[community] Community Meeting ( September 6 ): Limits of design

[Obara, Justin]

At this week’s Community Meeting<https://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Community+workshops> ( September 6, 2017 ) Peter Fuzesi will be visiting the IDRC and leading a community meeting on "Limits of design".

Description:

I am a doctoral student at Lancaster University, supervised by Professors Lucy Suchman and Carol Thomas. My doctoral research project (Working title: From designing for different users to economies of difference) stands at the intersection of Disability Studies and Science Technology and Society (STS). I am interested in how corporeal and technological norms and standards are co-articulated and circulate in bodies, devices and figures such as that of the user.

My presentation is based on an ethnographic study on how users are configured
within the UK's public healthcare system, and looks at a specialized Service Centre that delivers Environmental Control and Augmentative Alternative Communication Systems for “Clients with Complex Needs”. The site is peculiar insofar as every individual user is delivered a personalized system, which aims to take into account the user's wider social, cultural and material environment and its changes. To meet these diverse and changing needs and to retain a flexibility to re-design systems, the Service Centre functions as a site for not only designing, maintaining but also (literally) delivering and commissioning technologies. By doing so, the work practices of those working at the Centre also augment and reconfigure market relations and infrastructures, and redraw the established boundaries between development/design and use/consumption.

Although arguably the professionals in the Service Centre grapple with design problems, the language and discipline of design remains absent and the development of novel technological
devices is not seen as a primary concern. It is more fitting to describe professional practices at the Centre as the artful integration (Suchman, 1999) of existing technologies into an arrangement that works for the user in a given material and social environment. Although this iterative process of constant negotiation between the developer and individual results in several inventive solutions there are serious limitations to generalize these highly situated arrangements, specifically relevant for only one individual. This raises questions about the ways design and its products can be evaluated, and the ways standards, regimes of evidence and market success and failure frame our understanding of technology design and use. In sum, approaching and problematizing this site enables a critical reflection on the normative implications of concepts such as user, product/project, design and technology in relation to liberal individualism, mass production and commodity exchange.


Time:
2:30 - 4:00pm ET

Location:
Locally: IDRC Office<http://idrc.ocadu.ca/about-the-idrc/contact-us>
Remotely: fluid_standup<https://conf.inclusivedesign.ca/flex.html?roomdirect.html&key=xemU59x8DtnO41eCMtCpCioWaRI> Vidyo video conference

Thanks
Justin