Welcome to a K3 PhD seminar with Alicia Smedberg, PhD student in Interaction Design, K3

The title of the seminar is The Issue of Agency in Public Sector Infrastructuring Processes.

It will take place on Monday, February 14 at 10.15-12.00. It will be an online seminar. Please join here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/64675687916 (this is the zoom link to all K3 seminars this term).

This will function as Alicia’s 75 percent PhD seminar. Discussant: Maria Hellström Reimer, Professor of Design in Theory and Practice, K3

The seminar is collaboration between the K3 seminar series and the Collaborative Future-Making Platform

Abstract:

One of Participatory Design’s (PD) quintessential concerns is the issue of agency. The discipline holds a commitment towards democratic engagements, and within the theoretical framework of infrastructuring (Ehn, 2008; Karasti, 2014) resides both affordances and hindrances towards relational agency. Understanding the push-pull of agency becomes imperative when disparate groups meet, and when actors with established, decision-making power seek to work with those who lack it. This is particularly true in civil settings, and within the public sector – where there is an added dimension of care and responsibility within the assignments of public sector workers. It follows that the question of how we do/activate/perform infrastructures is of relevance to PD: these are political interventions often hold a dual nature of empowering and depowering. Understanding infrastructuring as a political action requires that we understand both its constraints and its possibilities, its constructive as well as its destructive power.

While design has often been seen as an artisan practice, infrastructuring uses much of design’s tools, repertoire and affordances in an ongoing care- and maintenance labour. In particular when tied to public sector work, where the common or collective “good” is and should be a factor, the practice of infrastructuring demands negotiations and compromises on behalf of the many. The artisan designer may produce the most beautiful, most prestigious or the most ingenious solution to a problem, but the collective designer’s priorities must always be to develop situated designs. To make a distinction between artisan design work and collective care work through design this thesis has borrowed the concepts of work and labour from Hannah Arendt’s (1958) writings in political philosophy.

The research has been conducted through programmatic design research where the program acts as a “frame and foundation for carrying out a series of design experiments and interventions” (Brandt, Redström, Eriksen and Binder, 2011., p. 19). A bricolage of methods has been used, reflexively, to drive the program forward, and these have always been informed by an ethics of care. There are three projects that form the basis of this design program: Amiralsstaden (2017-2019); Livskonceptet (2017-2018); The Democracy Ambassadors (2019). These three primary case studies were all situated within public sector work, and conducted alongside Malmö Stad. The design programme has generated two programmatic answers. The first programmatic answer, Affective Infrastructuring, highlights the importance of heeding affect when mobilizing social infrastructures, and represents a gap in previous literature around infrastructuring. The second programmatic answer suggests a method of approaching affective structures: Collaborative Anecdotalization. The final programmatic answer – Feral Infrastructures – presents a critical discussion around the role of Participatory Designers within the public sector.

References:

Arendt, H. (1998 [1958]). The Human Condition. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

Binder, T.; Brandt, E.; Ehn, P., and Halse, J. (2015) Democratic Design Experiments: between parliament and laboratory. CoDesign. Vol. 11 No 3- 4, pp. 152-165

Brandt, E., Redström, J., Eriksen, M-A., and Binder, T. (2015) The Perform Codesign

Experiment – On what people actually do and the relation between program and experiment in research through design.

Ehn, P. (2008) Participation in Design Things. Proc. PDC 2008, 92-101.

Karasti, H. (2014) Infrastructuring in participatory design. In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers-Volume 1 (pp. 141-150).  .