NextD Journal I ReReThinking Design Special Issue, April 2007
Birgit H. Jevnaker |
Beautiful Diversion
Norwegian School of Management, Norway
To provoke can be highly useful for many reasons. One is to shake up the audience to get vivid reactions. Even better is to evoke new thinking and reflections. Let’s face it; a good provocation can break down established categories and lead to new, unconventional thinking. Less good ones may lead to all kinds of responses incl. much noise and prejudice-raising. Among the bad aspects of a trivial provocation is perhaps reinforcing rigid polar views, encompassing biased perceptions about the Others. Stating that “designers suck,” or for that matter, evoking responses that managers suck more, may build up a dualistic rift rather than a creative one. This may circulate old stereotyping views (designers as arty, lonely riders, big Egos, etc) that many have touched upon before. As GK VanPatter reflects, “been there.” Reflecting critically on the portrayal of designers is already old starting points of design and design management research (cf. Walker, Dumas and others). Stop a moment. Why not attend more carefully to the context and framing of how this particular debate started. A dose of (preferably positive) provocation when speaking orally to an audience about the challenges of design management, can be interesting, especially if the audience and the provoking speaker engage in a reflexive dialogue so that learning lessons are also reflected upon explicitly. Who’s afraid of a provocative rhetor …if s/he is self-reflective and making us see basic issues in new ways? The speech entails many triggering issues, though young students may not have the experiential background to sort out what is good, bad, or ugly — in terms of labeling. Another point to take into consideration is the step from talking loud to publishing provocative speeches: this means a step from a flexible live language to a more fixed written one, which is a transition from an incorporating to an inscribing practice, as understood by the anthropologist Connerton. This is perhaps a small step for a writing/editing man, but what step is it in invoking a wider debate on design developments? Again, it is useful to think of the context and format of this activity, which is personalized blogging — an unfolding somewhere in between the formalwritten/informal-thinking-loud in a hybrid private/public form, yet translations of fragments may become endemic. Hence, second thoughts when reading the “Are Designers the Enemy of Design”piece over again is not only about the potentials/pitfalls of provocation, but rather the conspicuous curation of conversations to make a twist of one of Veblen’s concepts. The blogger is stressing that “we all live life in beta now” — this is illuminating language but reminds me a bit of We all live in a yellow submarine — now one with multiple media, people, tools & much ado for everyone in design. Curating the discussion by pointing to the shift from Authority to Participation is only scratching the surface of a much more layered, complex design situation (cf. also Heskett) and enmeshed organizing of specialists, even influencing open source design (and networks, tribes, or specialists’ interactions are of course no idyll). While shooting the pianist in a creating ensemble, let the horses bite, or arrest WHATEVER SUCKS will probably not help much either… Still, provocations can make us rethink. What I enjoy in this text is the call for exploring new paradigms with particular eco-cultures and own action regarding fundamental
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