design question at hand. 51 6. In a related context, in the introduction to New Practices – New Pedagogies: A Reader, editor Malcolm Miles (2005) notes that it is precisely the heterogeneity of, in this case, “art’s publics” that require art and design education to work against “much of the grain of European cultural policy which still assumes the unified subject (self) of a liberal humanist viewpoint which has been largely eclipsed, in academic writing, by post-modern and post-colonial thinking …” (11). This brings us back around to Margolin’s reference to shifts in Art History in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and raises questions outside the purview of this piece about the relative differences between art and design fields in the academy insofar as engagement with postmodern and postcolonial theory goes. 7. In fact, things were not going well for GM all of those decades. The inflexibility in production and design models that Brown discussed were well known in the 1980s, for example, and reports of poor quality GM cars, including from GM management, have in some periods been prevalent. A simple Google search reveals a range of consumer blogs and sources maintaining that GM’s quality is poor, suggesting users have also not always been happy with their product. Additionally, the GM/Toyota NUMMI plant, an innovative plant through which GM tried to remake its manufacturing processes and employee morale, closed in April 2011, laying off another 4,700 workers. (For more on the NUMMI plant, see http://www.thisamericanlife. org/radio-archives/episode/403/nummi.) My thanks to the anonymous reviewer who suggested looking into GM’s longer history of product quality problems and user dissatisfaction here. 8. Ward and Wilkie also offer a very useful refiguring of the notion of “critical” in their article, arguing for a “non-reductive empirical realism tracing the complex messy entanglements of societies with all their strange, weird and wonderful hybrid objects” (2). Their provocation is reminiscent of Avery Gordon’s discussion ([1997] 2008) of “complex personhood,” which I’ve utilized in class to discuss the complexities of designing in “real-life” situations that meaningfully engage relationships of power. 9. For a fantastic discussion of the development, teaching, and revision of a critical studio course that examines many of these questions in depth, and offers strategies and tools, see “Hybrid Ways of Doing: A Model for Teaching Public Space,” by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani and Elliott Maltby (2010). 10. Suchman builds here on a Haraway passage that is equally relevant to this article: “Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. In this way we might become answerable for what we learn how to see” (quoted, 2002: 96). Design and Culture Worldmaking: Working through Theory/Practice in Design Shana Agid 52 Design and Culture References Addison, N. 2007. “Identity Politics and the Queering of Art Education: Inclusion and the Confessional Route to Salvation.” International Journal of Art & Design Education, 26(1): 10–20. Alexander, B.K. 2007. “Embracing the Teachable Moment: The Black Gay Body in the Classroom as Embodied Text.” In E.P. Johnson and M. Henderson (eds), Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, pp. 249–65. Durham: Duke University Press. Bendiner-Viani, G. and E. 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