If one thing matters, everything matters
The embrace of participant observation by the design community has provided a source of tension between the disciplines that traditionally engaged in it and the new disciplines adapting it to their uses.
“If one thing matters, everything matters”
Wolfgang Tillmans
The embrace of participant observation by the design community has provided a source of tension between the disciplines that traditionally engaged in it and the new disciplines adapting it to their uses.
These tensions often confuse method with quality. I want to think about how the merger of these two activities can be re-conceptualised as an emerging third entity and avoid some of the disciplinary wars.
For anthropologists, the surge of interest in ethnography is both a boon and a worry. Interest in grounding innovation (and I’ll leave it at that for the moment) has meant increasing opportunity for the application of methods of engaging with people. If we step beyond the often rhetorical commitment to the needs of people, the simple situation is that capital has recognised the efficiency of grounded and iterative innovation and has increasingly looked to the humanities for methods of doing so.
The design industry has been well placed to respond to this need and they have enlisted the help of the social sciences under the banner of making capitalism serve people better. However the social sciences have a deep seated discomfort with the service of industry (not without reason) and my argument is that it’s this discomfort which lies beneath much of the argument over method in this debate.
However… Once we move into the service of industry, we accept some of the logic of capital by default, whether we like it or not. And part of that logic is efficiency. We must learn to do more with less. This may not apply to all of us. Some of us are fortunate enough to be blessed with long running projects and clients that want the fruits of the academy. For most jobbing design researchers however, we need to coax quality out of often sparse budgets and we need to apply our thinking directly to the practice of design.
Fortunately, this is not and should not be a hopeless quest. In 2003, the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans exhibited at the Tate Britain a show titled, “If one thing matters, everything matters.” This title can and should be a call to arms for those interested in the social and in the ongoing design of what the social will be in the future. Design, art and commerce are engaged in a fundamental re-organisation of the future around the notion of the local and there is simply too much local for the resource intensive model of academic ethnography to catch up. We need new models that are aimed at continuous response. We need to rethink our place in this model.
The idea of the field as a bounded and geographic location is long-contested. We need to abandon the notion that our role as design researchers is to report from one location to another. It’s not reportage, it’s merger. Our role is to exist simultaneously in multiple fields. The ethnography is the entire project and we need to make the most of each instance of understanding and insight that we are able to bring to bear. The arguments that interviews are not ethnography, workshops are not ethnography, only ethnography is ethnography often miss the point that the goal is not ethnography, but engagement and understanding. Frankly, I’m quite happy to just drop the use of the word ethnography altogether, just as I’ve happily dropped the use of anthropology or sociology. These are increasingly market orientated terms and get away from the goal, which is to discern understanding of the past in the service of the future. Maybe what we are engaged in is “designography” and our completed work, our theory is the design itself.
It’s both the understanding and the application of that understanding which is the marker of quality design research, not the deployment of particular methods or theories. I’m not arguing for the return of the heroic designer. But I am arguing that the designer has a role to play, we don’t escape from the role of the designer with the role of the heroic researcher. If everything matters, then each small thing matters too, each thing is a local field and matters and if a designer is able to craft quality from that small instance then that matters.
Quality is the success of what we create out of what we have available, it’s craft and it’s care and it’s passion. It’s not a formula. Research is in the business of answers and despite the philosophical difficulties of that position still appears determined to stay in that business. Design research or whatever this role grows up to be is a different thing and should be in the business of questions. We’re in the business of the future and that’s always a question, we shouldn’t forget it. Answers may be easier to sell, but they have a bad habit of arguing that they are only game in town. If everything matters, then every thing matters and every route to finding that thing matters. Keep finding ways to engage more deeply with the local through whatever means available, following the spirit, not the law, of whatever inspirations you have brought with you thus far. Design research should be art as much as science.