Who Designs, and Where Is the Value Realized?

Design has long been described as the work of professionals. The trained construe a proposal, release an artifact into the world, and the market or criticism judges whether it is good. Under this picture, the subject of design is restricted, and the path along which value is realized narrows to roughly a single track.

Yet arguments doubting this single track have arisen from several fields at once. Researchers of social innovation turn their attention to the design acts of non-professional citizens. From the side of ontology comes the observation that a designed artifact reworks the very way its user exists. Political theory asks after paths of value realization, such as recognition and care, that are not reducible to market price.

These are separate bodies of literature, and yet they share a single question. How far can the subject of design, and the path along which its value is realized, be pluralized? This note maps the prior research on the democratization of design around that question. It is a neutral review of established fields of study and does not aim to advocate any particular theory.

For much of the source material, only the bibliographic skeleton could be verified. Assertions that step into the pages of the original works are avoided; the note stays with bibliographic information and an introduction to the concepts each work proposed. Unverified bibliographic details are marked with [citation needed].

An Age in Which Everyone Designs

The argument extending the subject of design beyond professionals took clear shape in research on social innovation. In Design, When Everybody Designs (2015), Ezio Manzini distinguished expert design from the diffuse design carried out by non-professionals¹.

Manzini’s claim is an observation about the distribution of capability. He posits a universal standpoint in which everyone designs something in the course of daily life, and on that basis he repositions the professional’s role as one that triggers and orients diffuse design. This standpoint, which does not confine design to a few professionals, sits at the junction of the sociology of social innovation and design.

An older Nordic tradition flows into this genealogy. Participatory design began by asserting workers’ right to take part in designing computer systems, and it grasped design not as a technical decision but as a site of political negotiation. That genealogy and its contemporary developments are set out in design-social-science-nexus. The proposition that everyone designs is an observation that capability is universally distributed; whether the conditions for actually exercising that capability are in place must be asked separately.

Ontological Designing: What Is Made Makes Its Maker

Widening the subject carries the story of democratization only halfway. The other half lies in the question of what a designed thing does to the human side.

The argument that posed this question most sharply is that of ontological designing. Its basic proposition lies in a circle: we design, and that design designs us in turn. An artifact is not merely a tool external to its user; it shapes the very way the user engages with the world, and thereby conditions who the user is.

The philosophical foundation of this figure is often traced to Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores’s Understanding Computers and Cognition (1986)². The two connected Heidegger’s analysis of tools and the biological epistemology of Maturana and Varela to computer science, recasting human engagement with computers not as pre-given information processing but as a process in which a world comes forth within action.

Anne-Marie Willis’s “Ontological Designing” (2006) formulated this philosophical foundation as a theme of design theory³. Willis made explicit, as the ontological character of design, the circle in which design creates a world and the created world creates us in turn. Under this formulation, the consequences of design do not stop at the function or appearance of the artifact. They reach the level of which ways of being human become possible and which are foreclosed.

Adopting the standpoint of ontological designing changes the shape of the question of value realization. The value of a design cannot be measured by how the artifact is evaluated in the market alone. The path of which ways of being human a design made possible rises up as one more site where value is realized.

Designs for the Pluriverse

When ontological designing says that what is made makes its maker in turn, it tacitly implies that the world being made need not be a single one. Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse (2018) develops that implication directly⁴.

From the context of decolonization, Escobar reexamined the ontology of the one-world world that Western modernity has presupposed. Modern design has kept producing artifacts fitted to a single world, on the premise that only that one world is real. Against this, Escobar stands on the premise that multiple worlds (the pluriverse) can coexist, and he argues for design as autonomous design, the work by which each community maintains and creates its own world. This argument brings feminist science and technology studies and Latin American decolonial thought into the ontology of design; its neighboring genealogy is likewise noted in design-social-science-nexus.

The standpoint of multiple worlds can be read as restating the pluralization of value-realization paths at the level of ontology. Presuppose a single world, and the measure of value tends to converge on one. If multiple worlds coexist, the paths along which value is realized can branch as many times as there are worlds.

The Politics of Recognition and Care

The arguments of ontology and of multiple worlds showed that the consequences of design reach the way humans are. How, then, can one grasp whether that way of being has been realized, outside of market price? Two vocabularies connect to this question from the side of political theory.

One is recognition. In The Struggle for Recognition (1995), Axel Honneth argued that human self-realization is supported by three forms of recognition: love, rights, and solidarity⁵.

Connecting the theory of recognition to the democratization of design brings the following into view. Whether someone’s design act holds value can be judged, apart from whether it sold in the market, along the path of whether that act and its maker were socially recognized. A path of value realization not reducible to market price is thereby secured under the vocabulary of recognition.

The other is care. In Caring Democracy (2013), Joan Tronto repositioned care from a practice of the private sphere to a central political value of democracy⁶.

Tronto’s argument holds that the very distribution of who provides care and who receives it is a political question. Carrying this standpoint into design, the democratization of design appears not only as the distribution of the right to take part in designing but also as a question of the distribution of the care that design brings about. Recognition and care both name paths of value realization that lie outside the market, and both connect to the argument for the democratization of design.

How Far Can the Paths of Value Realization Be Pluralized?

The bodies of literature to this point set out from separate fields and converge on the opening question. Design for social innovation widened the subject of design beyond professionals. Ontological designing carried the consequences of design down to the level of the way humans are. Design for the pluriverse showed, at the level of ontology, that the measure of value need not be one. The political theories of recognition and care gave names to paths of value realization outside market price.

Placed under a single question, the democratization of design shows a double meaning. One is the pluralization of the subject: who designs. The other is the pluralization of the path: along which route the value of that design is realized. Arguments that widen the subject and arguments that widen the path have often been treated in separate literatures, but the question of pluralizing value-realization paths places both on one map.

That map still has much blank space. Much of the literature treated here is a bibliographic skeleton that has not passed verification against the pages of the originals, and the work of translating the theories of recognition and care into concrete axes for evaluating design remains, here, only a sketch. How the pluralization of the subject and the pluralization of the path actually mesh in real settings of design and evaluation can only be confirmed within each reader’s own practice.

Related Notes

• design-social-science-nexus — A genealogy of how design absorbed methods and theories from the social sciences; details the placement of participatory design and Escobar’s pluriverse
• democratization-recommodification-paradox — An industry-side analysis of the asymmetry by which the democratization of “anyone can do it” reverses into the recommodification of “no one can charge for it”

References

• Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822371816
• Honneth, A. (1995). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (J. Anderson, Trans.). Polity Press / MIT Press. [citation needed]
• Manzini, E. (2015). Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. MIT Press.
• Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York University Press. [citation needed]
• Willis, A.-M. (2006). Ontological Designing. Design Philosophy Papers, 4(2), 69–92. [citation needed]
• Winograd, T., & Flores, F. (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Ablex Publishing. [citation needed]

Unverified Items

• The publisher (Ablex Publishing) and subtitle of Winograd & Flores (1986) are recorded as a bibliographic skeleton; verification against the original is pending. [citation needed]
• The journal (Design Philosophy Papers 4(2)) and page range of Willis (2006) are unverified. [citation needed]
• The publisher (Polity Press / MIT Press) and translator attribution of the English edition of Honneth (1995) may differ by edition; verification against the original is pending. [citation needed]
• The publisher (New York University Press) of Tronto (2013) is recorded as a bibliographic skeleton; verification against the original is pending. [citation needed]

Footnotes

1. Manzini, E. (2015). Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. MIT Press. ↩

2. Winograd, T., & Flores, F. (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Ablex Publishing. [citation needed] ↩

3. Willis, A.-M. (2006). Ontological Designing. Design Philosophy Papers, 4(2), 69–92. [citation needed] ↩

4. Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press. ↩

5. Honneth, A. (1995). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (J. Anderson, Trans.). Polity Press / MIT Press. [citation needed] ↩

6. Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York University Press. [citation needed] ↩