The way one answers the question “Does design make a difference?” subsequently shapes one’s definition of what ‘design’ is. And how one answers this question depends on one’s understanding of the relation between humans and material objects. In this rather long blog post, I want to put forth an understanding of humans and objects informed by the Actor- Network-Theory. At its heart, the Actor-Network-Theory mobilizes the notion of ‘agency’ to explain human and non-human relations. I will argue that because agency is relational, design has the capacity to create and define human agency.

Let us start this inquiry by challenging the assumption that design as the process of giving an object a specific material form, has any broader, sociocultural implications – let us argue that design makes absolutely no sociocultural difference. Csikszentmihalyi’s psychological study on the meanings of household object might help to prove this point. Csikszentmihalyi conducted 82 interviews with different families in the Chicago area to find out how art affected the consciousness of the viewer. He quickly noticed that his informants had little to say about the ‘art’ objects that they owned, but they had a lot to say about other artifacts in their houses, which were charged with meanings and towards which they felt very strong attachments. Although there were quite a few (graphic) art objects among the mentioned artifacts, Csikszentmihalyi makes this interesting observation: Of the 537 reasons given for cherishing the 136 graphic works, only sixteen percent had anything to do with how the picture looked. The objects were special because they: conveyed memories (sixteen percent), or referred to family members (seventeen percent), or to friends (thirteen percent). Formal qualities alone almost never made a picture valuable to its owner.

What this observation suggests is that the way an object looks, that its material and visual qualities, are not acknowledged by whoever uses or consumes the artifact. Rather it is the symbolic relationship between a person and his personal belongings that we have to look at. This observation poses a problem: How can we claim that design has any significant impact if people seem to see and choose ideas, signs and meanings over the actual object? Does the way things look not matter at all, then?

We do not need to be designers to sense that this claim is extremely reductionist. Csikszentmihalyi argues that visual qualities do indeed matter, but that it is not in a “natural” way that we respond to color and form. Instead, he suggests, these are “responses to meanings attached to configurations of color and form“. These responses result from a process in which visual qualities are linked to values. This is a highly cultural process, as these values develop within groups of people and can be “unanimous or contested, elite or popular, strong or vulnerable, depending on the integration of the culture.”. An interesting thing has happened here. In trying to prove wrong the link between the material qualities of objects and sociocultural aspects, we have instead unveiled its complex and deep entanglement. But Csikszentmihalyi view is not unproblematic, as we will see. It still leaves us in the world of signs.

In his book ‘Design as Politics’ (2011) Tony Fry presents a strong and unequivocal argument in this debate. His book describes how today’s global economic and political practices carry with them a structural unsustainability, that is, these practices “materially erode (un-measurably) planetary finite time”. Action is designed negating the future (something he terms ‘defuturing’). His large-scale historical account exceeds the scope of this entry but is an argument on how pervasive the implications of design are in everyday life – and yet how unnoticed they go. This imperceptibility is deeply embedded in the common understanding of design as a linear work process, one that has more to do with ideas than with things. Callon describes this view in a model that thinks of the process of designing as starting with a stage of conception, then proceeding to development, followed by a phase of production and commercialization and finally ending with the diffusion of a product. Ingold describes a similar view that he calls ‘The hylomorphic model’. In this model an agent with a precast design in mind imposes form on passive matter. This model assigns primacy to the final product as opposed to the processes of making. Verbeek and Kockelkoren note that even designers think of their work as following this pattern and Ingold claims that contemporary discussions of art and technology, “continue to reproduce the underlying assumptions of the hylomorphic model“.

With the continuing reproduction of a view that chooses final products over processes of making, it is not surprising that it is often difficult to perceive the sociocultural implications of design. As Fry notes: “Although design totally infuses the material fabric of the world around us, it is almost always rendered invisible by the very thing(s) it brings into being.”. If an object stood only for its symbolic meaning, then one object could replace a completely different one with the same meaning. But a cup that is made out of paper cannot and will not be put in the dishwasher for reuse – contrary to a cup made out of ceramic.
If the conclusion is to take things and their materiality seriously, then we need a theoretical framework that sees objects not simply as props on a stage of human actors but as active partners that co-shape our action and us as humans. This means that culture is not only the social relations between people but also between people and things. What does it mean, then, to say that design makes a sociocultural difference? It means that design has the capacity to change and reconfigure these relations in a substantial way and even create new social ties. The actor-network theory proposes such a model. It sees culture as a collective or network of human and non-human actors. In what follows I will look at the way the Actor-Network- Theory explains design and its influence on social arrangements.

Design: the intent to shape human action

Let us look at the most evident connotation that the term ‘design’ provides us with: intention and intentionality. As Fry notes, design is a “prefigured intent”. Thus, design is not and cannot be “a politically or socially neutral space” (Drazin 2013). As Fry explains in “Design as Politics”, a simple look at the history of architecture reveals that power is not least a material expression, that all buildings “arrive with forms lodged in particular sets of ideological value that are predicated on how human beings should be viewed and treated”. But as we have already seen, it is wrong to assume that architects simply go and imbue a material with their ideology – the material itself has a say in this.
As already mentioned, the Actor-Network-Theory sees humans embedded in hybrid collectives. These collectives are hybrid because they not only include humans, but non- humans, too. Let us imagine an office in a creative agency that is typical for a lot of cities around the world. The work of the employed people there is to come up with all sorts of ideas, at all times. If we give up the idea of “the brilliant individual innovator and inventor” (Callon 2004), we realize that a person is not only surrounded by his colleagues but by all sorts of artifacts such as telephones, computers, or even post-it notes and marker pens. For the activities taking place in the office, these artifacts are just as important as the human actors – the collective is symmetrical, because humans as well as non-humans have the capacity to define the course of the action. And because action is collective, every action, be it the most simple and ordinary, mobilizes an entire network of humans and non-humans. Here Callon lists all the entities that participate in the act of driving:

“When I drive from Tokyo to Kyoto, as soon as I turn the ignition key of my Nissan, I mobilize all the engineers who designed my car, the researchers who studied the resistance of materials, the firms that explored the deserts of the Middle- East and drill for oil, the refineries that produce petrol, […]”  

(Callon 2004:6)

This view has far-reaching implications for how human agency is understood, and this is exactly where design comes into play. One consequence of this view is that a human being cannot be understood as being autonomous; everything he or she does is partly sustained and afforded by the surrounding materials. Consequently, agency as the capacity to “act, think and experience emotions” cannot be considered a pre-existing and unchangeable property of human beings (Van der Velden 2009). Rather, we have to consider “that there might be several forms of agency” (Callon 2004), some weaker and some stronger, and that things might have agency, too. Agency, after all, does “not reside neither in us nor in our artefacts but in out intra- actions” (Suchman 2007). Humans and non-humans are mutually constituted and their type of agency arises out of this process.

As Callon reminds us, this does not make human beings more passive, because the second consequence is that, in this view, design has the capacity to actively reshuffle arrangements of humans and non-humans and hence reconfigure human agency. This way, designers can achieve “more desirable configurations” (Van der Velden 2009). Of course, these design decisions are not ultimately binding, for the user can often react and use the object in a different way than envisaged by the designer. As Callon suggests, design is a never-ending process, in which the actors involved can potentially reconfigure what is given to them (although this has its limits).

In my next blog post I will try to connect these ideas with questions on sustainable design. In the meantime, here is my list of readings:

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Barad, Karen Michelle. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Callon, M. 2004. “The Role of Hybrid Communities and Socio-Technical Arrangements in the Participatory Design.” Journal of the Center for Information Studies 5: 3–10.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1995. “Design and Order in Everyday Life.” In The Idea of Design., edited by Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan, 118–26. Design Issues Reader Y. Cambridge, Mass ; London: MIT Press.

Drazin, Adam. 2013. “Chapter 2: The Social Life of Concepts in Design Anthropology.” In Design Anthropology : Theory and Practice, 33–50, 147 – [148]. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Fletcher, Kate. 2008. Sustainable Fashion and Textiles : Design Journeys. London: Earthscan.

Fry, Tony. 2011. Design as Politics. Oxford: Berg.

Hirst, John. 2010. “Values in Design: Existenzminimum, ‘Maximum Quality,’ and ‘Optimal Balance.’” In The Designed World : Images, Objects, Environment., edited by Richard Buchanan, Dennis P. Doordan, and Victor Margolin, 306–13. Oxford: Berg.

Ingold, T. 2010. “The Textility of Making.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34 (1): 91–102. doi:10.1093/cje/bep042.

Madge, Pauline. 2010. “Ecological Design: A New Critique.” In The Designed World : Images, Objects, Environments., edited by Richard Buchanan, Dennis P. Doordan, and Victor Margolin, 328–38. Oxford: Berg.

Manzini, Ezio. 2010. “Design, Environment and Social Quality: From Existenzminimum to ‘Quality Maximum.’” In The Designed World : Images, Objects, Environments., edited by Richard Buchanan, Dennis P. Doordan, and Victor Margolin, 300–305. Oxford: Berg.

Suchman, Lucille Alice. 2007. Human-Machine Reconfigurations : Plans and Situated Actions. 2nd ed. New York ; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Van der Velden, Maja. 2009. “Design for a Common World: On Ethical Agency and Cognitive Justice.” Ethics and Information Technology 11 (1): 37–47. doi:10.1007/s10676- 008-9178-2.

Verbeek, Peter-Paul, and Petran Kockelkoren. 2010. “The Things That Matter.” In The Designed World: Images, Objects, Environments, edited by Richard Buchanan, Dennis P. Doordan, and Victor Margolin, 83–94. Oxford: Berg.