Research through Design (RtD) and Uncertain Futures
Arguing about definitions of a research process seems an arcane business. However, to my mind, the idea of Research through Design is more significant than meets the eye as we look to creating sustainable futures in growing precarity and uncertainty. That is why I believe Research through Design (RtD) needs unpacking — to learn about processes of relevance to sustainability.
Much of my work looks at changing ethos, a design challenge of great urgency if we are to mitigate the negative effects of populism as well as adapt to and reduce climate change. It is increasingly clear that the transition to a sustainable society will not be achieved simply by doing what we currently do more efficiently with lower carbon emissions (Fazey et al 2018). A different way of being is implied by both the current and baked-in impacts of climate change and the need for a radically lower-carbon, reduced-consumption society with values that sustain and pursue those changes. I am engaged in designing social change to impact culture, to meet the challenge to transform ourselves and learn to live with continuous and increasing adaptation. My techniques and the underpinning approach are described elsewhere (see related work below). Here, I want to look at what RtD has to do with designing new processes of engagement and ways of being. This is to offer a contrast to the product-focused approach with which RtD is most often associated, underpinning the popular RtD conference (see https://www.researchthroughdesign.org).
RtD is becoming a term for any work that is practice-based and involves an element of designing. In 2016, I co-hosted a conference doctoral consortium in which 8 of the 9 PhD students showing their work called their method Research through Design. A few years ago, when researchers referenced this kind of approach, we had to cite Frayling (1993) even to argue that putting an artifact into the world was a valid way to conduct a research inquiry. Not so now. When quizzed, each student was confidently doing practice-based study, each using a different kind of interventionist research process.
Despite their claims, I would argue that the term RtD does not point to a method as such, but a relationship acknowledging a wider turn to performativity that legitimates action research approaches (i.e. research where the learning comes from making change and reviewing it, see Reason and Bradbury 2000). An argument rages quietly in RtD circles (and appeared at the 2018 DRS workshop) as to whether RtD is a) any research elicited through presenting a designed artifact and gathering data from its encounter and use, b) a method of ‘suck it and see’, where artifacts in the process of being designed are prototyped and given to the world so that their form and function can be modified by feedback from encounter and use.
My question here is what happens when the design is of political systems and ways of being. Clearly, by instigating changes, we are learning about the world (a). We are then using our learning to adjust what we do (b). This is feedback to allow us to live better (by which I mean more equally, justly and kindly, using resources more wisely and including all species in our understanding of ecological justice). But it is also the principle upon which all science has come to be founded. So we could see the development of intentional political change as a form of RtD that has a bearing on all our knowledge-seeking activities.
The activity of designing emerged as a distinct pursuit with the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America, now linked with the start of the Anthropocene era and short-sighted and unsustainable ways of life, but, at the time, made wonderful for applying the new sciences of the natural world to subjugate natural phenomena far more effectively than ever before for human benefit.
Science has long enjoyed an elevated status in epistemological terms as it concerns new understandings of the world (e.g. gravity) rather than what to do with them (e.g. generate hydro-electric power). Yet, in science disciplines, it is now acknowledged that something other than the simple investigation of natural laws takes place; there is a synthetic socio-technical process shaped by tools and credited with contributing to the effects it discovers (e.g. Barad 2007, Latour and Woolgar 1979, etc). Sciences can now be seen as methodology shaped by human needs rather than absolute truth, albeit remaining a fundamental means to understand our impact and the planet’s future. Science is designed through its manifestation in the science programs that inform what we know and understand. Design’s applied intention of finding fitness for purpose rather than producing objective and dispassionate knowledge is looking increasingly salient as we recognize the potential we have to shape and be shaped by our knowledge. Design practices acknowledge the specific need of judgment. This repositioning puts science in the service of design as an activity that shapes our world using the wisest knowledge of the moment. And the more that we are evaluating the sciences of the artificial - in that science is an evaluation of the world as we have rendered it and interpret it - the more that RtD (and performativity with it) becomes the frame of all research inquiry into future ways of being.
In considering RtD, one might also argue that testing change on the world to learn its effect is a necessary precaution before engaging in further Anthropocene activities. It allows us to iterate; to try and fail without taking the world with us. Taking due care, it is the ethical path to making change.
In practical terms, for me, it means testing out new ways of dwelling together and a new mindfulness about doing so respectfully — and then improving the formula. But we do not have the luxury of much time in testing how such change might be made. We need to respond now to the emerging trends that are most damaging to the planet’s life. This is a form of prefigurative politics, or politics-by-example, that is equally well regarded as Research through Design. It is to set up projects and ways of living that pilot and test our potential to change and be changed. This is not to ignore other definitions of RtD or to believe that we have the exhaustive one, but to point to the opportunity it offers to provide structure, experimentation and hope along a path of transformative action and reflection and to invite designers to sit down with the activists to make those paths clearer in the present uncertainties.
References
Karen Barad. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke University Press
Ioan Fazey + 47 further authors. 2018. Ten essentials for action-oriented and second order energy transitions. Energy Research & Social Science, 40, 54–70
Christopher Frayling. 1993. Research in Art and Design. Royal College of Art Research Papers 1, 1:1–5.
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. Sage, Los Angeles
Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, eds. 2000. Handbook of action research: participative inquiry and practice. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Related Work
Ann Light. 2015. Troubling Futures: can participatory design research provide a constitutive anthropology for the 21st century? Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal — IxD&A, N.26, 2015, pp. 81–94
Ann Light. 2017. Framing Wonder: A New Mission for Design. Medea Talk, Malmo, Sweden: http://medea.mah.se/event/medea-talks-ann-light.
Ann Light. 2018. Who are We to Make Change? In Taking Action in a Changing World (Light, Ferrario, Frauenberger, Preece, Strohmeier) interactions January-February 2018, p34–45
Ann Light, Alison Powell and Irina Shklovski. 2017. Design for Existential Crisis in the Anthropocene Age. C&T’17
Light, Ann, Mason, Deborah, Wakeford, Tom, Wolstenholme, Ruth and Hielscher, Sabine. 2018. Creative Practice and Transformations to Sustainability: Making and Managing Culture Change. Arts and Humanities Research Council.
