Koskinen and Thomson (2012: 79) differentiate between user-centred design and user-driven design.
User-centred design means that design innovation is focused on users’ needs and the delivery of new benefits to them in their use of products, services, environments, systems, and so on. A user-centred approach, they contend, is a strong support to incremental innovation.
User-driven design implies that innovation comes from users, leading to new approaches and methods to engaging end-users in the design process from the outset.
Spatial practices, and not only in Western countries, are radically gendered. Feminist analyses, particularly those that emphasise the performative character of gender ‘identity’ as processes of identification, which focus on material conditions of living and which bring to attention the significance of practices of the body in the constitution of spatiality, are therefore of great value in the design of narrative environments.
According to Andrew Pickering (2017), citing Woolgar and Lezaun (2013, 2015) and Kelly (2014), the social-constructivist consensus has broken down in the early 21st century. In response, both anthropology and science and technology studies have taken an ontological turn. This ontological turn in science and technology studies, Pickering contends, grew out of a prior turn to practice from the 1980s onwards (Pickering 1992).
“Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. It is easier to show their common opposition to a phenomenology of the sacred, understood as a propaedeutic to the ‘revelation’ of meaning, than their interrelationship within a single method of demystification.”
Ricoeur, 1970: 32)
By way of general introduction to the idea of a history of the techniques of interpretation from the Greek grammarians to our own day, Foucault proposes that it would be possible to say that language, in the Indo-European cultures at least, has always given birth to two kinds of suspicions: that language does not mean exactly what it says; and that language exceeds its verbal form in some way, so that there are other things in the world which speak and which are not language.
“Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodical procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail; its writing is not only performative, it produces rules — other conventions — for new performativities and never installs itself in the theoretical assurance of a simple opposition between performative and constative.” (Derrida, 2007: 23)
1 Destruktion, Deconstruction, (De)Construction and Deconstructionism
It is not possible to use the word ‘deconstruction’, which itself is a value or stands for a certain set of values in terms of academic inquiry, without evoking a chain of associations, for example, to German philosophy of the early 20th century, French philosophy of the mid-20th century, the American re-articulation of these philosophical traditions in the latter part of the 20th century and the controversies surrounding the term that subsequently arose through “the American invention of French theory” (Cusset, 2008: xiv).
Since the beginning of the 21st century, Elizabeth Povinelli argues, critical theoretical discourses have been marked by a particular style and approach. They have shifted, she suggests, from hermeneutic and deconstructive methods of reading towards a set of methods of knowledge production informed by mathematically-inspired philosophy and the natural sciences. A number of names have been given to this emergent field: the ontological turn; new materialism; and posthumanism.
Despite the variety of names given, Povinelli ascribes a common thread to these scholarly efforts. She contends that these scholars are seeking to imagine a form of political solidarity that is grounded in the entanglement of human, other-than-human and more-than-human existents [or inter-actants]. Thus, Povinelli suggests that, despite the variety of discourses under these headings, they can all be taken to be making the ontological claim, in different ways, that ‘existence is entangled’. Two of the major theorists that Povinelli cites in this context are Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. Haraway, with her emphasis on species entanglement and symbiogenetic kinship, aims to establish the basis of an anticapitalist, antiracist, posthuman feminist perspective (Povinelli, 2021: 17).
References
Povinelli, E. A. (2021) Between Gaia and ground. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
RELATED TERMS: Narratology; Reception theory and reader response criticism; Interaction Design
Literary theory is the study and analysis of literature in general. Narratology can be considered a branch of literary theory.
More recent literary theory tends to move away from earlier critical approaches, for example, Russian Formalism, New Criticism and French structuralist narratology of the 1960s, by shifting emphasis towards the reader. In both reception theory, Rezeptionsästhetik, which has had its greatest impact in Germany, and reader-response criticism, associated mainly with American criticism, the role of the reader is seen as crucial. Continuity between these two strands of literary theory can be found through the work of Wolfgang Iser, who is commonly cited in both.
Insights from reception theory and reader-response criticism may prove useful in shaping interactions in interaction design, while taking interaction in the direction of narrative.
References
Iser, W. (1972) The reading process: A phenomenological approach, New Literary History, 3(2), pp. 279–299. doi: 10.2307/468316.
Iser, W. (1990) The Aesthetic and the imaginary, in The States of ‘Theory’: history, art, and critical discourse. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 201–220.
Newton, K. M. (ed.) (1997) Twentieth-century literary theory: a reader. 2nd edn. New York, NY: Macmillan Education.
The term ‘ergodic’ might be said to occupy a similar territory to that of aleatory.
Bringing together two Greek roots, ergon meaning work and hodos meaning path, ergodic is a term borrowed from physics by Espen Aarseth (1997: 2) who uses it to suggest that a, “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” in the context of cybertextuality.
References
Aarseth, E.J. (1997). Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Critical race theory, as a movement, is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism and power. While traditional civil rights discourse stresses incrementalism and gradual progress, by contrast critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017: 3).
Critical race theory had its first stirrings in the 1970s when a number of lawyers, activists and legal scholars across the USA realised, at roughly the same time, that the advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled. Worse, these advances were, in many respects, being rolled back. Early proponents, such as Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman and Richard Delgado, put their minds to the task of creating new theories and strategies, necessary to combat the subtler forms of racism that were gaining ground (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017: 4).
Derrick Bell, for example, spent the latter part of his career as an academic, during which time, he came to realise that the decisions in landmark civil-rights cases in the USA had had limited long-term practical effect. From this insight, he drew an unsettling conclusion: racism is so deeply ingrained in American society that it reasserts itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it. He began to argue that racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of US society. These ideas were a major source of influence for the body of thought that came to be known in the 1980s as critical race theory (Cobb, 2021).
Critical race theory builds on the insights of two previous movements: critical legal studies and radical feminism (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017: 5). It also draws from certain European philosophers and theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In addition, it takes insights from the American radical tradition, for example, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the Black Power and Chicano movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Among the basic tenets of critical race theory, not all of which are held by all practitioners, are the following:
racism is ordinary; it is the normal way US society does business; and is the common, everyday experience of most people of colour in the USA;
the US system of white-over-colour ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group (sometimes called ‘interest convergence’ or material determinism);
race and races are products of social thought and relations – not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality, they are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient;
the dominant society racialises different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs, such as the labor market;
the notions of intersectionality and anti-essentialism, which holds that no person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity;
the voice-of-colour thesis holds that minority status brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism, a thesis that co-exists in an uneasy tension with anti-essentialism.
This last point, about the competence to speak, in other words, to be a reliable narrator of one’s own experience, raises the issue of power in relation to narrative. Thus, Delgado and Stefancic (2017: 11) note that, “The ‘legal storytelling’ movement urges black and brown writers to recount their experiences with racism and the legal system and to apply their own unique perspectives to assess law’s master narratives.” To this, the design of narrative environments would add that attention also needs to be paid to the ways in which people are ‘told’, both in the sense of being guided or instructed and in the sense of being narrated, by the ways in which their spatio-temporal environments are structured, that is, by the ways in which ‘master narratives’ are articulated environmentally.
References
Bell, D. (1992) Faces at the bottom of the well: the permanence of racism. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Childers, S. M. (2014) Promiscuous analysis in qualitative research, Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), pp. 819–826. doi: 10.1177/1077800414530266.
Cole, M. (2009) Critical race theory and education: a Marxist response. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Crenshaw, K. et al. (eds) (1995) Critical race theory: the key writings that formed the movement. New York, NY: New Press.
Delgado, R. and Stefancic, J. (eds) (2017) Critical race theory: an introduction. 3rd edn. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Forlano, L. (2017) Posthumanism and design, She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. Elsevier, 3(1), pp. 16–29. doi: 10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001.
Henry, K. L. and Powell, S. N. (2021) Kissing cousins: critical race theory’s racial realism and Afropessimism’s social death, in Grant, C. A., Woodson, A. N., and Dumas, M. J. (eds) The Future is black: Afro-pessimism, fugitivity and radical hope in education. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 79–85.
Ladson-Billings, G. and Tate, W. F. (1995) ‘Toward a critical race theory of education’, Teachers College Record, 97(1), pp. 47–68.
Tuhkanen, M. (2009) The American optic: psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and Richard Wright. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
“Ordinary life, [Barry Cryer] used to say, is badly written, so he infused it with jokes.”
(Andrew Martin, 2023)
“Design and the everyday are inextricably intertwined. Because it plays such a constitutive role in everyday life, it is hard to say that there is design work that truly engages, or does not engage, the everyday. … This is, I believe, Lefebvre’s point. The ordinary is ungraspable, slippery, and constantly confounding. Nothing is easier to point to and yet nothing eludes analysis more immediately.”
(Hunt, 2003: 70)
“A paradoxical presence in our lives, design is both invisible and conspicuous, familiar and strange. It surrounds us while fading from view, becoming second nature and yet seemingly unknowable.”
(Blauvelt, 2003: 14)
“The world is a metaphysics, that is: the way it presents itself first of all, its supposed objective neutrality, its simple material structure, are already part of a certain metaphysical interpretation that constitutes it.”
(Tiqqun, 2011: 10)
In some respects, design practices could be considered to be a critical, creative and reflexive practice within and about everyday life, interested not just in the ordinary but also the extraordinary. However, the everyday may not seem fertile ground for design practices, particularly, for example, if one takes one’s orientation from the proposition articulated by Maurice Blanchot (1987: 17) that,
“The everyday, where one lives as though outside the true and the false, is … without responsibility and without authority, without direction and without decision, a storehouse of anarchy, since casting aside all beginning and dismissing all end. This is the everyday.”
(Blanchot, 1987: 17)
Yet if one is attentive to Blanchot’s qualification, that it is “as though” this is the case, then it can be seen that the issues with which design practices are concerned are indeed present in the everyday: truth and falsehood or authenticity and inauthenticity; responsibility and authority; directionality and decisiveness; order and disorder; beginning and ending.
The everyday, everyday life or daily life, is the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the habitual (Perec, 2008), that which is taken for granted, that which is given and which is all too familiar and therefore goes unnoticed and is overlooked. The everyday is that which slips into the background; or, as Maurice Blanchot (1987: 12) puts it in an essay section heading, “The Everyday: What is Most Difficult to Discover”.
Agnes Heller (1985), from a different perspective, suggests that the everyday might be understood as the most fundamental ontological category of society, albeit one that is not an unchanging essence but has to be continually re-constructed. For Heller, the everyday constitutes the shared life experience through which the world is intersubjectively constituted.
In terms of an actantial approach to the agency of design in the shared world, everyday entities, from clothes to furnishings to architectures to institutional and infrastructural systems, actively environ. To environ is one of design’s primary modes of actantiality. It becomes an unrecognised and unrecognisable part of the atmosphere, unless attention is disrupted and the familiar made strange (again).
For this reason, the everyday may be of great significance in thinking about design practices because, similarly to the interventions of neo-avant-garde artists, a designed entity or environment can provide a way of, “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed”, as George Brecht, conceptual artist and member of Fluxus, once described his art. Appropriating Zen and other forms of Mahayana Buddhism for their own ends, the work of neo-avant-garde artists and composers, such as the ‘anti-art’ of George Maciunas, a central figure in Fluxus, and the ‘situation art’ of Tom Marioni, rejected orthodox modernism in favour of the sheer immediacy and authenticity of everyday life.
Everyday life is a central, highly diverse and problematic theme for modern philosophy and social theory and, since the mid-1990s, has become persistent topic within art practice. The analysis of the everyday has been undertaken by such thinkers as Dilthey, Wittgenstein, Simmel, Husserl, Schutz, Heidegger, Dewey, Lefebvre, Kosik, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas, Garfinkel, Debord and de Certeau.
As Lefebvre (2014: 679) points out, this represents a radical change of focus for philosophy, because,
“In the past, philosophers excluded daily life from knowledge and wisdom. Essential and mundane, it was deemed unworthy of thought. Thought first of all established a distance (an epoche) vis-a-vis daily life, the domain and abode of non-philosophers.”
Lefebvre, 2014: 679)
By changing its focus thus, Lefebvre suggests, philosophy is seeking to renew itself by overcoming speculative abstraction, an endeavour which has been ongoing since Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Lukacs and others.
As Gardiner (2006: 207) highlights, the theorists mentioned above set out to problematise everyday life, to expose its manifold contradictions, effects and determinations, as well as its hidden potentialities. This problematisation is accomplished through various techniques such as the alienation effect, estrangement or defamiliarisation, whose aim is to unsettle the state of habitual, perpetual distraction that, it is argued, constitutes the everyday life of modernity, thereby jolting it into a condition of active awareness or mindfulness.
Such approaches clearly differ from mainstream sociological studies, in which the everyday is the realm of the ordinary. In the alternative sketched out by Lefebvre and others, the everyday is treated as incipiently extraordinary.
Thus, Lefebvre (1987: 9) argues that,
“The concept of everydayness does not therefore designate a system, but rather a denominator common to existing systems including judicial, contractual, pedagogical, fiscal, and police systems. Banality? Why should the study of the banal itself be banal? Are not the surreal, the extraordinary, the surprising, even the magical, also part of the real? Why wouldn’t the concept of everydayness reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary?”
As Gardiner (2006: 207) explains,
“The ordinary can become extraordinary not by eclipsing the everyday, or imagining we can arbitrarily leap beyond it to some ‘higher’ level of cognition, knowledge or action, but by fully appropriating and activating the possibilities that lie hidden, and typically repressed, within it. Such an enriched experience can then be re-directed back to daily life in order to transform it.”
(Gardiner, 2006: 207)
In line with the Marxian dictum in the Theses on Feuerbach, the goal is to elevate lived experience to the status of a critical concept, not simply in order to describe it, but in order to change it (Kaplan and Ross, 1987: 1). The French understanding of the everyday, Schilling (2003: 24) comments, incorporates the avant-garde injunction to ‘change life’ which runs through the left-wing politics of Lefebvre, the disruptive interventions of the Situationist International and the popular tactics of resistance articulated by De Certeau and which was adapted by the Surrealists from Rimbaud and Marx.
Everyday life undoubtedly does display routinised, static and unreflexive characteristics, as Schütz and other sociologists have noted. Nevertheless, the work of Lefebvre and others leads to the recognition that everyday life is also capable of surprising dynamism, penetrating insight and unbridled creativity. Everyday lives and knowledges demonstrate an irreducibly imaginative and dynamic quality. They cannot simply be written off as trivial, inconsequential and habit-bound (Gardiner, 2006: 207). In this sense, the French-derived thinking about the everyday differs from German-language reflections on Alltaglichkeit, such as in Lukacs’ Metaphysics of Tragedy and Heidegger’s Being and Time, which characterise the everyday as the domain of inauthenticity, tiriviality and error (Schilling, 2003: 24).
Michael Sheringham (2006: 3) emphasises the importance of French thought in the post-World War Two period (post-1945) in bringing the notion of the everyday, or the quotidien, to prominence. He argues that from the mid-1950s onwards a cluster of closely-related ways of thinking about and exploring the everyday developed which led to the notion of the everyday being positioned at the centre of French culture from the 1980s onwards, and into the 21st century. Since the 1980s, investigations and explorations of the everyday have become prominent in France certainly, but also elsewhere.
Prominent amongst those paying attention to the everyday in the French context are Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau and Georges Perec, in dialogue with such thinkers as Edgar Morin, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and those included under the banner of Situationism. In turn, these writers draw common inspiration from ideas about the everyday at large in the writings of Karl Marx, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Raymond Queneau and Walter Benjamin, as well as the Surrealists (Sheringham, 2006: 4).
Thus, the work of critical neo-Marxist writers, such as Guy Debord, Henri Lefebrvre, the early Jean Baudrillard and Edgar Morin, articulating a ‘critique of everyday-life’, formed a unique contribution to the construction of a sociology of the quotidian, which examined everyday life as a site of capitalist domination characterised by ‘alienation’, ‘reification’ and ‘commodity fetishism’, or what Debord called the ‘society of the spectacle’ (Evans, 1997:223).
For Marx, the everyday is the site of political struggle, towards which philosophy should direct its attention; and is also the object of critique in certain forms of literary studies, as noted by Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (2002: 30):
“In Marx’s text philosophy must thus displace itself into the everyday struggle. In my argument, literature, insofar as it is in the service of the emergence of the critical, must also displace itself thus.”
(Spivak, 2002: 30)
In being conceptualised as a site of struggle within an agonistic framework, the everyday can be understood narratively as exhibiting dramatic tensions that take place in specific environments for specific kinds of actants. Therefore thinking about the everyday is of interest for design practices, particularly the design of narrative environments.
Brooker (2003: 96-97) suggests that references to everyday life can be taken to express an emphasis upon the forms and meanings of a common or popular culture. The assumption behind this position is that, as Raymond Williams argues, culture is ordinary, rather than the exclusive province of an elite. In turn, this underlies a broadly political perspective on cultural production and consumption, enabling the routine or banal in daily life to be recognised as a complex field of contested cultural meanings.
If, as Maurice Blanchot (1987: 13) suggests, the everyday constitutes, “a utopia, and an Idea, without which one would not know how to get at either the hidden present, or the discoverable future of manifest beings”, then the task of the designer is to become a critical theorist of everyday life, although not perhaps a practitioner of a utopian humanism.
Such a practice celebrates the intrinsic, although often invisible, promises and possibilities of ordinary human beings and the inherent value of common sense forms of making sense and knowing. It also recognises, nonetheless, the shortcomings of the mundane world as currently constituted. It is therefore attuned to the transgressive, sensual and incandescent qualities of everyday existence, whereby the whole fabric of daily life, in its sociality, materiality, spatiality and temporality, can take on a festive character, akin to that of a work of art (Gardiner, 2006: 207).
Design and the Everyday – A Note Of Caution
In noting that everyday life is thoroughly designed, Henk Oosterling (2009) cautions that this statement is flattering for designers but is in equal measure challenging for them. It flatters because it reflects design’s outstanding success in the 20th and the early 21st centuries. Nevertheless, it presents a challenge because it suggests that the role of designers as innovators has ended. In the networked society, which is proceeding from strength to strength, their mediatory role is diminishing. When everyone is a designer, as Manzini (2015) among others contends, and Dasein (human being-in-the-world) has become thoroughly designed, the designer is everywhere and nowhere.
Resources
Sources for researching how the study of everyday has developed:
Blanchot, M. (1987) Everyday speech. Yale French Studies, 73, 12–20.
Blauvelt, A. (2003) Strangely familiar: design and everyday life, in Blauvelt, A. (ed.) Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, pp. 14–37.
Brooker, P. (2003) A Glossary of Cultural Theory, 2nd ed. London, UK: Arnold.
Evans, D. (1997) Michel Maffesoli’s sociology of modernity and postmodernity: an introduction and critical assessment. Sociological Review, 45 (2), 220–243. Available from http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/1467-954X.00062 [Accessed 7 May 2016].
Heller, A. (1985) The Power of Shame: A Rational Perspective. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hunt, J. (2003) Just re-do it: Tactical formlessness and everyday consumption, in Blauvelt, A. (ed.) Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, pp. 56–71.
Johnstone, S., ed. (2008) The Everyday. London: Whitechapel Gallery
Lefebvre, H. (1995) Critique of everyday life. Volume 1: Introduction. London, UK: Verso.
Lefebvre, H. (2014) Critique of everyday life. Volume III: From modernity to modernism (towards a metaphilosophy of daily life). In: Critique of everyday life. The one-volume edition. London, UK: Verso.
Manzini, E. (2015) Design, when everybody designs: An introduction to design for social innovation. Translated by R. Coad. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Martin, A. (2023) A Life full of laughter. Observer, 15 October, New Review, 43.
Perec, G. (2008) Species of spaces and other pieces. London, UK: Penguin Books.
Sandywell, B. (2004) The Myth of everyday life: toward a heterology of the ordinary. Cultural Studies, 18 (2), 160–180.
Schilling, D. (2003) Everyday life and the challenge to history in postwar France: Braudel, Lefebvre, Certeau. Diacritics, 33 (1), 23–40. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805822 [Accessed 7 May 2016].
Sheringham, M. (2006) Everyday life: theories and practices from Surrealism to the present. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
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