Prospecting a systemic design space for pandemic responses

Frederick M.C Van Amstel,Fernanda Botter,Cayley Guimarães

doi:10.4013/sdrj.2021.141.06

Frederick M.C Van Amstel, Fernanda Botter + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.4013/sdrj.2021.141.06

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Abstract

Design literature describes an expansion of design activity towards systemic relations, which requires dealing with controversies among multiple actors. These controversies have a sociotechnical nature, given the inextricably of social and technical relations. This research looks at the sociotechnical controversy in COVID-19 design responses to assess the extent of said expansion. A controversial design space mapping was conducted based on a set of web pages found in the international design community which describes design responses for the pandemic. Considered as a representation of a socially-produced design space, the mapping reveals that systemic relations are still overlooked by the design community. A possible explanation for that is the lack of depth in problematizing the COVID-19 pandemic. The research offers, thus, prospective recommendations for a systemic design space for pandemics and other systemic crisis.

Highlights

Design activity has developed in, at least, four orders of design across the XXth century (Buchanan, 1992, 2001, 2019a)
(Macedo et al, 2020; Hynes et al, 2020; Bradley et al, 2020) suggests that there should be plenty of fourth order responses in this design space, if design is really expanding to that direction
Looking for evidence of this expansion, this research poses the following questions about the COVID-19 design space: a) What is the distribution of responses across the four orders of design? b) How do responses justify each other? c) How do actors position themselves in this controversy? To answer these questions, we combined design space mapping with controversy mapping to generate a hybrid method called controversial design space mapping

Summary

Introduction

Design activity has developed in, at least, four orders of design across the XXth century (Buchanan, 1992, 2001, 2019a). The fourth (systemic) order is becoming increasingly prominent in design discourse (Vôute et al, 2020; Buchanan, 2019b; Dorst, 2019; Jones, 2014; Ryan, 2014; Sevaldson, 2013). Various design approaches emerged in recent years to underscore such design interventions (Engeler, 2017; Irwin, 2015; Jones, 2014; Vassão, 2017; 2008; Manzini, 2015; 2008). Since multiple actors compete to shape the social and technical relations under design, this space can be considered a sociotechnical controversy (Venturini et al, 2015; Venturini, 2010). Since the design space is socially produced (Van Amstel et al, 2016), actors act in relation to each other, generating design patterns (Alexander, 1979) as much as justification patterns (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991)

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