Mutual shaping of Agency and Design

DESIGN AND AGENCY RELATIONS:

i.     Agency’s role in design:

a.   How do different agencies involved in technology production phase shape design problem and process?

In technology production phase, there may be designers, potential users and any other human actors and material artefacts participating in this process. An assemblage of humans and artefacts and their various connections or couplings may result in agencies in different forms and degrees. These different forms of agencies may shape the design process and design problem itself.

How much are we aware of the fact that the different configurations of human and artefact assemblages may bring about different forms of agencies?

How much are we aware of the impact of different agencies on definition and transformation of the design problem?

Configuration of Assemblage à Forms of Agency à Design Problem/Process

Super subjective!

Agency from POV of designer1, designer2, participants, or researcher.

b.     How do different conceptions of agency shape design?

Humans involved in production phase might have different conceptions and perceptions of agency. These different conceptions of agency may affect the design decision implicitly or may cause misattribution of agency and hence unintended outcomes.

We design according to whose conception of agency?

How much are we aware of our and others’ conceptions of agencies during design?

c.      How does the extent of consideration of agency shape design?

Some designers may include agency-related qualities in design problem at a great extent, whereas some others may not consider any of them.

While lack of consideration may result in problems related to accountability, responsibility, and ethics, an excess amount of consideration may lead to problems related to over-amplification of differences, unceasing value conflicts, privacy and surveillance.  Moreover, a careful consideration of agency-related qualities may result in responsible and ethical design practices, new more harmonious integrations and couplings between humans eand artefacts and may expand our potential for action.

How much are we aware of benefits and costs of addressing or not addressing agency-related qualities in design problem?

ii.              Design’s role in agency:

a.     How do different design approaches shape agencies involved in production and use of technologies?

Design process can be organized in such a way that it can facilitate formation of some particular configurations (assemblages) of humans and artefacts, while preventing some other ones to be formed.  Design process can invite particular kinds of actions, while inhibiting some others. The artefacts can be designed in such a way that they can privilege values of some actors while ignoring the values of some other ones.

How much are we aware of the impact of design process we follow on formation of agencies involved in technology production and formation of agencies involved in technology use?  

★ p.s. we can also talk about agencies in design time and agencies in use time.

Here is a sketch of roles of design and agency in mutual shaping.

Agency as a Value in Design

the idea of agency as value in design is originated from the value sensitive design (VSD) domain. there are many values mentioned in VSD such as informed consent, privacy, trust etc. I was mostly inspired by VSD and named my approach agency sensitive design. sensitiveness is really a good phrase since it doesn't totally reject existing practices or ways of doing and knowing but at the same time develops an awareness and consideration of related matters at some degree and tries to integrate them into existing approaches. In this respect, sensitivity approaches can be considered as an evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This is again related to balance between familiar and novel.
It would be good to include a little discussion in the thesis about the consideration of agency as a value. Like a value in VSD.

Some quotes from an interview with Bill Gaver

• We don’t analyse the data, so we don’t do some of the things that I might have done when I was a psychologist, like count up the number of people who give certain types of replies or even the number of responses, nor do we try to use the replies to generate personas, because after all we’ve got real people that we’re dealing with. And we don’t really do scenarios in that context because, again, we’ve got real returns from real people. We don’t need to kind of re-present them. They are what they are, and what I find too is that it’s nice to work with the… raw materials because they force you to re-interpret them pretty much every time you look at them
  
• Ludic Design: I’ve been inspired by the notion of designing for play because I think it offers a nice alternative to assumptions that design should be about problem solving or about functionality or about trying to … pursue tasks in particular ways. From the point of view of play; if you want to think about people as being characterized by play you realize that there is a huge number of activities that we pursue in everyday life that are not about achieving some external goal but are done merely for the sake of enjoyment and pleasure. Here I don’t mean game play. I don’t mean joining in a set of kind of arbitrary rules to see who can win in some situation. On the contrary I mean by play something much more fluid and self-motivated so examples of play are things like, I don’t know, anything from fooling round with friends and taking on imaginary roles when you’re just having a chat with them to maybe starting to take over things where you stack up things to see how many things you can balance on one another before they all tumble down or taking a new walk on the way home from work just to see where you get.
• Also I tend to allow that category to extend to beyond the obviously playful to taking things like enjoyment of the scenery or just sort of staring out the window and wondering about how the wind is moving around the leaves and the trees and so forth.
• So it’s a pretty broad category and I think what really ties it together in my mind is the notion of there’s a bunch of ways of appreciating the world or engaging with the world that aren’t goal oriented and that it’s quite an interesting task to try to design for those things.
• Well that’s an interesting question because you know the kind of tangible interaction is not the focus of our work at all. We don’t really tend to characterize our work in terms of the style of technology we use, but instead the kind of personal and cultural effects we’re trying to achieve.
• to design some sort of devices or systems that would enable people to get new views on their environmental impact but the key would be to avoid being too prescriptive about how they should approach that information, so rather than create systems that constantly tell you that you need to use less energy and recycle more and so forth, we would try to point out some of these issues in a way that’s fairly non-judgmental and in fact open for a kind of aesthetic appreciation.
• The idea there is that we don’t need systems telling us how to live and what to do. We’re adults, we know the issues, we get told what to do all the time by various things but instead it’s more that if we could find new ways, new perspectives on ideas and on the world around us, if we could sort of play around with the issues that surround us, we can find our own ways of leading meaningful lives, so that’s the kind of thing we’d like to support with our designs.

Source of the interview: http://www.infodesign.com.au/uxpod/ludicdesign

ASD Contribution and Formulation

1. What can be the contribution of ASD to design domain?
2. What can this PhD research say about ASD?
3. How do we understand after a case whether we would have designed for agency or not? what are the indicators of promoted agency? or increased awareness for agency and design relations? are the indicators indicators in design phase or use phase? are they processual indicators or artefactual indicators?
4. Are the qualities of ASD derived from literature really supportive for developing sensitivities of agency in design? Is this study for testing their applicability? or ways to apply them or integrate them into existing practices?
   

Answer 1:

• ASD can provide ways and insight for responsible and ethical design
• ASD can facilitate creative possibilities (this can be the connection with the C&C conference by also using improvisation theme) (creativity required tasks, entertainment, artistic studies. not for high performance studies)
  
• ASD can support sustainable systems by its features of adaptability and configurability.

Answer 2:

• this study is the start point of establishing ASD theory and practice.
• it aims to understand what designing for agency means and find ways of how to do it. what do we need to know, what skills do we need to have and generally what does ASD involve?

Answer 3:

• new ways of perceiving and acting. ( different forms of agency, I need to concretely define them!!!)
• Can there be processual indicators? what can they be? increased awareness, increased participation, temporary assemblages in design and use?? (temporary, reliable, visible, accountable), inclusion or consideration of marginal values, concerns of adaptability, configuring or design-in-use. engagement of participants. material agency?? visibility of actors, their relations and roles! design&use are intertwined. so are process and product.
  
• what can be the artefactual indicators? customizability, being composed of many modular elements, flexibility, transparency or structural honesty/visibility, accessibility. capacity or extent to be designed in use. how may different couplings it can allow/facilitate.
  
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