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Designing with Publics that Are Already Busy: A Case from Denmark Andreas Birkbak, Morten Krogh Petersen, Tobias Bornakke Jørgensen Introduction: Making a Data Set Public Recent discussions in design research have turned the attention to 1 how design interventions take part in the formation of publics. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/34/4/8/1715964/desi_a_00507.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 The discussion is informed by recent work in Science and Technol- ogy Studies (STS) and related fields, which has drawn on the polit- ical philosophy of John Dewey to argue that problematic objects (or issues) play a key role in democratic politics because of their ability to “spark a public into being.”2 For design research, this proposi- tion raises the question of how designers might contribute to the organization of publics when designing objects. To be sure, designers for a long time have understood themselves as pursuing normative goals as part of their design 1 Christopher A. Le Dantec and Carl work. The question that bears asking is what specific kind of DiSalvo, “Infrastructuring and the Forma- “good” designers are pursuing when they seek to design for the tion of Publics in Participatory Design,” Social Studies of Science 43, no. 2 (April orchestration of publics. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, 1, 2013): 241–64, Erling Bjögvinsson and colleagues have argued that publics must doi:10.1177/0306312712471581; Carl be understood as problematic assemblies, always socio-material DiSalvo, “Design and the Construction of and mobilized through issues or controversies.3 The question for Publics,” Design Issues 25, no. 1 (Winter design, they argue, is how to design agonistic spaces that facilitate 2009): 48–63, doi:10.1162/ desi.2009.25.1.48; and Thomas Binder, and that “infrastructure” the unfolding of public matters of con- Eva Brandt, Pelle Ehn, and Joachim cern. To quote the title of this special issue, the question is how to Halse, “Democratic Design Experiments: “organize provocation, conflict, and appropriation.” In the prag- Between Parliament and Laboratory,” matist conceptualization of publics currently being developed in CoDesign 11, no. 3–4 (2015): 152–65, doi STS research and beyond, these “goods” are important to achieve. :10.1080/15710882.2015.1081248. 2 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, Establishing the emergence of publics as the goal of design 1st ed. (New York: Henry Holt and Com- work also raises the question of what other “goods” are left out by pany, 1927); Noortje Marres, “Issues this missional focus. The risk of establishing an instrumental Spark a Public into Being,” in Making approach to the formation of publics arises, in which facilitating Things Public: Atmospheres of Democ- their unfolding remains the responsibility of the designer. This racy, ed. Bruno Latour (Cambrige, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Bruno Latour and Peter problem is both a normative and a practical one because an instru- Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: mental approach can severely limit the scope of participation when Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambrige, designers construct publics by designing things. Solving this chal- MA: MIT Press, 2005). lenge might require that designers are prepared to consider how 3 Erling Bjögvinsson, Pelle Ehn, and Per- the “sites for future use” of their creations are already overflowing Anders Hillgren, “Design Things and Design Thinking: Contemporary Participa- tory Design Challenges,” Design Issues 28, no. 3 (Summer, 2012): 101–16, doi:10.1162/DESI_a_00165. © 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 8 DesignIssues: Volume 34, Number 4 Autumn 2018 https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00507 with situated understandings of what “goods” need to be pursued. Taking these pre-existing normative projects into account seems key to avoiding an approach that sees publics as yet another instantiation of “users” of design objects. We develop this argument by discussing our recent attempt to design an online data visualization tool for public use. The tool was intended to help maintain and extend public contestation around a specific data set on the Danish power elite.4 By making this data set available for further public exploration through a user-friendly web interface, we hoped to contribute to the ongoing formation of publics around the issue of power—especially the continued presence of “old boy” networks, such as corporate boards of directors. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/34/4/8/1715964/desi_a_00507.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Although web logs show that our tool was taken up by casual users in a limited period after its launch, no sustained interest materialized. To mitigate this problem, we drew on the tradition of participatory design to try and include members of relevant publics in the design process as “future sites of use.”5 Specifically, we reached out to three sites of knowledge produc- tion: a public service newsroom, a university research office, and a business consultancy. We knew from the creators of the elite data set that all three sites contained knowledge professionals who had expressed an explicit interest in working with the elite data set. The selection of the specific cases was motivated by our wish to reach across several sectors of knowledge production (i.e., journal- ism, business, and academic research). Instead of simply inviting the potential future users of our tool to a design workshop, we decided to adopt an ethnographic interest in the existing “goods” that guided the public for which we wanted to design. Upon exploring the data practices unfurling at the three sites, we found that they were already busy with con- cerns that were both highly relevant to the data practices we were trying to facilitate, while overflowing and provoking our framing of the publics we were trying to spark into being. This discovery caused us to raise the question of how to design with rather than for publics that are already busy, and to propose a reconsideration in design of the publics we hope to spark into being. Publics and Design: The Problem of Relevance The question of how to design with rather than for publics touches on the issue of how exactly to conceptualize publics inspired by 4 Christoph Houman Ellersgaard and Anton the pragmatist thoughts of John Dewey and others, as well as Grau Larsen, “Data Exchange Network: recent work in STS. We start by adding some nuance to this The Danish Elite Network,” Connections theoretical question before moving on to describe our own design 35, no. 1 (2015), doi:10.17266/35.1.5. challenge and what can be learned from it. 5 Jesper Simonsen and Toni Robertson, eds., Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design (London: Routledge, 2012). DesignIssues: Volume 34, Number 4 Autumn 2018 9 In his 2009 article, Carl DiSalvo observes a surge in scholar- ship around the theme of design as an enabler of collective action and argues that the work of Dewey on political philosophy offers particularly useful conceptualizations.6 The reason is that Dewey’s approach asks the question of how publics are constructed. His thinking thus is a resource for getting away from abstract under- standings of politics as made up of taken-for-granted entities, such as “the state” and “the public.” Instead, DiSalvo reads Dewey’s theory of publics as emphasizing how multiple publics must be expected to co-exist because they are constituted by specific issues. Following Dewey, the consequences of issues, such as environmen- tal disasters, epidemics, or in our case, the proliferation of new kinds of digital data, are variously felt and perceived by various Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/desi/article-pdf/34/4/8/1715964/desi_a_00507.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 groups in society, resulting in a multiplicity of publics. The design challenge that DiSalvo ends up foregrounding is a problem of communication among disparate publics—some- thing that designers might take up and try to tackle with tactics such as the “projection” of possible future scenarios or the “trac- ing” of the heterogeneous networks of actors and entities that make up an issue. These design interventions are understood as means to aid the construction of publics that can better handle the specific matters of concern. By focusing on the multiplicity of publics sparked into being by indirect consequences, DiSalvo’s reading highlights Dewey’s commitment to pluralism. This perception casts Dewey as a liberal political philosopher, which is a widespread interpretation of his work.7 However, recent work in STS has emphasized other ele- ments of Dewey’s political philosophy that somewhat alters how we might approach the question of how to design for public engagement. These alternative readings of Dewey include the work by Latour and Weibel on Making Things Public,8 and they are also particularly well explicated in the work of Noortje Marres. In her book on material participation, Marres carefully distinguishes what she calls the problem of relevance from the conventional (liberal) problem of pluralism in relation to the forma- tion of publics.9 The problem of relevance arises because of the way Dewey defines publics as formed by indirect consequences of actions, Marres argues. As a result, publics are always strug- gling with how to make their situation relevant to actions taking 6 DiSalvo, “Design and the Construction place elsewhere. of Publics”; Dewey, The Public and Its Following Marres’s reading of Dewey, this issue of rele- Problems. 7 Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and vance is not just a problem to be solved; instead, it is what consti- American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell tutes public engagement. Problems of relevance can play out as University Press, 1993). public controversies over what parties should be considered and 8 Latour and Weibel, Making Things Public.

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