2. Who Designs?

The term “open source” originated from the field of software development. It denotes software where the source code is made freely available to the public domain for use, modification, and redistribution. The Open Source Definition, developed by the Open Source Initiative, a California based public domain corporation, identifies a set of distribution terms that must be met in order for a piece of software to qualify as “open source.” Over the past few years, open source ideas and practices have been translated to the domains of knowledge (e.g. Open Knowledge) and artifacts (e.g. Open Source Hardware, Open Design).

As defined by Joseph Pine, mass customization is marketing and manufacturing technique for offering customized products and services to individual customers at near mass production efficiency (Pine 1993).

For reasons of simplicity I henceforth use “design for empowerment” instead of “design for design empowerment.” In the context of this chapter design for empowerment refers to empowering users in design decision-making and giving them the tools to create their own designs.

The concept of “technological mediation” was systematized by philosopher of technology Verbeek (2011). Verbeek synthesized earlier approaches from STS and the philosophy of technology that grappled with the reciprocities and cross-configurations among users, technologies, and their designers. Bruno Latour had earlier conceptualized such relations in terms of “technical mediation” (Latour 1994).

The “Design Participation” conference presentations discussed in this chapter are “Adaptive-Conditional Architecture” by Charles Eastman, associate professor at the School of Urban and Public Affairs, at the Carnegie-Mellon University, “Information Processes for Participatory Design” by Hungarian-born French architect Yona Friedman, and “Aspects of Living in an Architecture Machine” by Nicholas Negroponte, assistant professor in the School of Architecture and Planning, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Oudshoorn and Pinch’s review includes literature from innovation studies, the sociology of technology, feminist studies of technology, semiotic approaches, and media and cultural studies approaches (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2008). Through this review the authors collect analytical tools that capture the previously neglected role of the users in the shaping of technologies.

The principle of symmetry was one of the main tenets of SCOT (Pinch and Bijker 1984). According to this principle the analyst maintains an impartial, agnostic position as to any “true” properties of a technological artifact in the explanations of its development (Brey 1997). The positions of all “relevant social groups” should therefore be handled by using the same explanatory criteria. First articulated by David Bloor in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), this principle initially referred to the use of the same type of sociological explanation for “successful” and “unsuccessful” scientific theories (Bloor 1976). The application of symmetry in SCOT has been criticized for implicitly assuming the equality and presence of all relevant social groups in the design process, thus neglecting power asymmetries between groups (Klein and Kleinman 2002).

Don Ihde developed a post-phenomenological approach as a corrective to phenomenology, construed as “the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view” (Smith 2012). For Ihde all human experience is mediated by technologies, which constitute an inextricable part of the life-world (Verbeek 2011). Post-phenomenology therefore moves away from traditional anthropocentric accounts to a classification of technologically mediated experiences. These mediations, reminds Verbeek, constitute both subjects and objects (Verbeek 2011), or rather structure their co-constitution.

In his book Technics and Praxis: A Philosophy of Technology Don Ihde proposed to think about “hermeneutic” mediations in terms of “amplification” and “reduction” and of “pragmatic mediations” in terms of “invitation” and “inhibition” (Ihde 1979).

In his 2009 article entitled “The Textility of Making” social anthropologist Tim Ingold criticizes the effort to remedy the asymmetries between subjects and objects by attributing agency to non-human actors. Ingold argues that this approach casts subjects and objects before any action has taken place, and therefore loses sight of the flows of forces and matter that happen in-the-action. Ingold calls for the replacement of relational descriptions of subjects and objects in networks of agency with dynamic, processual, action-based descriptions.

Verbeek’s second method for bridging the “context of design” with the “context of use” is a form of Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA). CTA brings all stakeholders in an evolutionary design process. This process resembles a deliberate actualization of the evolutionary technological development under the influence of relevant user groups that Pinch and Bijker had theorized in SCOT (1984). Verbeek proposes an augmentation of the CTA process through an explicit exposition of stakeholder-technology associations (Verbeek 2011).

In Verbeek’s proposal constructive technology assessment takes the form of what one could call a “moral usability trial.” Verbeek here appears to ignore the moral implications of cross-configurations at play between designers, users, artifacts and institutions (Woolgar 1991; Mackay et al. 2000) during such trials. In the case of scenarios and simulations he does not take into account the discontents associated with such mediated representations of a reality in the making (Turkle 2009).

One of the first and formative events for design methods was “The Conference on Systematic and Intuitive Methods in Engineering, Industrial Design, Architecture and Communications” (Jones and Thornley 1963), at the Imperial College London.

An indicative example of future-centric rhetoric in design is the work of American architect, designer, author, and inventor Buckminster Fuller. Fuller was amongst the first to pose issues of sustainability and human survival as integral aspects of design and to articulate principles for what he called “comprehensive anticipatory design science:” a systematic articulation of human-made interventions in the environment. His paraphrase of Abraham Lincoln in the famous motto “the best way to predict the future is to design it,” is revealing of a future-oriented attitude with growing prevalence among designers during the 1960s and 1970s.

The ideas of “undesired consequences” or “harmful side effects of technology” invoked by Nigel Cross at the “Design Participation” conference, bring to mind the concept of “unintended consequences” popularized by sociologist Robert Merton. In his 1936 article entitled “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action,” Merton engaged in a systematic analysis of the possible causes for unintended consequences, ranging from human error and ignorance to the values that guide decision-making. The idea of intended and unintended consequences was also central in the work of philosopher, sociologist, and political economist Max Weber. In theorizing “risk society” Ulrich Beck argued that the traditional category of unintended consequences does not capture the complexities of risk society: when it comes to risk, intentionality doesn’t really matter. If traditional industrial modernity tried to master nature and render the unpredictable predictable (determinant judgment), Beck’s new modernity is conscious of the new uncertainties that are manufactured in this process (reflexive judgment). These manufactured uncertainties, the consciousness that technologies will bring risks that cannot be predicted, challenge the role of the experts and pose questions of decision making legitimacy, similar to the ones operative in the “Design Participation” conference.

The Atoms of Environmental Structure had been developed during Alexander’s two-year visiting researcher appointment at the Offices Development Group (ODG) of the UK Ministry of Public and Building Works.

Charles Eastman is currently director of the Digital Building Laboratory at Georgia Tech and renowned for his pioneering work in Building Information Modeling. At the time of the “Design Participation” conference Eastman was associate professor and director of Institute of Physical Planning at the School of Urban and Public Affairs, Carnegie-Mellon University.

As part of the qualitative and quantitative toolkit for measuring “fit” between users and their environment Eastman listed methods such as human factors, ergonomic studies, time and motion analysis, proxemics influences and social interactions, as well as influences from sensory processing, cognition, and symbolic references (Eastman 1972).

The feeling that designers imposed order in the world through the environments that they designed, was widely shared among designers since the rise and decline of International Modernism. The modernist redefinition of architecture as making “machines for living” (Le Corbusier 1923) did not only epitomize the turn toward functionality and efficiency but also formed the ground for a broader rethinking of “architecture as technology.” Technology means here as “anything made, managed, configured, or transformed in the process of modifying the environment for human habitation” (Hale 2012).

In the context of Warren Brodey’s article, “self-organizing” denotes a system that maintains its organization besides partial failures and “evolutionary” designates a system that can form new “purposes.”

Yona Friedman had originally used Pour Une Architecture Scientifique as a textbook for a class on participatory design, which he taught as a visiting professor in the University of Ann Arbor at Michigan (Vardouli 2012). During his travels to the United States, the Hungarian-born French architect, had developed an intense curiosity for the epistemological transformations that information theoretical ideas effected to numerous disciplines. During his stay at Ann Arbor and under the influence of the renowned graph theorist Frank Harary (Vardouli 2012), he applied information and graph theory to justify the intuitions that had led him to propose the “Spatial City,” and to elucidate his ideas in a comprehensive scientific theory of architecture (Friedman 1971).

With slogans such as a “new humanism through machines” the Group’s leader, Nicholas Negroponte, actively promoted a shift to the understanding of computers from tools of the technocracy to media of personal empowerment and social emancipation (Negroponte 1970; Groisser and Negroponte 1971; Negroponte 1975).

The Architecture Machine Group’s first major work in the area of Computer Aided Design (CAD) was URBAN 5, a research project for computer-aided architecture initiated in 1966 under the joint sponsorship of the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Architecture Machine Group later wrote about URBAN 5: “This effort was the first and largest comprehensive computer system ever developed to assist architects with those activities they call “design” (as against specification writing, preparation of working drawings, accounting etc.)” (Groisser and Negroponte 1971).

Around the time of the Design Participation conference, the Architecture Machine Group submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) a proposal for Computer Aids to Participatory Architecture, which however did not get funded. Nicholas Negroponte had taken inspiration from Friedman’s argument that the user—as the risk bearer in design- is the legitimate decision maker (Friedman 1975). In 1973, Negroponte invited Yona Friedman as a visiting researcher in the Architecture Machine Group, in an effort to implement his ideas about the FLATWRITER, in a new program called YONA (Your Own Native Architect). In 1975 Nicholas Negroponte published the results of these explorations in his book Soft Architecture Machines, with a foreword on the chapter about participatory design by Yona Friedman.

Gordon Pask famously argued mutual understanding derived from three levels of modeling: “(1) its (the machine’s) model of you, (2) its model of your model of it, and (3) its model of your model of its model of you.” (Negroponte 1975).

In his presentation “Aspects of Living in an Architecture Machine,” presented at the “Design Participation” conference, Negroponte explored different methods for recognizing, responding, and learning from the user. As far as user recognition was concerned Negroponte proposed heuristics, i.e. informed guesses based on previous experience and mental shortcuts as an intuitive way of identifying the user of an environment. He counterpoised this idea to artificial means, such as a barcode, or statistics, that do not really provide any meaningful information about the user. He then proceeded to envision three kinds of responsiveness, pertaining to atmospheric changes (environmental), practical gadgetry (operational), and linguistic interactions with the user (informational). Finally, when it came to learning the user, Negroponte examine three types of models: the “determinate”, the “probabilistic”, and the “evolutionary.” The determinate model corresponded to a compositional kind of modeling, based on building up a model through smaller ones. “Such a model,” Negroponte wrote, “is always at the mercy of its human designers, because when it fails it is simply repaired by the addition or subtraction of the parameters deemed necessary.” (Negroponte 1972) The probabilistic model was based on the examination of statistical probability, gauging future behavior based on past ones. Negroponte dismissed this anticipatory kind of learning as unsatisfactory, because it told the machine nothing about the phenomenon in question. Negroponte proposed evolutionary learning as the main principle of an “intelligent” environment.

Deontology is a normative theory of ethics that evaluates an action based on a set of rules (Alexander and Moore 2012). Preference utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism, a normative theory that judges the rightness or wrongness of conduct based on the consequences of one’s actions. This form of utilitarianism seeks to satisfy the preferences of as many stakeholders as possible (Sinnott-Armstrong 2012).