Attending to How Practices Come Together: Situating Design among Relational Practices

Abstract

When acting in complex sociocultural contexts, designers often encounter other people engaged in differing practices. Non-design practices and design practices co-evolve in reciprocity. However, this study suggests that in design culture designers are too often encouraged to be uncritically reliant on performing established design activities as a crucial means of demonstrating their professionalism. Designers may encounter difficulties in concretely perceiving and describing how their everyday practices are entangled with people and things – a detached position which can prompt design professionals’ self-doubt about whether they contribute positively to others’ lives. This article explores how to aid designers in building attentiveness to the situated nature of their design practice. Drawing on recent practice theory, the possibility entails attending to the relational practices of others that occur in the proximity of an acting designer. Design and other practices become relational since these practices mutually constitute each other’s conditions of existence, maintenance, and transformation. Using autoethnography and analysis, the article reveals the positive potentials of four ways of attending to relational practices: tracking, recounting, repositioning, and responding. While non-exhaustive, these four categories can enable designers to develop a more nuanced understanding of their working context and appropriate localized strategies for design action.