Alternative Design Scholarship

Accounting for Diversity / Universal Design

offers designers an opportunity to think about how their work might be directed as wisely and fairly as possible

back to the 1960s and before, technology transfer advocates argued for transferring Western technologies to the third world

Through the 1970s, appropriatetechnology became a strong social movement in both developed and developing countries, with proponents working on projects ranging from shelter to transport, from agriculture to energy

However, several related alternative design communities
arose to take the place of the appropriate technology movement in Western design scholarship: universal design, participatory design, ecological design, feminist design, and socially responsible design have gained various degrees of legitimacy in their efforts to design for marginalized groups

analyze how technologies and other designed artifacts are implicated in larger social problems

Designing for marginalized social groups requires paying attention to the deceptively complex fact that different people have different needs.

Universal design advocates have a simple but important goal:
to account for a more diverse range of abilities when designing built environments. Although rooted in the accessibility movement—the advocacy and legal efforts by the disability community in the sixties and seventies to make existing public places physically accessible to people with disabilities—universal design theorists distinguish their work from accessibility design

universal design assumes that it is possible to design objects
and spaces such that they are usable (and will be used) by a broad range of the population, including but not limited to people with disabilities.” 7 Universal design theorists want designers to think systematically about “inclusion” and to broaden their notion of who users are. In addition to the disabled, other groups typically marginalized by design include women, the aged, the infirm, and the young.

Early accessibility designers identified the physical abilities/needs of people bound to wheelchairs and walkers, but they failed to account for their psychological needs. Buildings with backdoor entry ramps, for example, may provide access for those in wheelchairs, but they additionally marginalize wheelchair users by separating them from “normal”
people who enter through the front.

Coping with Disagreement / Participatory Design

When designers choose to counter
existing power imbalances, they can work directly on projects representing the interests of marginalized perspectives, as do universal designers, or they can work to mediate conflicts between different perspectives by providing space within mainstream design processes for marginalized groups to voice their concerns

design is a tool for arbitrating disagreement over which objectives to pursue. Such disagreement may arise merely from different perspectives on a problem or from enduring conflicts of interest

participatory design has a “central and
abiding concern for direct and continuous interaction with those who are the ultimate arbiters of system adequacy; namely, those who will use the technology in their everyday lives and work

From its inception, participatory design scholarship has
sought to cope with differences of perspective and goals in an explicit, productive, and fair way

Participatory design scholars call attention to underlying inequalities, and provide two core reasons for working against them: participatory decision making is (1) fairer and (2) more intelligent than nonparticipatory processes. Participatory design is fairer because “[p]eople who are affected by a decision or event should have an opportunity to influence it.” 18 Participatory design is more intelligent because broad participation by multiple interests is more likely to result in innovative, widely agreeable solutions to shared problems.

Coping with Uncertainty / Ecological Design

Uncertainty can never be completely elimi-nated

designers need productive strategies aimed at coping with it.

Designing “with nature” is one strategy for coping with uncertainties (designing human systems to work in conjunction with natural systems)

Uncertainty in the language

What does sustainability mean?

In the rush to the next sustainable project or "green washing" some difficult questions simply go unasked

Ecological design models actively design for non- totality and respect for complexity (ecological and social matters) serve as examples for alternative design thinking.

Understanding Governing Mentalities / Feminist Design

Challenge to design thinking

Governing mentalities shape how people interpret macro social- cultural phenomena and how they think about their own lives and identities

Feminist design scholarship emphasizes the importance of this challenge

They show how gendered power relations become embedded in mate-rial objects, and then how social-material relations reinforce and legitimate sexist practice

Microwave oven Designed for women? To cook or to heat up? "Technology is gendered. We collectively gender it, of course; but, in turn, it individually genders us"

No domain of social life, or of design, is or can be isolated from the influence of gender-based values and assumptions

Addressing margin-alization through design requires changes not only to immediate design practices, but also to the governing mentalities that underlie those practices

Thinking Through Agency / Socially Responsible Design

catering to economically powerful groups, market-led design practices create ever more products while leaving many basic human needs unaddressed

This void is magnified when designers in poor countries are pulled away from their home- lands by lucrative salaries in affluent economies

this problem is pervasive within design professions, and significantly shapes what gets designed and how

Papanek: "Quality, new concepts, and an understanding of the limits of mass production could mean designing for the majority of the world’s people".

Margolin and Margolin recently renewed the call for a more socially responsible design doing social design themselves.

market model

social model

Summary ///// Synthesizing Design Alternatives / Toward Appropriate Design

Appropriate design accounts for diversity and disagreement.

Appropriate design accepts and copes with uncertainty.

Appropriate design recognizes the importance of governing mentali- ties

Appropriate design theorizes agency-structure tensions

As advocates of social change, alternative design scholars should celebrate the progress that has been made in identifying and addressing uneven social power relations through design

But as social critics, we also should recognize the dangers of feeling satisfied that alternative design scholarship has found the correct path: that it has arrived

Like democracy, appropriate design is an ongoing activity that can never be fully or finally achieved