This research project aims to generate (shareable) knowledge through design. The main generator of knowledge will be the act of designing and reflection on the act of designing. Design, as a way of acting in the world through intervening and making, brings with it great capacities of knowledge production. Whether under the name of Research through Design, Design Research, Critical Making, or Critical Design, the design practice can contribute a knowledge outcome through designerly activities. Within the Re-Source project we refer to these activities as ‘Designerly Research’. The focus of this Designerly Research is residual material flows in the urban environment. The research activities bring artifacts into the world and allow for discussion, reflection and analysis of the coming-into-being of these artifacts (Stappers & Giaccardi 2017, 20). The possible futures that become visible, debatable, and tangible through design give us new insights in what circularity looks like, how we can reevaluate residual materials and what a transition towards circularity might look like within the urban environment. Moreover, the act of designing generates knowledge through experience and the production of an object of design (Binder et al. 2011). Through engaging with the complexity of a particular situation, through intervening and joining in the constellation of actors, Designerly Research generates new knowledge on the subject of the societal challenge of circularity and what this challenge exactly entails. One of the important challenges in the Re-Source project will be in making this knowledge shareable and understandable.
Our project is grounded in a field of tension constituted by different disciplines, domains and theories. The design practice is one of them. Reflection plays an important role in the design practice, both as a bodily experience and as a cognitive process and happens both in-action and on-action. Consequently, reflection also happens in-practice and can occur on-practice (Schön 1984; Scrivener 2000). These different modes of reflection will be important in our attempts at making the knowledge generated through design sharable and understandable. Within this research project we not only try to understand the design practice itself and find ways to open up the knowledge generated in it, but, in doing so, we contribute to bridging the supposed gap between the world of design and the world of academic research. Because of this a contemporary academic debate is of interest to us; Actor Network Theory, or ANT.
The fields of Science & Technology Studies equipped with the ANT-toolbox and Designerly Research share a certain interest into what I for now will refer to with the inadequate notion of context. There are many different approaches to design both as a discipline, a mode of research, an interventional practice or anything in between. However, contemporary developments in the meeting point of academia and design have brought forward notions of ‘constructive design research’ or ‘Research through Design’ and the likes to try and make a distinction between the different design activities and modes of design (Stappers & Giaccardi 2017). Viewing Design as a research practice and taking seriously and evaluating their outcomes as potentially insightful rests on this idea of context.
The idea of context or situatedness plays an important role in Science & Technology Studies and ANT. Things do not exist separately from the networks they are a part of. In STS the empirical analysis of phenomenon, performed often by intervening through participant observation (Mol 1999; Law 2003; Law & Singleton 2015), might be seen as a move in the direction of the designerly ways of acting and producing knowledge found in the design practice. In these types of sociological or anthropological research projects the focus is on specific instances of things in specific situations. Knowledge gets produced through meshworks of institutions, devices, protocols, people and other things. Salmon, as insightfully explained by John Law in the video below, is not the same thing all over the world. What a thing is varies constantly by the way of these meshworks that they are entangled in. We are not talking about or dealing with anything in general, we are always dealing with things in particular. We can view Design as the process of creating the ultimate particular, and accompanying knowledge (Nelson & Stolterman 2003, 33). Consequently, if we take this meshworked view of reality, the more particular, the more complex and the more general the more simplified (Fig 1). We might understand ANT as a debate or program that tries to come to terms with this within Science & Technology Studies.
Fig. 1. (adapted from Nelson & Stolterman 2003)
As a theory, ANT is an approach to sociotechnical analysis based on entities as effects of enactment and relationality (Law 2004, 157). What I propose to take from Actor Network Theory at this point is the general notion that things happen in networks, in highly complex and entangled networks that might not be aptly described by the term ‘network’ (we might call these meshworks, ecologies or assemblages). The notion that things happen in ‘networks’ brings with it implications for inquiry into things.
The notion of ontological politics plays an important role in ANT and describes the process through which complex networks produce realities; Practices perform or enact realities. In the process hinterlands, a wording that directs us to the realm of geography and the material, get crafted through the stabilization of statements about that reality into inscription devices (protocols, machines, tools, systems, structures, etc) that work to further inform the practice and enact that reality (Law 2004). The understanding of reality as constructed through practices and hence multiple move us in the direction of the ultimate particular as we try to make sense of it.
Because we regard realities as taking place, being enacted through people and things, contextual, situated and constituted by entanglements, and yes, within a larger field of socio-economic powers but indeed always through actual particular entities, a Designerly Research approach can be very productive as it is a way of intervening in the particular and experiencing these meshworks through actually engaging with them.