10.6092/issn.2038-3460/16992
This assemblage is based on the talk I gave at the EASST010 conference in Trento, Italy, September 03, 2010. It is composed of several kinds of materials. The ground structure is formed by the slides I showed at that occasion. These slides are commented in three different ways. Firstly by excerpts from the talk, secondly by comments added now when this assemblage is put together, and finally quotes from “Design Things”, the book manuscript around which the talk circulated.
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2038-3460
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Pelle Ehn
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
assemblage
Design Things: Drawing Things Together and Making Things Public
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
2
Lectures
2011-06-27
2023-05-22
2011-06-27
2023-07-03
31-52
TS
Pelle Ehn
2011/06/27
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/16992
31
Malmö University
2038-3460
1
assemblage
en
52
Design Things: Drawing Things Together and Making Things Public
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/16992/15893
2
                                                                            Lecture
Design Things: Drawing Things Together
and Making Things Public


Pelle Ehn




      Abstract This assemblage is based on the talk I gave at the EASST010 conference
      in Trento, Italy, September 03, 2010. It is composed of several kinds of materials.
      The ground structure is formed by the slides I showed at that occasion. These
      slides are commented in three different ways. Firstly by excerpts from the talk,
      secondly by comments added now when this assemblage is put together, and final-
      ly quotes from “Design Things”, the book manuscript around which the talk circu-
      lated.

      Keywords design; sociomateriality; things; controversy; assemblage.




    Thank you for inviting me here. It is a big honour to be allowed to present in a
community different from your own, and trying to make sense out of the things
that I think I have learned from this community. Still, many of you will probably
think I have just misused or misunderstood what it is all about.
    I will not give a literature overview or an overview of the field. What I will do
instead is something that could be called to design “things”, by “drawing things
together” and “making things public” – words and phrases that are familiar to you
in this community.




TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Volume 2(1) pp. 31-52 - ISSN 2038-3460
http://www.tecnoscienza.net                       © 2011 TECNOSCIENZA
32   EHN




        What I want to do is to try to respond to a design challenge that Bruno Latour
     put forward two years ago to the Design History Society in Cornwell.
        In that talk he observed that designers over the years have been so good at
     “drawing” – from four hundred years ago with the central perspective, to technical
     drawings, and onwards to today with the 3D CAD renderings. He asked: what if
     this kind of competences could be used to draw things together, to lay out the con-
     troversies in the objects of concern that are involved in the single object. Could
     this designerly way of approaching the object of design be a way to shift from
     drawing things, objects, to drawing things together? That is the challenge that I
     will look into. What is needed are tools that capture, in Latour´s words, what has
     always been the hidden practice of modernist innovation: objects have always been
     projects, matters of facts have always been matters of concern.
                                                               TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)        33



    My structure for this talk is a narrative of “circulating references”, to borrow
another of Latour’s concepts familiar to most of you. It starts with the “drawing”
practice of master design students in Vienna, Austria and Malmö, Sweden. They
became involved in an EU research project called ATELIER, Architecture and
Technology for Inspirational Learning, and that project designed a number of
technological artefacts, objects, and potential things to enhance their “drawing”
skills. These objects and these design practises became the grounding for a group
of people, under the collective name of A.Telier, to try to reflect further on how
“to draw things together” in a design practice.
    A result of this transformation was another object, a manuscript for further cir-
culation. This object was last week, or rather starting already half a year ago, trans-
formed into a PhD course on “the doing of design things” and opened up as a
“thing” for design students involved in “drawing controversial things together”
ending up as new objects and “things” in transformed design student practices.




    The two practical settings that inspired our search for inspirational design
“drawing” environments were chosen to be complementary. One was a “tradition-
al” master’s program in architecture. It was complemented and contrasted by the
setting of a new-media-oriented master’s studio program in interaction design.
    The Academy of Fine Arts is Vienna’s main university of arts; its history goes
back to 1692. The studio-like learning environment brings together a diversity of
resources-disciplines, people, materials, and technologies. These resources include
“hard facts” about context and requirements, images and metaphorical descrip-
tions of qualities, such as atmosphere, movement, and spatial configurations,
knowledge about construction, material, detail, and so on. The resources are mul-
timedial—they range from physical objects like CAD plans, sketches, and scale
models to samples, product catalogs, art books, and everyday objects, as well as
immaterial resources, such as conversations and emotional reactions.
34   EHN



         The School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University, is by contrast,
     very young. It opened in the autumn of 1998. The interaction design program at
     the master’s level is a two-year full-time studio based program and applies a broad
     perspective on the interaction design field. Students have a mixed background in-
     cluding computer science, design, art, and music. Besides the computer, they typi-
     cally work with a mixture of video clips, mock-ups, and other physical representa-
     tions, such as scale models, prototypes, and so on. The design studio is their per-
     manent base, but they also have access to a craft workshop for designing physical
     devices, a “black box” where they can create full-scale mock-ups of scenarios, and
     a well-equipped music studio to record sound and music.




        The Atelier project studied design education practice,
        developed prototypes to enhance such education, intro-
        duced prototypes to different real-world settings (design
        and architecture classes) and, partly in collaboration
        with the students, reflected on the interventions to
        learn about how to improve both architecture and technol-
        ogy and the learning situation. This “pro-searching” is
        built on a user-collaborative approach involving users
        and researchers as reflective co designers and evolves
        from early explorations of practice and visions through
        field trials with gradually more integrated scenarios and
                                                              TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)        35



   prototypes      for   inspirational        learning.      (A.Telier     manu-
   script)


   The ATELIER project, as an EU project, produced lots of objects. These de-
sign artefacts were given names like the Texture Painter, the Mixed Object Table,
the Interactive Stage, the Tangible Archive, the Physical Building Block, the Tan-
gible Image Query, the eDiary, the Tracking Game Table…and I could go on…




    The interest of the project had to do with inspirational qualities of design envi-
ronments. So we were interested in how qualities of such an environment could be
supported, and we explored aspects like materiality and diversity of representa-
tions, creative density, connection, multiple travels, narrativity, reprogramming,
dimensionality, scaling, configurability, etc. These were the kind of qualities that
the project struggled to support. I will not talk much more about the project, but
just conclude that most of this worked reasonably well. The students got quite sub-
sumed into this new design environment, to the degree that they did not get out to
do their design work into the field anymore. This great design environment was re-
ally too cocooning, with great “drawing” tools, but not really supporting “drawing
things together”.
36   EHN




        So towards the end of the project we literally had them move the design studio
     out of the box and into a controversial thing, into public space, etc. So that is how
     that project ended, on the one hand with a number of tools and an environment
     supporting designarly “drawing” of complex objects, but with the conclusion that
     these activities had to be moved out into public space and controversial things to
     really support engagement in “drawing things together”.



                        “Design Things” by A.Telier
                                                               TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)        37



   A group of us continued the work into something that became a manuscript,
another designed object, that we in the end came to call “Design Things”. We met
for two years and worked on a manuscript that tried to deal with these issues, but
not as an edited volume but as a collective writing. Even if we found a publisher in
2007, it turned out to be really controversial to act as a collective writer (now, four
years later the book is eventually being circulated by the publisher, MIT Press Sep-
tember 2011).


   Even if “A.Telier” has been intensively doing research on
   interaction design and related areas for the last twenty
   years, his name is not known in the research community.
   Probably from a strong case of shyness, or some other
   form of psychological fragility, during these years he
   (or she) has hidden behind a large variety of pseudonyms.
   We know for certain that he has widely published and has
   frequently appeared in Aarhus and Malmö as Pelle Ehn; in
   Copenhagen he has also gone by the name of Thomas Binder.
   In Italy he is well known as Giorgio De Michelis, while
   in Wien he has adopted a feminine pseudonym: Ina Wagner.
   Moreover, in recent years he has augmented the confusion
   by creating new younger aliases: in Denmark and Sweden he
   has appeared as Per Linde, while between Finland and Ita-
   ly he appears under the name of Giulio Jacucci. This list
   is not complete, but illustrates adequately a behavior
   whose deep reasons merit attention. It seems as if he or
   she needs a multiplicity of personalities to deal with a
   complex subject like design, investigating and practicing
   several aspects of it as well as proposing different
   viewpoints on it, without being able to take a consist-
   ently uniform point of view. A turning point in his/her
   life has been the project Atelier (the name cannot be
   casual!) where, with all his/her different names he/she
   has played almost all the roles, multiplying him-/herself
   like a Fregoli of research. At the end of the Atelier
   project, A.Telier has spent some years reflecting on its
   outcomes, coming out finally with this book—Design
   Things—which he signs for the first time with his/her
   true name.
   So what is suggested is a “deconstruction” of the indi-
   vidual designer and the object of design, an edifying ap-
   proach for reflection and dialogue for, by, and with fel-
   low designers and design researchers. This deconstruction
   begins, following Heidegger, with the things themselves,
   or more specifically in our case with sociomaterial de-
   sign things. Such things, or rather events of “thinging”
   (as Heidegger would put it), gather human beings; they
   are events in the life of a community and play a central
38   EHN



       role in community members’ common experience. In this
       spirit, Bruno Latour has called for “thing philosophy”
       and “object-oriented politics” (Latour and Weibel 2005),
       and by doing so has also challenged designers to make
       public the object of design. Things are not carved out of
       human relations, but rather of sociomaterial, “collec-
       tives of humans and nonhumans,” through which the objects
       of concern are handled. At the same time, a designed ar-
       tifact is potentially a thing made public, since once it
       is delivered to its users, it becomes matters of concern
       to them with its new possibilities of interaction. A turn
       toward things can, as will be elaborated upon, be seen as
       a movement away from “projecting” and toward design pro-
       cesses and strategies of “infrastructuring” and “thing-
       ing”. (A.Telier manuscript)




        To a community like yours the complexity of “things” and objects are well
     known. This is not so much problematized in the design community, but just as
     Latour and others, we are struck by the etymology of the English word “thing”.
                                                              TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)        39



   The etymology of the English word “thing” reveals a jour-
   ney from meaning an assembly, which was decided on be-
   forehand to take place at a certain time and at a certain
   place to deal with certain “matters of concern” to the
   community, to meaning an object, “an entity of matter.”
   So, the term thing goes back originally to the governing
   assemblies in ancient Nordic and Germanic societies. The-
   se pre Christian things were assemblies, rituals, and
   places where disputes were solved and political decisions
   made. It is a prerequisite for understanding this journey
   that if we live in total agreement, we do not need to
   gather to solve disputes, since there are none. Instead,
   the need for a neutral place, where conflicts can be ne-
   gotiated, is motivated by a diversity of perspectives,
   concerns, and interests. (A.Telier manuscript)




   This journey back and forth is interesting for us to consider. A suggestion in the
manuscript is that “things” are going on in assemblies and places, “thingings” are
events in the life of heterogeneous communities, and “things, as we have learnt
from this community, may be seen as collectives of humans and non-humans. But
for the design community we also have the question of an object out there, and the
assembly of the design thing itself, but we also have the question that the object of
design is not yet there.
   So, this is our complexity: to deal with a “thing” that is not yet there, that does
not yet exist. It seems like the vocabulary of “things” and objects could help us a
40   EHN



     bit. For designers, there are two kinds of outcome of a design thing: there is the
     engineering outcome: devices providing access to functions, but at the same time
     there is the architectural outcome; “things” modifying the possible spaces of inter-
     action (functional, aesthetic, cultural, etc.). In the manuscript we investigates
     things, devices and the object of design.


        We propose a view of design as accessing, aligning, and
        navigating among the “constituents” of the object of de-
        sign. People interact with the object of design through
        its constituents, be those constituents things, arti-
        facts, or representations. In experiencing things, ob-
        jects, and devices people are primarily involved not with
        different types of materials, but in different kinds of
        interaction. (A.Telier manuscript)




        So when moving into the design studio, we have to deal with social “things”
     and material representatives or constituencies, “things” which are socio-material
     assemblies, but also thing as physical devices, and as design artefacts that we work
     with, the models and sketches etc., which in turn could be looked upon as partici-
     pating representatives or constituencies. This is very different from the idea of fac-
     tual representations. Design instead becomes a way of creating, importing, ma-
     nipulating, cancelling the different constituencies of this “thing” and its object of
     concern. So the question becomes how to do that. The manuscript explores this in
     terms of metamorphing of the object of design, by investigating the performativity
                                                          TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)      41



of “things” and by hinting at how designers may journey an emerging landscape of
design and not least how in design projects and other design engagements design-
ers may “draw things together”.




   How do designers mobilize, manage, and transform arti-
   facts and their interpretations? Our approach explores
   how the web of “constituents” is weaved around a drifting
   object of design as the designer engages in its transfor-
   mations. Design work is looked on as an act of “meta-
   morphing,” where design concepts are envisioned and real-
   ized through objectifying and manipulating a variety of
   representations. (A.Telier manuscript)
42   EHN



       How do designers express and experience design objects?
       The approach here is to describe and explain the evolu-
       tion of the design through the designer’s performance of
       it. This includes considering narrative temporalities,
       fictional spaces, and creative constraints as basic fea-
       tures of performing design, and looking at characteris-
       tics of staging design events. We suggest an interven-
       tionist, participative and experiential understanding of
       design as purposeful staging and accomplishing of events.
       (A.Telier manuscript)




       We propose particular notions of place and landscape to
       explain how the design environment is performed in the
       work of designers and how a situational ground is enacted
       and transformed as design artifacts emerge. We suggest
       the concept of an “‘emerging landscape”‘ as an alterna-
       tive to the notion of an abstract design space, an expe-
       rienced landscape in which the designer journeys and
       dwells. (A.Telier manuscript)
                                                               TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)        43



        “Objects have always been projects”, but projects
        are preferably performed as Things




    Let’s now move to the design project thing and questions of participation and
representation. Latour points out that objects have always been projects. But we
could, from a designerly view, add that projects perform things. So, this mean, as I
mentioned earlier, to design “things”. For us in the design community this means a
shift away both from a tradition of waterfall or other sequential models of analysis,
design, construction and implementation, but also going beyond thinking of user
participation as the ultimate solution. Questions have been raised like: how to con-
struct a finished objects of design, what kind of task is that and how do you go
about it, how do you align constituents around a shared problematic objects of
concern, how do you make these practices reportable (all the work we do with
ethnography, participation, fieldwork), how do we make these objects possible to
manipulate, through working with sketches, models, prototypes, games, etc., and –
last but not least – how is a design made into a public thing, how does it open up
to controversies among participants in the project as well as outside, in workshops,
exhibitions, public debates. In this view, designing and “drawing things together”
becomes a matter of aligning, engaging, attaching representatives or constituents in
the life cycle of design objects and devices, and in making and designing a thing, as
this collective of humans and non-humans.
    There are at least to two strategies to draw things together in design projects: to
focus on “use-before-use” or “design-after-design” as Johan Redström has put it.
44   EHN



         Let’s start with use. This is the traditional way to go about drawing things to-
     gether in my own field and is often referenced as Participatory Design. Basically,
     the idea is to say: well, Let’s invite users – we know who they are, who the human
     constituencies are – and have them participate and, by that way, envision a future
     use, and we use all these tools, all scenarios and prototypes to do that. It could be
     said: to focus on assemblies before objects, and use before actual use. Design by
     doing as prototyping, design by playing as performing of visions, and more gener-
     ally design by participation as the making of shared design things, are key elements
     in engaging participants/constituents in this approach to drawing things together. I
     will not go into any details here. So this is a very unfair history of Participatory De-
     sign in thirty seconds (Ehn 1988; Greenbaum and Kyng 1991).
                                                              TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)       45




    This is maybe also the right moment to pay tribute to Susan (Leigh Star), to her
concept of processes of on-going infrastructuring (and special attention to those
being marginalized in these processes). This is a question of how to draw things
together for “design after design”. What we need to do is to design a thing that
opens up for potential design after the actual design in the project has taken place,
to defer some of the design until later on, assuming that people would be interest-
ed in doing that (an assumption that could be questioned). We go from designing
things aimed at use of products and services, to design things, to create good envi-
ronment for future design things, in the future, at use time, wherever and whenev-
er that might be.
46   EHN




         We should not focus on the infrastructure but on the process of infrastructur-
     ing, which is ongoing between the here and now and somewhere in a future we
     know very little about. There are a lot of practices involved in this: selection, de-
     sign, development, employment, enactment and, later on, with other actors, articu-
     lation, adoption, appropriation… The list could be much longer. All these kinds of
     practices seem to be involved in this infrastructuring and it becomes an important
     work how we make it possible for diverse actors to get involved into the perform-
     ing of these kinds of practices. In the manuscript we suggest some strategies – pro-
     tocolling, formatting, configuring, working with components, working with pat-
     terns, working with ontologies, working with ecologies of things etc. That has to be
     for another talk, or for the book, if it eventually comes out.
                                                               TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)        47



   Despite all the potential merit of drawing things together through strategies of
designing as engaging users in potential use before actual use or designing plat-
forms that open up for design after design in actual use there are challenges be-
yond this, so to say out of the box and into participation in controversial public
events.

   Where will the design studio of the future be situated,
   who will participate, and what kind of “design games”
   will they play? Is there a new role for the professional
   designer to play that takes place “outside the box,” by
   participating in controversial public events? In the fi-
   nal chapter we reflect on such issues of design “outside
   the box,” extending design into political processes, pub-
   lic debates, and possibly even subversive but creative
   misuse. In doing so we reflect on values that guide such
   design and we look into a few controversial issues, such
   as: Are designers the enemy of design? (A.Telier manu-
   script)




   The book is not yet out, as I said. The final manuscript was sent to MIT Press a
year ago, so I do not know if it is a book object or not, but at least it has been cir-
culated into another kind of activity, the Nordic Design Summer School, which
was held last week in Pukeberg, in the forests of Sweden, with participants from all
the Nordic countries and from the US and Germany: 41 design PhD students who,
48   EHN



     during a week, read the manuscript, had seminars in the morning and workshops
     in the afternoon. In this way, they were designing parliaments or parliamentary
     technologies (Latour and Weibel 2005), and mapping controversial issues. As a
     main assignment, they were probed to design ways of “drawing things together”.




        I would like to quickly go through how they appropriated and transformed
     what started as design student practices in Vienna and Malmö, became the design
     of collaborative things in a European design research project, and then became a
     manuscript. Of course this is not a linear story, there are a lot of actors participat-
     ing all over, going in and out.
                                                             TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)       49



   Here are some examples from day one on drawing things together, on that day
with a focus on parliamentary technologies. The pictures on the top show an inter-
active wave machine, where the waves were responses to controversies but also
participated in them. Down left is a space for eternal encounters and to the right
representations of the ongoing and becoming of networks.




    On the next two days, the design students were mapping controveries. To the
left opening up and laying out controversies from already public stories, and to the
right, on the following day, being much more concrete in the square in the city of
Kalmar. The square, recently being redesigned by a well-known architect, had be-
come big controversy in the city. The design students did, based on their interpre-
tations of the controversy, interventions to create dialogues around the controversy
with citizens passing the square.
50   EHN



        The main work was, however, the closing design things opening up matters of
     concern on the last day of the summer school. For this the design students gath-
     ered in groups on matters of concern that they would like to work on for the whole
     week, and the assignment was to organise a design proposal. The things they
     “draw together” ranged from “material” controversies to open-ended design
     things.

                         material “controvercies”




         Some of them were very simple. One example is the thing in which 16 cubes
     with different materials participated. The human participants were asked to judge
     and discuss which one was best. Maybe this was not a deep and essential contro-
     versy, but it is interesting that even (or especially) among designers it was not so
     easy to agree in judgements.
         Another group worked on environmental issues. They challenged the tradition-
     al environmentalist “Apocalypse Later” approach (postponing the catastrophe), by
     mockingly suggesting a strategy of “Apocalypse Faster”. There would be things
     like the 10.000 Miles Food Certificate, the Energy Abuse Meter, and the Ultra-safe
     Vehicle for Shopping etc. They tried to engage people in this campaign.
                                                               TECNOSCIENZA – 2(1)        51



   Another proposal, “band aid”, was about packages to be distributed the mar-
ket. Examples included a “do-it-yourself gardening pack”, and “a personal rape
evidence kit”. The suggested kits were close to products that already exist, and
they were piggybacking on the interest in such projects. But the interventions were
really responses to articles on existing major controversies, like on contaminated
ground or the demands for hard evidences in cases of rape. The designers interven-
tion also included engaging the audience in how they would best market these
products.




   The final group, working on the platforms for open ended design (design after
design), draw all the participants together in a reflective thing evaluating the design
summer school, revealing controversies, and opening up for further design en-
gagements and things after the summer school.

                     bringing the thing together
                    (locally) open ended design
52   EHN



        I do not know if these “circulating references”, this weave of successive trans-
     formations, from design student “drawing” practices, to the design of artefacts
     supporting such collaborative design “drawing”, to a view of design as the perfor-
     mance of controversial “design things” and finally back to design student practices
     of “drawing things together” compose a proper response to the challenge put for-
     ward by Bruno Latour, but I hope to have shown that the design research commu-
     nity takes the challenge of “drawing things together” seriously, and that we in our
     pragmatic and designerly way try to put science and technology studies at work.

        Thank you.




     References
     A.Telier (2011) Design Things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (forthcoming).
     Ehn, P. (1988) Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts, Hillsdale, NJ, Law-
        rence Erlbaum.
     Greenbaum, J. and Kyng, M. (eds) (1991) Design at Work: Cooperative Design of
        Computer Work, Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum.
     Latour, B. (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cam-
        bridge, Harvard University Press.
     Latour, B. (2008) A Cautious Promethea? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of De-
        sign (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk). Keynote lecture for the Net-
        works of Design meeting of the Design History Society Falmouth, Cornwall,
        3rd September 2008.
     Latour, B. and Weibel, P. (eds) (2005) Making Things Public: Atmospheres of De-
        mocracy (Catalog of the Exhibition at ZKM—Center for Art and Media—
        Karlsruhe, March 20–October 30, 2005), Cambridge, MIT Press.
     Star, S.L. and Ruhleder, K. (1996) Steps toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design
        and Access for Large Information Spaces, in “Information Systems Research”
        7(1), pp. 111-134.




      Pelle Ehn Malmö University
      School of Arts and Communication
      205 06 Malmö - Sweden
      Email: pelle.ehn@mah.se
