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Participatory Design and Social Transformation
Images and Narratives of Crisis and Change
John A. Bruce
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eBook - ePub
Participatory Design and Social Transformation
Images and Narratives of Crisis and Change
John A. Bruce
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About This Book
Participatory Design and Social Transformation introduces theories and methodologies for using image-oriented narratives as modes of inquiry and proposition toward greater justice and equity for society and the environment.
Participatory artistic- and design-based research encounters – being, making, and learning with people, things, and situations – are explored through practices that utilize image-oriented and cinematic narratives. Collaborative alliances are invited to consider aesthetics, visuality, attunement, reflection, reciprocity, and care as a means for transdisciplinary approaches that foster generative and ethically responsible conditions toward collective liberation. The design of spectacles is proposed as a way for collective movements to affectively contribute to positive systemic changes from the ground up. In this way, Participatory Design and Social Transformation bridges contemporary advances in design theory and practice with media and art theory, the human and social sciences, and a pedagogy of interdependence.
Participatory Design and Social Transformation will be of great interest to both professional and academic communities, providing resources for researchers, artists, designers, activists, students, educators, and leaders engaged with initiatives for transformation.
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1 IntroductionImages of crisis, images of change
DOI: 10.4324/9780367365264-1
“Photography is also an act of love.” This opening line in Hervé Guibert’s essay ‘Ghost Image,’ speaks to the generative potential of participating in the making of images (Guibert [1982] 2014). Sense-making, meaning-making, and decision-making can be readily realized through activities of encountering, creating, and sharing narratives. Stories, and especially image-oriented and sensory narrative experiences, are the heart and soul of integrative knowledge domains and the basis for thought and action. This short book explores image and narrative creations as modes of learning with the capacity to address complex social issues in the realms of art- and design-based research. For several years, I have been experimenting with cinematic tropes—the formal elements of moving images and sound that impact narrative and meaning-making—as a way of informing artistic and design-based research processes. Central to this practice-based approach are frameworks I refer to as images of crisis and images of change—ways of seeing, understanding, and acting that address what, in design syntax, are commonly referred to, respectively, as ‘the problem space’ and ‘ways forward.’ These methods are particularly salient within transdisciplinary investigations and propositions focused on transformations of greater environmental and social justice.
The approaches shared in this book introduce and prioritize modes of a sensory exchange over didactic language-based forms of communication. Embodied learning relies on what appears to us through our senses, minds, and hearts. Appearances are the ways in which images become evident and serve the activities of meaning-making. What is apparent is not always true, and what is true is not always apparent. Images—whether sensorily, relived as memories, or encountered as mediated artifacts through art, design, cinema, television, print media, the Internet, and other visual forms—are never capable of exacting complete or fixed truths. All the while, images that circulate widely or with strong resonance among individuals and the publics can serve as powerful levers for shifting cultural understandings and opinions. It is this malleable nature of our relationship with images that presents a great opportunity for working with visual artifacts and narratives within participatory research and design processes. The discussions in this book use the term ‘design process’ to refer to approaches for addressing complex social issues. These processes center artistic and design-based transdisciplinary research and practices—the “systemic use of methods that make the most of creative imagination” while leveraging the depth across and beyond disciplinary knowledge—a kind of ‘exploratory social sciences’ (and humanities, I might add), as described by Geoff Mulgan in his discussion paper “The Case for Exploratory Social Sciences,” published by The New Institute (Mulgan 2021, p. 6). The ‘creativity methods’ outlined by Mulgan are similar to those familiar to transdisciplinary design researchers: deep play with abstract models, provocative prototypes (provotypes), grafting ideas or analogues from one field to another, experimental journey mapping, design futures and speculative fiction, and so on (Mulgan 2021). These methodologies might be exploited in significant ways through narratology and especially through visual applications.
Jargon and other highly specialized forms of language can create barriers to the ways we might learn within research and design processes by limiting the inclusion, agency, and efficacy of collaboration. This book introduces ideas and methods for working with visual and image-oriented narratives through making, sharing, and manipulating images and narratives to investigate, imagine, and manifest more equitable and sustainable futures. Specifically, it asks: How might practitioners of participatory research and design experiment with expanded notions of appearance, disappearance, and reappearance for embodied learning and new ways of knowing?
In Hervé Guibert’s essay ‘Ghost Image,’ a teenage son, Guibert, carefully stages the photographic portrait of his mother (Guibert [1982] 2014). The living room furniture is rearranged to create a more spacious atmosphere, a particular angle is chosen where the light is more flattering, and the mother’s clothing and hair style are adjusted to reflect an earlier, free-spirited period of her life. The father is barred from the photo session by the son so that his mother performs outside of her role as ‘wife.’ In the story, the young photographer works to design conditions for the emergence of the woman who otherwise could not appear within the family home. He bears witness to this appearance, made visible through the photographic moment. His efforts to conjure the appearance of the past expose the dimensions of his desire for knowledge that might inform a new way forward in their relationship. When it is later discovered that the film had not been properly loaded into the camera and that no images had been recorded from the session, curiosity is heightened. Ghosts, or ghost images, are an invitation to potential learning. Haunting is the appearance of traces that persist in the absence of fully recognizable images while illuminating histories of the present that provoke inquiry and considerations for future trajectories. Capacities for reading ghostly traces, free from assumed, concretized, and foreclosed meanings, inspire an embrace of groundlessness necessary for imaginative and fearless learning—ways for moving beyond what we think we already know.
Getting beyond what we think we know, together
Collaborative thought and action that provide conditions for atmospheres of emergence have the potential to spur collective effervescence and ideally move us toward collective liberation. It is important to consider the notion of emergence as that which might bubble up—uniquely come to be—as a result of certain atmospheres and might appear in ways that are beyond recognizable understandings of the current conditions. Challenges to remaining open to what might emerge are often brought about by propensities to focus on familiar things and patterns, entrenched notions of causal relationships, and preconceived expectations or anticipated outcomes, all of which can foreclose ways of seeing new possibilities. Herein lies a critical tension for design researchers between what we think we know and what we might seek to transgress. Narratology offers perspectives that can inform methodologies for participatory research and design, particularly through working with tropes that illuminate the unfolding of events and aspects of their causal histories along with intimations constellating desires. Compelling narratives might be shaped by that which is apparent and also by that which is hinted at—perhaps the emergence of haunting or fragmentary anticipation—and experienced through sensing, feeling, possibilities. Certain forms of narrative affect can be utilized as ways to motivate aspirations for transformation, similar to notions of queerness as described by José Esteban Muñoz,
that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity.(Muñoz 2019, p. 1)
The film Lovers Rock, by the artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, is a wonderful visceral example of emergence and, in particular, of an emergent moment of collective effervescence for collective liberation. Set in 1980 west London, the film takes place over the course of a weekend. The centerpiece event is a Saturday night house party where members of the city’s West Indian community gather to eat, drink, and dance, having been barred from white nightclubs. Lovers Rock is named after a genre of music—a romantic, hyperfeminine subcategory of reggae, popularized by Black Londoners in the mid-1970s (Harris 2020; McQueen 2020). The dance party generates a lush atmosphere of dimly lit colors, textures, and movements that climaxes during the song “Silly Games,” an anthem of the Lovers Rock genre. When the song ends, the gyrating dancers continue signing a cappella, their feet on the dancefloor creating the only other sounds. The scene is more than a representation—it is an authentically co-created moment that illuminates collective effervescence—embodied transcendence, camaraderie, and joy—that stretches toward a forward-dawning futurity, beyond oppressive systems, and beyond movie-making expectations, “I’m not too sure what it was, but there was a spiritual element to it,” McQueen says. “I can’t put my finger on it. It was beautiful” (Harris 2020). McQueen describes his job with Lovers Rock,
Directing the actors simply meant creating an environment where he was an observer of every blushing face, every small drama, the sweating walls, the singing chorus. “To see Black women looking at other Black women and feeling acknowledgment.”(Harris 2020)
The embodied learning that takes place in the making of Lovers Rock and especially the climactic scene described by McQueen as ‘spiritual’ are models for ways design processes, as reflective practices embracing non-preconception, might allow for emergence—to cede the dominance of consciousness to the movements and senses of the body and, perhaps, beyond the body—to feel through incorporeal states of being.
Working with narrative—whether co-creating stories or collective encounters with stories—is central to the theories and practices of participatory research and design and is particularly salient for ethical considerations regarding efforts toward greater social and environmental justice. Investigations in the service of addressing complex social issues demand more than steps in identifying problems in order to propose solutions—what is often typical of research for design. Participation is not limited to fieldwork. The analysis and synthesis of findings from participatory research rely upon messy and meandering work—reflective, iterative, and bespoke approaches—and is perhaps best categorized not in terms of tools or methods but as multimodal ways of being with narrative. A complex situation comprises multiple perspectives, divergent stakes, and competing goals and, like a narrative account, evolves through a number of ongoing causal relationships, potentially across various spaces and nonlinear time. Image-oriented and narrative experiments for building capacities to design the design process co-creatively are further examined in Chapter 2 of this book, ‘Proximity and Duration, Senses and Images.’
Narrative is not an informational set of instructions like a weather report or a recipe. Stories—whether in the form of images, sounds, or written and spoken language—can be spectacles of open-ended provocation and might present elements that are true and false, and fact and fiction, and refer to time and space across a spectrum of the past, present, and future. The unfolding of causal relationships is central to what constitutes narrative, and these revelations can be dramatic, humorous, shocking, thrilling, meditative, and so on. Narrative can direct and misdirect our attention, as in a magician’s sleight of hand or a joke with a strategy. Learning relies on the ways we might pay attention to our attention; as learners we must iteratively reflect and not only consume. Engaging with stories, we are never completely outside of them or inside of them; we reverberate as a relational part of the storyworld no matter how distant, strange, or novel. At the same time, there is often a propensity to complete and make firm a singular set of meanings as gleaned from our participation with narratives, and this rush to erase mystery, perhaps to ameliorate anxiousness and fear, forecloses more expansive possibilities. The four chapters of this book propose ways that images and narratives might serve as thresholds for participatory research—to expand collective memory, understanding, and imagination—and not simply serve as references.
Efforts of artistic and design-based research dedicated to contributing to a more equitable and sustainable future demand asking the important and complicated questions of ‘why, what, and with whom’ before getting caught up in the questions of ‘how.’ Ethicist Dr Bill Grace told a story during a visit to the Bainbridge Graduate Institute on Bainbridge Island, Washington, in the autumn of 2007 that I witnessed and paraphrase here:
Aliens from outer space land on Earth and announce that they’ve been observing us for a long time, and that based on what they’ve learned about our current systems – the appalling ways humans have treated the planet, nonhuman life, and each other, they will obliterate the planet – vaporize the whole thing to space dust. The leaders of Earth snap out of their usual infighting to band together and beg the aliens for mercy: “Wait! Give us a chance.” The aliens say, “OK, here’s a deal: we’ll give you one year to straighten out the mess you’ve made. We’ll be back, and if you haven’t fixed it by then we’ll erase you from the universe.” The Earth leaders are relieved for a moment, and then panic sets in: “Wait! Tell us how we will know that we’ve fixed things in the right way.” The aliens look at one another with eye-rolling smirks: “When we return a year from now you need to be OK with us picking up any one of your children and moving them to any place on the planet.”(Grace 2007)
The story shared by Dr Bill Grace invites attention through familiar and unfamiliar images and provokes imagination by fracturing the certainty of what we think we know—opens up cracks for new light to shine through, illuminating the otherwise shadowy areas where accountability might be obscured. Ethics might be understood as the recognition that we, as humans, will do harm, and given this we are accountable and responsible to make the greatest efforts possible to repair the damages resulting from harm and to prevent it from occurring again. These recognitions and efforts, like narrative, are not effective in forms that resemble weather reports or recipes. I propose that design for social change can learn a great deal from narratology and find effectiveness through the use of narrative in active, collaborative, and experimental ways. The discussions and examples in this book emphasize the affective role of co-creating images and narratives through discursive and nondiscursive exchanges in ways that operate most powerfully not as equations but rather in forms more akin to a Buddhist koan.
The impacts of context on the meaning and transformative power of images and narratives are a critical consideration for design processes. The scene as described below is presented intentionally without any framing. Pedagogically, I prefer that audiences experience this narrative in its original form as a video of moving images and sounds. However, addressing readers of this book I must offer written text as an encounter.
The image of an old, white, man with a small round bandage on his nose fills the frame in medium close-up – head and shoulders. His eyes are blue, and his beard is grey. Dark age spots are visible on his bald head, revealed each time he moves to gaze downward. He wears a pale blue shirt. The background is a soft-focused off-white wall and includes one edge of what might be a gold-framed picture. He stares directly back at the viewer and only occasionally and briefly averts his eyes. The man’s breathing is audible along with distant sounds of birdsong and the motion of water. At one moment, the sound of nearby wind chimes gently erupts. He strokes his beard and takes a sip, once from a glass of water that he brings into the frame from off-screen after clearing his throat. For more than six minutes the only action of the scene are these simple gestures, except for several moments when he seems to be about to speak. Each time that he nearly utters a word, he stops before saying anything. During one of these aborted speech ...