Multiplicity Lens / Quality

From the ASD lenses document:
- flat design hierarchy
- multiplicity in representation
- constructive engagement with diversity
- participatory activities (multiple sources of influence)
- cognitive justice and valorizing marginal views

Against the accounts of neutral and deterministic accounts of technological agency. feminist technoscience approach claims that agency is not an attribute of humans alone but enacted and performed in socio-material configurations and intra-actions. This view opens up for the reconfigurations of design and use for more ethical effects such as cultivation of cognitive justice, the equal treatment and representation of different ways of knowing the world. The implication of this approach is that design becomes an adaptive and intra-active process in which more desirable [and sustainable] configurations of people and technology become possible.

Cognitive justice asserts the diversity of knowledges and the equality of knowers.

Donna Haraway:
How can we do justice to our different knowledge practices and at the same time share a common world? (Knowledge as embedded and situated) by democratization of science and technology as a requirement for the answer!

Visvanathan and Maja Van Der Velden:
Monocultures, western science view >> as the museumisation of indigenous knowledge(that means it is only useful for historical display) and scientific endeavor.   Science contains its own grammar of violence that needs to be addressed. Cognitive justice is not only about participation but cognitive representation: The idea of participation fundamentally accepts the experts’ definition of knowledge … experts’ knowledge is represented as high theory and layperson’s ideas as a pot-porri of practices, local ideas and raw material.   Thus democratization of science should be extended to include alternative sciences. It should be possible to validate other forms of knowledge.   

The solution, he argues, lies in a political economy and cosmology based on the following principles of cognitive justice:
• All forms of knowledge are valid and should co-exist in a dialogic relationship to each other.
• Cognitive justice implies the strengthening of the 'voice' of the defeated and marginalised.
• Traditional knowledges and technologies should not be 'museumized'.
• Every citizen is a scientist. Each layperson is an expert.
• Science should help the common man/woman.
• All competing sciences should be brought together into a positive heuristic for dialogue.

In this new relationship, framed by the principle of cognitive justice, it becomes possible to validate other forms of knowledge and to validate laypersons as experts. This validation is not an automatic justification for local practices but a “positive heuristic for dialogue” and will expand the democratic notion of citizenship, from voter and consumer to the citizen as knower. A dialogue of knowledges in order to create a new or alternative conception of Science.

Haraway shows that the alternative to this strong relativist position is not the single view, as argued by Nanda, but “partial, locatable, critical knowledges” in a dialogical relationship (Haraway 1995). This relationship is guided by epistemic responsibility and critical inquiry, not by an “everything goes” position that is as equally “from nowhere” as the positivist position.

Cognitive justice is first of all a call for making other ways of knowing visible, in particular the knowledge of the defeated and marginalised. Their relative validity will be realized through their inclusion in the heuristic dialogue between (conflicting) knowledges. they should be treated equal in terms of access to and participation in dialogues of knowledges.

This inclusion should not be understood as an automatic justification for local practices but as step towards a “new global language within which you can locate a local practice, or a multiplicity of local practices.


With cognitive justice there is no objective expert position from which to design and develop technology.

In theory, a design process based on cognitive justice would lead to technologies that are more flexible, because they accommodate diverse interests, and more democratic, because they incorporate diverse values. In practice, the full participation of end users, including their diverse knowledges in each phase of the project, leads to technical solutions that provide a better overall fit. As the study of ecological systems shows, diversity plays a crucial role in a system’s ability and capacity to adapt to change and to solve problems. In the absence of diversity, development can stumble and social, economic and cultural disruption will follow (Apffel-Marglin & Marglin, 1996; Lal, 2002; Shiva, 1993).

Cognitive justice enables diversity and it is in this meeting of the knowledges of participants that effectiveness is generated.

Johnson et al. (1998) argue that a diverse, non-competitive system is more successful in problem solving than a competitive, survival-of–the-fittest system. This may be the result of diversity enabling self-organisation. Thus the diversity and self-organising capacity of a system are interlinked. Self-organisation, the process in which global order comes forth out of local interactions, builds forth on both the differences and commonalities found in the local entities that form its diversity. A self-organising system uses collaboration and decentralised local control to network the local entities. 

What design principles encourage cognitive justice? Adaptive technology design that changes acc to the needs of users.  Design becomes more process oriented, an ongoing dialogue between design, designers and users as designers. It also changes the perception of the lifetime of design.

• Flat Design hierarchy: no expert privileges.
• Multiplicity in representation: diversity and participation.  also participation of artefacts. participation of artefacts can mean different things in production and use phases. for instance, in a participatory workshop, any material used or engaged can influence the design process differently.  consideration of these different materialities and their effects on perception and construction of design problem and solution space. Although we usually quite conscious about our selection and design of participatory activities and artefacts involved in those activities. We need to further think bout our choices and consider what kind of perceptions and actions are inhibited while we encourage some particular kinds. (are there any examples considering effects of different materialities?? if there exists some, how to find them?)
• Cognitive Justice: The concept of cognitive justice is based on the recognition of the plurality of knowledge and expresses the right of the different forms of knowledge to co-exist. Co-exist in design and use. involving different users with different backgrounds who will be part of the future assemblage/the system. if possible some indirect stakeholders who are likely to be affected by use  or non-use of the system.
• valorizing marginal views or assumptions: it is strategy of Critical Technical Practice and Reflective Design as well.