Why a design dinner in Oxford in 2012?

On Thursday evening, around twenty people will gather for a dinner in Oxford. Curated by Phil Clare and Caroline Bucklow of the Knowledge Exchange and Impact Team in Research Services at the University of Oxford, and me (an associate fellow at Said Business School), this dinner aims to stage a new conversation about design within and around Oxford and its global and local networks.

In contrast with other design dinners, often associated with events such as the Salone furniture fair in Milan, this one is perhaps less glamorous, although we do include some internationally-renowned practitioners and academics among the guests. In contrast to many other Oxford dinners, we’ll be talking about a field of expertise and practice that perhaps curiously is not well-represented in the university, which has schools of engineering, computer science, business and fine art, but not industrial design, product design, communications design or architecture.

Guests include leading people from the design world, including from small, emerging studios, people working in established innovative consultancies and others from large corporations with an interest in design, as well as academics from different faculties and resources across Oxford University, as well as guests from Oxford Brookes University across the city. Although I haven’t checked – there are 800 years of archives to look through – this may be the first such dinner in the Oxford ecology. We think it’s timely for these reasons.

Firstly, the profession and practice of design are taking up a new place on the world stage. Borrowing a term from art history, we might see as designers working within an ‘expanded field’. There are numerous examples of designers and architects such as Josiah Wedgwood or Victor Papanek addressing the issues of their day. But what is striking about the last decade is how designers trained in design schools now see their role as contributing to global challenges such as educational standards, climate change, public service design, or humanitarian disasters. Examples are Project H, openideo.org and Participle.

Secondly, several academic fields have been exploring what a design-based approach can bring to research and teaching. For example in research, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Design Council are scoping out a research programme in the design of services. Within management education, there are now several universities around the world (including Oxford) teaching “design thinking” – the application of designerly approaches and methods to solving “wicked” problems and stimulating innovation.

Thirdly, within business, developments such as the cloud, 3d printing, mobile broadband, and a focus on delivering services, experiences and interactions, has lead to designers and design-based approaches being brought in not just to make things look pretty, but develop and explore concepts from day 1. Examples here are Berg London, Samsung and Intel.

Fourthly, the London 2012 Olympics and other cultural events have highlighted the role of the symbolic in day-to-day life. Creating and staging collective experiences requires the design and production of places, artefacts and signs, and paying attention to the design of the social interactions in which meanings are created. These are all activities that are central to designerly practices.

The aims of our dinner are however more modest. We won’t necessarily discuss these issues. But we do hope that participants will enjoy having conversations about their work and hearing from others, within an institution that has a great deal of history but also is a site of critical thinking and innovation. We believe this will provoke new relationships and lines of enquiry that might lead to new projects.  The design of a dining experience seems a good way to start that.

Behave: New services to change travel behaviours

Why do people use cars for short journeys when there are more sustainable alternatives?

Behave: New services to change travel behaviours from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

This short film proposes new service concepts to change the travel behaviours of car owners for short journeys. The ideas were created in a two-day workshop held in Oxford in 2011, by mixed teams of MBAs, MDes and MSc students.

Focussed on the Oxfordshire town of Bicester, the project is based in the idea that 'travel behaviours' cannot be separated from other social practices. The film suggests that shifting towards new travel behaviours involves creating new combinations of meanings and stories, infrastructure and stuff, skills and competences, and emotions.

This collaborative project involved 55 students including MBAs taking my elective in Designing Better Futures at Said Business School, University of Oxford; students on the MDes Innovation and Creativity in Industry at London College of Communication at University of the Arts, London, and students on the MSc Environment Change and Management at the University of Oxford.

Collaborators included travel planners from Oxfordshire County Council.

The film and workshop were financially supported by Samsung Design Europe.

For more information visit the MBA Designing Better Futures teaching blog at designingbetterfutures.wordpress.com/​

Investigatio: Workshop at Design London/RCA/Imperial College

Yesterday I joined around 30 people discussing multi/inter/transdisciplinarity at the Investigatio event in London organised by Anne-Laure Fayard (visiting academic at Design London, from NYU-Poly) and Bruce Tether (Design London). In addition to the workshop, Anne-Laure curated an exhibition exploring "what is research" with work by researchers working in the arts, design, social sciences and management, including Yasmine Abbas, James Auger, Anne-Laure Fayard, Ileana Stigliani, Patrick Stacey, Nina Wakeford, Aileen Wilson, and my own rat project (see image). See Anne-Laure's blog post here.

Since Design London are creating a podcast of the event (available here), I will not say too much here other than to give tweet-sized summaries of the contributions by
- Peter Childs, Professor of Engineering Design, and Marco Aurisicchio, Imperial College, proposing the jet engine as a model of creativity, and design linking creativity and innovation and the importance of language in interdisciplinary encounters
- Tony Dunne, Professor and Head of Department, Design Interactions, Royal College of Art, proposing designers can contribute a great deal if they shift from application to implication
- Bruce Tether, Professor of Design and Innovation, Design London, Imperial College, discussing institutional limits to multidisciplinary research because of the pressure to publish in A-list journals
- Lucy Kimbell (ie me), Clark Fellow in Design Leadership, Said Business School, Oxford (see below); and
- Simon Blyth, IDEO and Julien McHardy, Lancaster University, on user-less design rooted in practices

Here's more or less what I presented.

Aesthetic play and interdisciplinary ambiguity


Many of you will be familiar with debates over the past 10-15 years about the nature of research in art and design, in particular that of practice-based research. I will not rehearse these debates here today, but make three brief observations which will serve to inform what follows.

The first is to note criticism by Michael Biggs and others of the way that art and design research in the UK academy has adopted the natural sciences as the paradigm to which it should aspire and against which its contributions should be assessed (Biggs 2004; Biggs and Buchler 2007; Rust 2007). For Biggs, this undermines the contributions that art and design research can make, because its outputs offer a plurality of interpretations and are open to, although not reliant on, non-linguistic experience.

The second is the important question of aesthetic autonomy, which so far has not been discussed extensively in design research (Ross 2008; Ranciere 2004). Ranciere makes a distinction between three regimes – the first, the ethical regime of images which reflect the collective ethos, rooted in Platonism; the second, the representative regime of art, in which art’s function is mimesis and the Aristotelian idea of consciously shaping matter; and the third, the aesthetic regime of art influenced by Kant and Shiller. This latter regime offers freedom from prescribed criteria, disrupts hierarchies – and – relevant to today, gives art the function of reorganising the accepted perceptions of reality.

The third observation is that the natural sciences – if we can even call them such – are themselves objects of scrutiny and contestation. Research in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), for example, has shown how science and other kinds of knowledge production are very social matters (eg Foucault 1972; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). Scientific research is not neutral and the ways that scientific knowledge is produced, legitimised and disseminated are subject to questions of power, value, and difference.

To put this another way
- firstly, the nature and value of practice-based art and design research is still unclear, and
- secondly, the aesthetic regime of art of the past 200 years or so is concerned with reorganising perceptions of reality, and
- even what we might think of as well-established fields saturated with disciplinary rigour as in Kuhnian (1970) normal science, are more messy and ambiguous than many scientists and policy-makers might like to think.

Where does this leave attempts to bring disciplines together to do research? I will argue that it is exactly this ambiguity and disciplinary incoherence that offers opportunities to generate new knowledge, as researchers attempt and fail to combine worldviews and approaches from different disciplines.

There is one further piece of research on which I wish to draw, an empirical study of interdisciplinarity in projects crossing design and IT, social science and design, and art and science (Barry et al 2008). Their starting point was claims about interdisciplinarity rooted in the idea that science is becoming more accountable to society and research is, or should be, more directly relevant to users and stakeholders (Gibbons et al 1994; Nowotny et al 2001).

Research undertaken in Mode 2 knowledge advanced in Gibbons et al (1994) has five criteria:
- knowledge is produced in the context of application
- transdisciplinary research cannot be reduced to disciplines
- it is heterogeneious and there are lots of diverse organisations involved
- it’s more socially accountable and reflexive
- there are diverse quality controls.

When Barry et al set out to examine in more detail so-called interdisciplinary projects, they found the abstract notion of interdisciplinarity promoted by funders and others turned out to be more complicated in practice: two or more disciplines added together do not simply make a nice coherent new field.

Barry et al describe three modes of interdisciplinarity that they identified across the examples they studied in their fieldwork. One, the subordination-service mode, involves one discipline being in service to another, for example artists whose projects were funded to help increase the public understanding of science. The second, the intregrative-synthesis mode, involves disciplines integrating. The third, the agonistic-antagonistic mode, is forged as researchers question disciplinary commitments to ideas of what constitutes reality and knowledge. Barry et al found that some of the interdisciplinary collaborations they studied sprang from a “self-conscious dialogue with, criticism of, or opposition to the limits of established disciplines, or the status of academic research in general and attempts to reconceive or change the object of knowledge” (Barry et al 2008: 29). They found three logics under which claims about interdisciplinarity were advanced (accountability, innovation, ontology) and different kinds of institutional commitment.

My argument today is that this agonistic-antagonistic mode provides a helpful way to think about the positive effects of the disciplinary incoherence and ambiguity I mentioned earlier. If - still early in its trajectory within the academy - art and design research is unclear about the nature of its knowledge and contribution, then it is not necessarily a problem in interdisciplinary research as long as the institutions supporting it are willing and able to recognise the agonistic-antagonistic mode alongside the other modes. In other words, art and design research does not have to be internally coherent, normal science before it engages in interdisciplinary collaboration. It has the potential to mobilise the aesthetic regime of described by Ranciere to reorganise the accepted perceptions of reality within different research fields.

Image: Drawing created by rat, human and software in collaboration through the "Is your rat an artist?" drawing device, part of the Rat Fair organised by Lucy Kimbell at Camden Arts Centre, London, 2005