Design: design matters in Participatory Design

Abstract

Design as a profession, concept and movement emerged during hard times – in the socially, economically, and politically unstable aftermath of World War I. A distinctive moment was the inauguration of the Bauhaus in 1919, as a new kind of art school different from the fine arts, engaging in a practical way with social change (Droste 1998). The Bauhaus laid the foundation for what we today think of as modern design – ‘useful’,functionalist, transparent objects of design: buildings, furniture and utensils, combining traditional materials like glass and leather with ‘modern’ materials like steel and reinforced concrete and, later, plastic composite materials and information technology. ‘Art and Technology – a new Unity’ became after a few years the constructivist motto for turning social utopias into industrially oriented product design and architecture. Buildings and other artefacts should be designed in order to engender social change. By the design of progressive social and cultural values into artefacts, these were then viewed as vehicles for change – through creating the necessary conditions. Early modern design was also, if not explicitly participatory, at least programmatically colla-borative. The Bauhaus was inspired by the notion of the Bauhutten – the medieval organisation of craftspeople involved in building cathedrals. Except that the Bauhaus was more about the cathedral of the future – that is, mundane objects that would support people in their everyday, secularised life. It was collaborative and interdisciplinary, as we would say today, joining the different design competences of art, craft, architecture and technology – in order to build a Gesamtkunstwerk, a genuinely collaborative design work. The foundation for this work was the collaborative building activities that took place in the Bauhaus workshops. The project was controversial and political, advocating a modernist lifestyle, embodyingsocially progressive and democratic values, at a time when the influence of Nazism was steadily growing, thus linking its ultimate fate to the ‘wrong’ side of the political divide in Germany and resulting in its demise in 1933. Now it was the Third Reich that should be realised, and in this design there was no place for the socially radical Bauhaus school, with its rational functionalism as a meeting place for art, culture and technology. On the international scene the reception of the Bauhaus figures and ideas was quite different.In exile, key figures from the Bauhaus, such as Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and van der Rohe, enjoyed great success in the US. They became the design avant-garde for the modern international style (Wolfe 1982). While the Bauhaus was justly celebrated for developing modern design and the international style, it was also criticised by some for its overly harsh forms in steel, glass and reinforced concrete, which were replicated uniformly around the world. The slogan ‘architecture or revolution’ seemed to imply that a revolution could only be avoided if the modern architects and designers were given the freedom and power to change the world (Berman 1982). The original social engagement in this form of modern design at times became transformed into an undemocratic professional elitism. Modern design also flourished in Europe after World War II. The Scandinavian countriesbecame internationally known for Nordic design. However, the real breakthrough for functionalism and the impact of the Bauhaus came earlier, with the 1930 Stockholm exhibition and the acceptera (accept) manifesto produced by leading functionalist architects and designers (Asplund et al. 1931). Here the espoused vision of the interplay between art, technology and politics was made very clear. The belief in the link between industrial development and social progress was strong. Social problems could be solved with scientific rationality. Salubrious and functional apartments, clothes and everyday objects for the masses were to be produced industrially. Craftwork was to be subsumed under this industrial production. ‘Funkis’, as functionalism was nicknamed, became synonymous with the growing working class, or at least withthe social democratic parties and their welfare ideology of folkhemmet. The legacy was obvious in what became known as Nordic Design, but the forms were somewhat more inviting and warmer – soft curves rather than German exactness, wood rather than metal, and more nuances than the basic colours proclaimed by the Bauhaus. In Denmark it was clearly the cultivated bourgeois middle class who made the style their own. What in Sweden, first and foremost, was perceived as a political conviction, was in Denmark more of a style, literally known as the ‘white style’. And in Sweden, despite the initial utopian visions, the reality of Nordic design was perhaps more of an elitist doctrine from above than an approach based on democracy and participation of all concerned. Where does this leave Participatory Design as a design field? Even if the Bauhaus andmodern design concepts in general, with their specific social and aesthetic considerations, were not part of the early Participatory Design movement, we would argue that they were implicit in the background thinking of the Participatory Design pioneers. For instance, the first Participatory Design attempts in Scandinavia in the early 1970s, pioneered in collaboration with the Norwegian Metal Workers Union in the field of computers in the workplace, shared some of the social and democratic values of modern design, especially Nordic Design (for more information, see Chapter 2). Initially the Participatory Design focus was on the shared concerns with the labour movement and its values, rather than on its conception of modern design per se. However, we believe that by the 1980s these modern design ideals had become more explicit in Participatory Design thinking and design practice. A good practical example of this influence is the oft-cited Nordic Participatory Design project UTOPIA, in which computer scientists, social scientists, industrial designers and graphic designers worked together with graphic workers and their unions to design ‘tools for skilled work’ (Bodker et al. 1987). The extensive use of material mock-ups and prototypes introduced by the industrial designers led to new ways of performing design in Participatory Design such as ‘design-by-doing’ and ‘design-by-playing’, actually extending the Bauhaus workshop to also include as designing participants those people who would ultimately be the users of the artefacts designed. Later, in attempts to ‘bring design to software’, references to the Bauhaus design conceptsonce again became more explicit (e.g. Ehn 1988; Winograd 1996) and even institutionalised, as attempts were made to re-establish a latter-day Bauhaus as a ‘Digital Bauhaus’ (Ehn 1998; Binder et al. 2009). Today the link between these early modern design ideals and Participatory Design is more evident, as design thinking has been introduced into the computer systems and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) fields, in the shape of the emerging new field of ‘interaction design’. This new field provides a more explicit link between the design movement and systems design thinking, by shifting some of the focus on human-machine interaction away from an engineering or human science perspective and towards more engagement with the design community, linking it to other design disciplines such as product design, communication design and architecture. But now that Participatory Design has become more of an established design field, can weavoid the fate of the Bauhaus and its successor, modern design – i.e. becoming an overly rationalistic and somewhat elitist programme, filling the market with well-crafted functionalist modern design objects for mass consumption? Or is it an even bigger risk that Participatory Design, now incorporating design thinking and offering creative and collaborative environments for user-driven design and innovation, also ends up as the latest fashion in a further modern, market-driven, commodification process (Thrift 2006)? We believe these are major design challenges for the contemporary Participatory Design community, despite all the promising participatory and democratic intentions and statements in our field.