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Fordism and Post-Fordism

RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control; Remembering;

Introduction: Design practices, political-economic and socio-cultural conditions

Design practices are contextualised by the political-economic and the socio-cultural circumstances in which they are invented and deployed as specific responses that are considered appropriate to those circumstances. For example, design practices may take up different roles in a Fordist political-economy to a post-Fordist one. It is further argued, however, that design practices have the potential to break with those circumstances, to alter the context reflexively.

User-Centred and User-Driven Design

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.

References

Koskinen, T. and Thomson, M. (2012). Design for Growth & Prosperity. Brussels: European Commission. Available from https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/a207fc64-d4ef-4923-a8d1-4878d4d04520 [Accessed 10 October 2014].

Feminism and Materialism

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.

Ontological Turn

RELATED TERMS: New Materialism; Ontological Designing; Ontology; Performance and Performativity; Practice;

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).

Hermeneutics

RELATED TERMS:

“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 – Derrida

RELATED TERMS: Heidegger;

“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).

Povinelli

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.

Literary Theory

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.

Ergodic

RELATED TERMS: Aleatory

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

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.

Cobb, J. (2021) The Man behind critical race theory, The New Yorker, (13 September). Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/the-man-behind-critical-race-theory? (Accessed: 8 August 2022).

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.