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Die Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit kontemporären Entwicklungen eines zunehmend als sozial und politisch engagiert und involviert begriffenen Designbegriffs, und beleuchtet unterschiedliche Problemkomplexe, die sich aus einer Übertragung modernistischer Designerpositionen in Kontexte ergeben, wie sie heute etwa in den Diskursen zum „Social Design“ verhandelt werden. Darauf aufbauend folgt die Arbeit einem Research-through-Design-Ansatz (RtD) zur Exploration unterschiedlicher Positionen des Gestaltens, die sich diesen Problemen gegenüber produktiv und souverän verhalten. Von besonderer Bedeutung für diese Auseinandersetzung ist die Metapher der Infrastruktur, wie sie von Susan Leigh Star entwickelt und innerhalb der Skandinavischen Debatten um das partizipative Design für den Designdiskurs adaptiert wurde. Die Dissertation besteht aus drei Teilen:
Zunächst aus der Bearbeitung der Fragestellung, mit welchen derzeitigen Selbst- und Rollenverständnissen wir auf das Verhältnis von Design und sozialen Transformationsprozessen blicken, und der Entwicklung der Forderung, den vorrangig konzeptionell-normativen Diskurs mit einer kritischen Praxis anzureichen bzw. aus einer solchen heraus zu reflektieren.
Der zweite Teil besteht aus dem Versuchsaufbau einer ebensolchen, reflexiven Praxis, also einer systematisch und im Sinne des übergeordneten Erkenntnisinteresses strukturierten, designerischen Tätigkeit, und deren Reflexion im Rahmen von MAZI (CAPS/H2020), eines interdisziplinären und EU-geförderten Forschungsprojekts, innerhalb dessen Positionen aus Design, Aktivismus und Technologieentwicklung aufeinander bezogen werden. Innerhalb dieser Auseinandersetzung wurde ein Modell entwickelt und vorgeschlagen, welches den skandinavischen Ansatz „Design as Infrastructuring“ operationalisiert und für den Kontext der Dissertation nutzbar macht.
Im dritten und letzten Teil der Arbeit schließlich werden diese beiden Ebenen zusammengeführt, und aus dieser analytischen Verschränkung von Theorie und Praxis Positionen zu den Fragestellungen der Arbeit entwickelt.
When going deep into the area of sustainability and looking at the crosslinks that open up regarding the practice of design, a dark narrative appears whereby sustainable design is a failing practice, either aiming too high by trying to tackle global, inter- and intragenerational challenges, or aiming too low by focusing on, for example, material impacts of new products and services; this narrative appears to have an upper hand over one that is more positive and constructive that sees the strengths and potentials that design can bring to the challenges of sustainability. While the growth-oriented sustainable development discourse still dominates the way sustainable design is practiced, there are other streams with a more holistic view of sustainability. These streams are rooted in a post-growth / no-growth or strong sustainability discourse, which are slowly making their way into design practice through the guise of sufficiency, resilience and activism with a common theme of sharing knowledge, allowing citizens to be an active part of their community.
The dark narrative of sustainability in design as well as the call for designers to transform a practice of “un-sustainability” into one that allows “futuring”, leaves most of them shrugging their shoulders in light of how to implement the theoretical (utopian) requirements into their own practice. I argue for providing a different, more positive narrative, moving past the finger-pointing attitude towards reminding oneself what the practice of design in the context of sustainability can bring to the table.
Why there are new directions in sustainable design is largely because design has broadened beyond its product and service fixation towards a more process-oriented practice and an awareness of the impact designers have on this world. In these processes, designers are often taken outside the boundaries of growth-oriented economic progress towards social progress. They are continuously reminded that they cannot operate outside of a societal context and that their work has an impact on the Earth’s dynamic equilibrium (however small it might be).
Thus, the aim of my work is to re-frame sustainable design as a default configuration, stripping it from the unwieldy term of sustainability and extracting its core features of transformation, participation and future-focused thinking. Considering this core configuration, design is bound to be situated between anthropo- and eco-centricity, putting into question current user- and human-centric design approaches that tend to marginalize the everyday context and wider implications of the designed product or service.
Through an investigation that spanned the last five years, I have come to realize that sustainable design has nothing to do with a specific practice, but rather with a mindset which is, at its basis, tied to ethical considerations rooted in everyday life. It is moreover tied to broad, interdisciplinary knowledge that is needed to grasp the interconnected and global challenges that lie ahead. To make this point, in my work I am retracing the steps from the early roots of sustainable design within the sustainability movement towards its radical opening in different directions such as design activism, transformation design, design for social innovation and participatory design.
Furthermore, I propose a re-framing of the practice of sustainable design, (tentatively) linking it with a research-through-design approach and subsequently, through the design case, constructing a dynamic, interdisciplinary action repertoire for designers.
When framing this renewed idea of sustainable design, not only do the two dimensions of transformation and participation almost automatically appear in the current discourse, but also the notion of opening up contexts through design in a way that is directed towards possible (sustainable) futures becomes apparent. Several overarching perspectives resurface in the course of this work:
1 Opening – How can designers open access to contexts, tools, knowledge and technology through collaborative, interdisciplinary action?
2 Making – How can designers provide processes to involve stakeholders in critically assessing and making possible futures?
3 Transforming – How can designers transform contexts and situations from one state to a preferred one (and how can they facilitate the negotiation-processes tied to them with regards to social equity and intra-generational justice)?
The topic of transformation and future-focused thinking is currently engaging most of design, not exclusively sustainable design, and this thinking seems to provide an underlying idea that design may be able to provide at least part of the skill-set required to cater to this transformation. It is, however, not only the context and situations design claims to transform, but also user behavior and market incentives. In this research, transformation is viewed as a careful byline to a project which spans almost six years and is now coming to a close.
The design case for this research is the project Neighborhood Labs which has been run by an interdisciplinary group of design researchers, citizens and other stakeholders in a central, but isolated area in Berlin’s Mitte district. It incorporated the development of a research concept and experimentation process which builds on a participatory design methodology as well as a living lab approach. It was planned open-ended with the potential of stakeholders taking over after the official end of the research project.
In terms of sustainability, the subject and guiding theme of sharing and collaboration was the baseline of the design phases and iterations. While focusing at first on the sharing of concrete objects in a specific community of practice, there was a shift to sharing knowledge, as well as to the empowerment of citizens to impact local decision-making processes, a much fuzzier subject than the sharing of objects or services. The project was run in three intertwined phases:
– Sharing phase / Neighborhood lab: Setting up and running a living lab. Investigating the context and building the infrastructure. Approaching the neighborhood and designing tools for gathering insights about needs and issues within it while drawing active citizens towards the project. After this step, insights inform the research process and help focus the research question further. This phase produced several concepts and sketch prototypes in collaboration with the stakeholders of the Fischerinsel, Berlin.
– Infrastructure phase / Designing infrastructures & fostering change: Designing and testing participatory tools such as the Hybrid Letterbox, an analog-digital bridge device, in order to discuss and evaluate questions of social cohesion and communication within the neighborhood and to activate citizens for involvement in these issues.
– Transfer phase / Design transfer: opening up the context and pushing the methods and tools outside of its initial project and creating new instances thereof.
As I am reflecting on the process of a long-term project now behind me, such as working through trial-and-error phases, prototypical research-through-design attempts and the immersion in the Fischerinsel-context that the research group grew a part of, several key directions in the dealing with and conveying of sustainability challenges appear.
On a practical level, these directions materialize in the categories of investigative action, participatory tools and workshop formats, which are distilled from a broad range of interdisciplinary actions conducted over the course of the research, leading to an action repertoire for transformation which I propose as one of the outcomes of my work.
On a theoretical level, I argue for sustainable design by default, meaning sustainability as an inherent, embedded goal of any design process, integrating a research-through-design mindset in sustainable design or vice versa. In further steps, this entails restructuring the way we teach design and how design practice is informed throughout its process.
Within the application context of interior spaces, this thesis investigates the emerging area of body-driven energy harvesting technologies from the perspective of human computer interaction (HCI) design. Upcoming innovations in new materials and low-power devices have enabled the conversion of body movements such as steps and arm movements into electrical energy for powering small computational things. Everyday interior spaces such as public buildings or homes can be fitted with new materials that harness human kinetic energy to produce electrical energy. Recent developments in the area of engineering and materials science aim to make these technologies more efficient. However, research about the implications of implementing them in the everyday from the perspective of the experiences and interactions of the people adopting these technologies is highly under-explored. In order to examine this design space, this research proposes to identify emerging concerns and challenges brought by everyday engagement with electricity production that need to be addressed through an interaction design inquiry.
To investigate the above proposition, a design program situated between the field of human computer interaction research and the practice of e-textile design is formulated with the aim to
investigate, at the scale of the interior, how static electricity can bring new perspectives and possibilities for ways of engaging with e-textiles, and designing interactions for energy harvesting with textiles.
The research sets up four research studies to systematically explore the design program. These research studies focus on four questions of how static electricity shapes e-textiles, how electrostatic textiles shape e-textile interactions, how e-static interactions shape everyday behaviours and how e-static studies shape energy interpretations. By developing a working knowledge of textile-based triboelectric generators, various body-generated electricity systems of different scales are envisioned. In the process of making, discovering and exploring different textile systems, questions regarding human interactions, material behaviours and the role of electricity in the everyday are discussed.
This thesis contributes to the practice of e-textiles by creating the foundational knowledge of using static electricity as a resource in e-textile design and development without needing specialised materials. Furthermore, it contributes to the field of human computer interaction research by further developing the topic of energy harvesting as a research area of interaction design. The thesis identifies two key areas for addressing challenges presented by body-driven energy harvesting with HCI which include considering accumulation of interactions over time and incorporating the electric properties of the body in interaction.
Additionally, practical outcomes of this research include:
1) www.estatictextiles.cc- An online handbook for learning about and working with static electricity and e-textiles which includes tutorials and examples from the research process.
And 2) E-static textiles prototyping board- A prototyping board developed for easy integration of static electricity and textiles to be used as an educational tool for designing and prototyping electrostatic energy-related interactions.
Encountering the Digital: Representational and Experiential Embodiment in Tangible User Interfaces
(2014)
This dissertation is concerned with the concept of »embodiment« in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It investigates the issue by the means of Research Through Design
(RTD).
The notion of »embodiment« has many meanings in HCI. It is therefore the aim of this work to contribute to its clarification. I propose a distinction between two major meanings: »embodiment« in the sense of »representation« and »embodiment« in the sense of how the experience of one’s socio-physical world is fundamentally grounded in having a living body. I propose to name these two meanings »representational embodiment« and »experiential embodiment«.
Having separated the two meanings, I then look at those moments in which they encounter: I investigate moments in which »embodied« users face »embodiments« of digital information. These moments of encounter appear to be a central aspect of Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs), which are often concerned with making digital information graspable. Therefore, I focus on TUIs, pursuing the question of how the design of the »representational embodiments« of digital information affects the user’s experience of the interaction.
RTD is a research concept that promises to offer a new, »designerly« perspective on a subject matter. There are different approaches to RTD, of which I have chosen Findeli’s model of Project-Grounded Research (PGR). I introduce RTD and PGR, contextualising them in their historical context. I underline the central roles of the prototype and the »project« in PGR. I also relate RTD to its academic reference points: action research and grounded theory. Afterwards, I transform my research question into a design question, namely how the »embodiments« of digital information could be designed in a way that is oriented to the users’ »embodiment«.
In everyday language, physical (e. g. »disk size«, »data mining«) and social metaphors (»smart phone«, »battery life«) are often used to describe concepts of interacting with digital information. These metaphors form the starting point of my investigation into TUIs that make digital information graspable through socio-physical manifestations – through shape change, weight shift, and life-like signals. I describe the prototypes and report several previous studies that were conducted with them. These assess, for example, the accuracy at which users could feel the shifted weight on the phone’s inside, or the experiences of users carrying the »living mobile« for a weekend.
I then report a comparative study of the three prototypes and three vibration-based comparison prototypes. In this study, I make use of the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT). RGT is based on so-called »personal constructs«, which the users name themselves, as to describe the prototypes (e. g. »knowledge required – easy to understand«, »biological – technical«, »exciting – boring«). The users then use their own personal constructs to rate the prototypes. The findings of the RGT study indicate that the interaction with the Shape-Changing Mobile, Weight-Shifting Mobile, and Ambient Life prototypes was experienced by the users as novel and interesting, but at times also as irritating, and even annoying. The mixed results from this study can be described as three »two-sided coins«: the interaction with the prototypes was rated as rich in associations, but requiring prior knowledge and, at times, disappointing. It was rated as permanent, but at times annoying. Lastly, it was described as cute, but sometimes creepy.
I conclude that the encounter of »representational embodiment« and »experiential embodiment« can open a conceptual space for interaction design that is rich in opportunities, but also rich in challenges. It is this space that I set out to explore with this dissertation.
In summary, the main contributions of this dissertation are a separation of different meanings of »embodiment« in HCI and a study of TUI prototypes that explore the encounter of these meanings.
Decolonizing the Earview of Design: Listening Anxieties and the Apparatus of Auditory Governance
(2018)
This dissertation attends to the intersection of sound, material culture, racism, and police violence in Brazil from a decolonizing perspective. With a focus on theories informed by cultural and sound studies, it unravels the contingent arrangements through which certain designed objects and practices function as material-discursive nodes for the normalization and perpetuation of racialized violences. To explore these ideas, it reads design—a field of knowledge and a set of practices—as a material-discursive apparatus, accountable for not only the results but also the conditions of possibility for any research endeavor.
The main driving force of this work is the identification and evincing of ‘listening anxieties.’ These emerge through enactments of political consensus, policing, and compliance; the articulation of these three in institutional, designerly, as well as everyday practices is what this research identifies as the Apparatus of Auditory Governance (or AAG). More specifically, I look at three manifestations of these auditory governances in contemporary Brazil—from the early 2000s to the judiciary Coup d’Etat of late 2016. These range from the criminalization of jukeboxes by a Military Police acting outside the scope of written law in so-called ‘pacified’ neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro, to the construction of a seven kilometer-long acoustic barrier in the city as a device for urban segregation, to the deployment of sound bombs as devices for the enforcement of silence by the same police force in São Paulo.
The articulation of auditory governances, however, is not fixed; rather, it shifts and mutates to account for distinct and diverse experiences of listening. These shifts are what this work calls earviews: a conceptual orientation which determines the “listening point” where narratives and perceptions of auditory reality unfold from. The AAG, articulated and deconstructed at the intersection of distinct and conflicting earviews, forms the main method of this dissertation, and is of particular interest for sound and design studies. By understanding the earview as an asset of and for designing, it is possible to interrogate the role of design in the enforcement, reproduction, and normalization of sonic violences, and the erasure of other(ed) narratives of listening. Rather than simply evincing the hegemony of normative—qua racialized—earviews, I intervene by reading them through first-person accounts and storytelling stemming from fieldwork with artists and activists in Brazil, as well as from two movies by Brazilian directors—O Som ao Redor (2012) and Branco Sai, Preto Fica (2014). These intersections are further complemented by a semi-fictional narrative created throughout five collective pedagogical sessions fusing designing and fabulation. This format, named “Yarn Sessions,” is my methodological proposition for design research in this work.
This research started out by posing three broad questions relating to the connection between auditory practices—i.e. sounds and their social, cultural, and political engagements—and the design of listening devices. It asked: what is the contribution of design to the politics of mediated listening and its devices? What might be the possible, probable and/or preferable enactments of the political agency of designed listening devices? These initial questions are all addressed by this work, and have shifted from their initial form as a general investigation on the entanglement of design and listening, to offer an inquiry and an intervention on violences enacted with and through sound.
This work thus participates in a re-historicization of the colonial underpinnings of design, while at the same time offering a decolonizing methodological proposition for design research and design studies with a sound and listening-oriented locus. It demonstrates that the material conditions of sonic violence—from architectural planning to transitional/illegalized sound objects to the development of weaponry—are a form of ontological design (cf. Anne-Marie Willis) which succeeds by making its own colonial and racialized ethos discursively and materially invisible. This ontological enunciation demands the accountability of the designer as both producer and reproducer of racialized/colonial phenomena in the making of their own practices.
Yet this research does not align itself completely with discourses from the “ontological turn” or “new materialisms” in philosophy (cf. Karen Barad), insofar as these often undermine and erase the role played by coloniality and “racialized assemblages” (cf. Alexander Weheliye) to the constitution of its own ontologies and epistemologies. My proposition for design understands the field to constitute in itself an ontoepistemology (cf. Willis, Gloria Anzaldúa), albeit reading such ontological alignments through decolonial and critical race studies. In so doing, it opens up a new field of inquiry in which sound studies and decolonial thought inform designerly inquiries into material culture not only for the evincing of specific material-discursive phenomena (e.g. sonic violences), but also for intervening on them with intersectional and decolonizing frameworks.