Shifting perspectives

Shifting Perspectives: Image

PhD festival 2018

Looking for/at histories of Scandinavian User-Centered Design

The aim of my exhibited piece was to highlight three main aspects of my PhD project: Where could we look – and with which perspectives – in order to understand where user-centered design practices come from; which ideas, values, norms and assumptions might be embedded in these design methods, given the historical contexts in which they emerged; and how could we tell histories of design and designing that open up for broader considerations of which contexts are considered relevant for making sense of current and future practices in design?

Shifting Perspectives: Text

I have chosen to work with combinations of images relating to collaborative design practices and methods, that relate current co-design methodology and established design history of participatory design to historical contexts that have hitherto not been present in the history of design. The images have been merged/juxtaposed by folding them in such a way that a physical sideways movement is required in order to see the one or the other image in full.

This aims at underlining how an actual movement in where we stand and what we search for is needed in order to take new perspectives on what we perceive as important to consider and look at in the history of design. Hence the “looking for” (as in searching other backgrounds and contexts) and “looking at” (as in questioning the a-historicity of current practice as well as established design history) in the heading of the exhibit.

Where do we stand?

On one side of the stand is a juxtaposition of an image of nurses co-designing the ideal future patient room using a 3D room layout with furniture, from an article by Liz Sanders & P.J. Stappers ”Co-creation and the new landscapes of design” (CoDesign 2008:1), with a 1940s image of a couple testing different ways of furnishing an ideal future home using a similar 3D set-up. The idea with this is to illustrate that the methods that are used in participatory design processes today are not neutral and a-historical, but have come about in specific historical settings.

In this case, the use of scale models or mock-ups in the 1940s home reform movement aimed at both educating young people in citizenship and the importance of ”good design”, as well as simultaneously have architects, planners and politically engaged persons learning from these people in order to design the best possible future ”people’s home” in Sweden. The aim then was to investigate, understand and reform everyday life, in order to design a completely new kind of society.

On the other side of the stand are two compiled images: One of a co-design process with a group of men around a table in an early participatory design project – I am uncertain if it is from the DEMOS or UTOPIA – (photo by Pelle Ehn, published in 1991), and the other of two women testing kitchen appliances at Hemmens Forskningsinstitut (1953). The idea here is to highlight the search for and development of methods for both investigating everyday life, and for supporting user participation in design processes. In Participatory Design, as it emerged in Scandinavia in the 1970s and 80s, methods were developed to support user participation throughout the whole design process, when designing (digital/computerized) tools for professional use. Central to this was the consideration of users as experts on equal terms with designers, based on their skills and experience.

By shifting perspectives on the history of design, we can see similar practices already in 1940s Sweden in other contexts, such as at the HFI. Here, methods and tools were developed collaboratively with the aim of professionalizing house work. In this process, housewives were established as experts on equal terms with architects and scientists. This image also references to the image of the nurses on the other side of the exhibition stand: In both images, women are protagonists and attributed expertise (also through their “uniforms” which signal professionalism), thereby also highlighting gender perspectives on and in the histories of design.

What do we see?

What design does, for and with whom, and how design is done, has changed over time – and will continue to change also in the future. Unpacking the ideological contents and historical contexts embedded in our current ways of doing participatory, user-centered, design could support a more conscious and critical approach in rethinking and developing existing and emerging design practices.

Shifting Perspectives: Work