Scandinavian Design: On Participation and Skill

Abstract

specification. Floyd argues that the product-oriented view leaves the relationship between programs and the living human world entirely unexplored, providing no way to check the relevance of the specification or to accommodate learning and communication. As a remedy to these anomalies, Floyd sees a new process-oriented paradigm in software engineering with a focus on human learning and communication in both the use and development of the software. She views the products of this process as tools or working environments for people and not as pieces code or an abstract software system. Hence, the quality of the product depends on its relevance, suitability, or adequacy in practical use. Quality cannot be reduced to features of the product such as reliability and efficiency. From this perspective, prototyping can be seen as an alternative or complement to traditional, more formalized, and detached descriptions. Another important example of new tendencies in the design of computer-based systems is the development of a new philosophical foundation in the tradition of hermeneutics and phenomenology proposed by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus (1986) and Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores (1986). This philosophical endeavor focuses on the differences between human activity and computer performance. In doing so, it departs from other traditions by focusing on what people do with computers, how in cooperation with one another they use computers, and what they might do better with computers. In this approach, the origin of design is in involved practical use and understanding, not detached reflection, and design is seen as an interaction between understanding and creation. This research aims not to create just another design method but to create a new foundation for a science of design. In the following, I will propose that this new understanding can be buttressed by an awareness of language games and the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. My focus is on the shift in design from language as description towards language as action. Rethinking Systems Descriptions A few years ago I was struck by something I had not noticed before. While thinking about how perspectives make us select certain aspects of reality as important in a description, I realized I had completely overlooked my own presumption that descriptions in one way or another are mirror images of a given reality. My earlier reasoning had been that because there are different interests in the world, we should always question the objectivity of design choices that claimed to flow from design as a process of rational decision making. Hence, I had argued that we needed to create descriptions from different perspectives in order to form a truer picture. I did not, however, question the Cartesian epis ontology of an inner world of experiences (mind) and an outer world of objects (external reality). Nor did I question the assumption that language was our way of mirroring this outer world of real objects. By focusing on which objects and which relations should be represented in a systems description, I took for granted the Cartesian mind-body dualism that Wittgenstein had so convincingly rejected in Philosophical Investigations (1953). Hence, although my purpose was the opposite, my perspective blinded me to the subjectivity of craft, artistry, passion, love, and care in the system descriptions. Our experiences with the UTOPIA project caused me to re-examine my philosophical assumptions. Working with the end users of the design, the graphics workers, some design methods failed while others succeeded. Requirement specifications and systems descriptions based on information from interviews were not very successful. Improvements came when we made joint visits to interesting plants, trade shows, and vendors and had discussions with other users; when we dedicated considerably more time to learning from each other, designers from graphics workers and graphics workers from designers; when we started to use design-by-doing methods and descriptions such as mockups and work organization games; and when we started to understand and use traditional tools as a design ideal for computer-based systems. The turnaround can be understood in the light of two Wittgensteinian lessons. The first is not to underestimate the importance of skill in design. As Peter Winch (1958) has put it, "A cook is not a man who first has a vision of a pie and then tries to make it. He is a man skilled in cookery, and both his projects and his achievements spring from that skill." The second is not to mistake the role of description methods in design: Wittgenstein argues convincingly that what a picture describes is determined by its use. In the following I will illustrate how our "new" UTOPIAN design methods may be understood from a Wittgensteinian position, that is, why design-by-doing and a skill-based participatory design process works. More generally, I will argue that design tools such as models, prototypes, mockups, descriptions, and representations act as reminders and paradigm cases for our contemplation of future computer-based systems and their use. Such design tools are effective because they recall earlier experiences to mind. It is in this sense that we should understand them as representations. I will begin with a few words on practice, the alternative to the "picture theory of reality".