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Download fileTracing the tensions surrounding understandings of agency and knowledge in technology design
conference contribution
posted on 11.05.2017, 11:11 authored by Ruth Neubauer, Erik Bohemia, Kerry HarmanThe literature suggests that prevailing understandings of the makeup of
design knowledge and agency in producing design knowledge in technology
is not helpful for design processes and its practitioners.
Tensions arise within processes of designing, when design knowledge is
understood as objective, whilst subjectivity is experienced in the research
methods employed. In the same time, knowledge production is pursued in
an individualist manner, where the situated nature of knowing as an
interplay of factors, likely reaching beyond personal traits and human
intention, is not acknowledged.
In this way, design processes are currently working against their inherent
potential with likely effects on designers and subsequently design outcomes.
The arising tensions cause issues for practitioners, who are stuck in between
an objectivity demand and experienced subjectivity, without an alternative
conception of their work.
Practice-oriented conceptualisations of social dynamics, how things are, and
come to be, as well as existing research in consumption practices and
sustainable design, have shown that agency and knowing conceptualised as
emerging from practice might reconcile this tension. It is therefore that we
argue for a reconceptualization of the makeup of knowledge and agency in
knowledge production, so that these advancements in conceptualising
practices can be of service to the technology design discipline.
History
School
- Loughborough University London