Designing Cultures of Care

Laurene Vaughan, Laurene Vaughan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350055360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Critica sull'architettura

Designing Cultures of Care brings together an international selection of design researchers who, through a variety of design approaches, are exploring the ways in which design intersects with cultures of care. Unique in its focus and disciplinary diversity, this edited collection develops an expanded discourse on the role and contribution of design to our broader social, cultural and material challenges. Based around a unifying critique of the proposition of care as a theoretical framework for undertaking design research in real world
contexts, each chapter presents a case study of design research in action. This book aims to provide readers - both academics and practitioners - with insights into the possibilities and challenges of designing cultures of care. The disciplines represented in this collection include architecture, visual communication, participatory and social design, service design, critical and speculative design interventions and design ethnography. These case studies will provide real world insights that have relevance and value to design students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and to researchers at all levels within and outside of the academy.

1

Introduction

Laurene Vaughan

Contingent with our evolving understanding of design and its capacity to contribute to the social, cultural, and technological aspects of society has been an evolving body of scholarship that interrogates the nature of design practice and the emotional and affective attributes of these practices and outcomes. This discourse has been speculative, experimental, theoretical, and enacted, and is realized through projects with living communities. The catalysts for these projects are the challenges of our time: impending environmental disasters, mass migration, population growth, aging populations, and increasing disparity in wealth distribution.

One outcome of this has been the increasing interest in, and publications on, the intersections between design and care. Typically such publications frame care as a context of design and social practices, particularly as they relate to the health and aged-care sectors. Care is understood as something that is institutional, or manifest, in particular systems, services, or “things” that care, within professional or “lay” contexts. The outcome of this can be seen in a number of publications presenting case studies, models, and accounts, many of which are referred to in the following chapters.

The aim of this book is to expand this discourse on the relationship between design and care through a frame of culture and cultures. It is proposed that through a framework of culture we are able to envision and realize a more expansive interrogation of care as both an approach and a context for design practices. As will become evident to the reader, culture in this publication spans many definitions.

According to Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary culture can be understood as:

a: the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time

b: the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization

c: the set of values or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic

It is by understanding culture as dynamic, variant, and practised that we are able to expand our perception of care, and how we design with care or for care. The chapters in this collection present case studies that position the cultural dimensions of care from this breadth of understanding.

In Chapter 2, founded on some of the principles of care ethics, I endeavor to present a case for design as a practice of care. Through a response to the writing of Maurice Hamington, I propose that if it is possible for us to conceive of care as a practice that involves an interplay between imagination, empathy, and action, as he does, we can likewise see that design, with its comparable qualities, may also be conceived of as a practice of care. It is through this conception that our ability to understand the value and contribution of design to facilitating care can be expanded.

In Chapters 3 and 4, authors Cathy Smith, Sue Anne Ware, and Brad Haylock present a range of student-led case studies of design partnerships and interventions with organizations that are focused on the care of citizens outside conventional institutional settings. Smith and Ware present projects by the all-female design collective “out(fit),” initiated by a group of designers and educators frustrated by the seemingly intractable problem of gender inequity in the discipline of architecture. They discuss two projects—The Looking Glass (2016), a temporary gallery for abandoned shopfront windows; and the ongoing Jenny’s Place (2016–), a design-build of a children’s outdoor playspace and minor repair works for a local women’s refuge—as a means to explore how design-led interventions add value for urban citizens. Haylock continues with this citizen-led focus through an account of a series of communication design, graduate-student projects in collaboration with the Sentencing Advice Bureau in Melbourne, Australia. The aim of these projects was to develop ways to communicate to the public data on sentencing implications and profiles of offenders within the judicial system. In this way access to information is a performance of care.

In Chapter 5, Shana Agid proposes that designing with people is, at least in part, a means for learning and articulating what we want so that we might imagine and build our desired outcomes. How we understand the questions from which we begin to frame needs and desires, and the contexts and relationships through which we engage them, is critical to design practice. Agid examines this idea through a conversation with scholars, activists, and writers, many of whom are from outside design fields. Through these conversations, the chapter frames four ideas: problem-posing, multiplicity, imagining, and building, and argues that learning from others’ long-term engagement with social and political change is essential to being responsible and accountable in our work.

This focus on the role of designers in projects is continued in Chapter 6. Here Laurene Vaughan, Shanti Sumartojo, and Sarah Pink respond to the considerable bodies of literature that propose care as a design paradigm for the health sector. From the global challenges of aging communities to the particularities of specific health and medical facilities, there has been a growing focus on human-centered design methods and approaches and their potential to provide particular and site-specific ways to design into this domain. The ambition of researchers and practitioners has been to identify ways to align the physical experiences of being in a state of institutional care, with new paradigms of patient-centered care as realized within the medical services that hospitals and other such care facilities provide. This discussion takes place around their research into the design of the psychiatric unit of a regional hospital redevelopment.

Chapters 7 and 8 explore two participatory design interventions into aged-care and aging communities, in two different cultural contexts. In Chapter 7, Rachel Clarke reflects on an exploratory, design-led case study inquiring into potential future technologies for older people’s participation in urban planning. While older people’s perspectives were collected in the redesign of citywide pathways in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, their feedback was considered valuable in limited ways, highlighting physical mobility and accessibility rather than broader psychosocial, cultural, and aesthetic interests. Through experimental design workshops and urban walks with researchers, alternative futures were imagined for how communication might be improved between city planners and elders. This provided opportunities for reimagining technology to engender temporal communities of care that nurture appreciation of future visions, interdependent processes, cultures of mobility, and layers of expertise rather than focusing on collecting “Smart City” data.

This is followed by Yanki C Lee, Niels Hendriks, and Albert S Y Tsang’s discussion of their development of the dementia experience tool. In Chinese society, as in many cultures, people with dementia suffer some level of stigmatization. A dementia research and care center commissioned a social design research lab team (including two of the authors) to design empathic tools. One of the main challenges was to find a way to empathize with a complicated condition such as dementia, as traditional empathic tools mostly focus on simulation of a specific physical or mental impairment.

Chapter 9 explores interdisciplinary art- and design-led approaches to addressing the affordable housing crisis. Neal Haslem, Keely Macarow, Margie MacKay, Per-Anders Hillgren, Marcus Knutagård, and Mim Whiting introduce their project Homefullness as a response to the crisis. The design principles and philosophy underlying Homefulless as a codesign project are discussed through a description of the current housing conditions in two cities on opposite sides of the world, Melbourne and Malmö. Homefullness is a multidisciplinary inquiry into the ongoing, seemingly intractable issue of homelessness and housing stress. It investigates how art and design processes and artifacts, applied through co-design methods, can work with manifold stakeholders to produce innovation in response to and conceptualization of social issues.

Child welfare and institutionalized models of care for young people have been topics of much public scrutiny. In Chapter 10 Lily Hibberd examines how emergent practices of strategic design are transforming public and private power relations to create cultures of care. This is done through an analysis of Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project, through which past residents of Parramatta Girls Home—a former state-run child welfare institution in Sydney, Australia—collaborate across disciplinary boundaries with artists, activists, historians, architects, and urban designers to transform this traumatic institutional place into a space of care. It highlights the significance of expanded paradigms of design as the means to transform the entire system: design as a human-centered practice of collaborative, responsive, and adaptive approaches that are able to develop better social outcomes in the production of cultures of care.

Small arctic towns in Norway are under considerable pressure because of changes in fishing rights and livelihoods. Alternative futures, often based on the extraction of oil and gas, have been proposed, but not always realized. At the same time, climate change has become more visceral in the daily lives of arctic communities, wedged between large state and commercial geopolitical actors. In Chapter 11, Andrew Morrison, Maria Bertheussen Skrydstrup, Angeliki Dimaki-Adolfsen, and Janike Kampevold Larsen discuss the development of a former hotel into a “cultural hub” for a local community in the town of Vardø. Drawing on ethnographic and other methods, the research involved a delicate process of negotiation and gradual development of an approach to cultural innovation in which care was needed at many levels to protect local needs and interests while introducing new spaces of both cultural and commercial possibility.

Chapters 12 and 13 show how cultural production in the form of artworks can contribute to community and public experience of care in place. In Chapter 12 Jordan Lacey, Ross McLeod, Charles Anderson, and Chuan Khoo discuss their collaboration with the City of Casey to create a public artwork in the North Clyde Community Centre plaza. The collaboration is a unique example of two interdisciplinary teams coming together to create a work that promotes community engagement. The first phase of the project saw the development of a robust conceptual framework that puts community needs at the center of the creative process. The result of this design process was an amorphous and abstract “other” that can inhabit any civic space with the goal of weaving community into place. The relationship of memory and place, so considered, gave rise to the concept of an “other” that remembers. The memory-place connective is manifested by an embedded interactive systems design that uses technology to interweave community interaction with spatial and temporal expressions.

In Chapter 13 Claire Mc Andrew and Itai Palti revisit the idea of the Conscious City, arguing that the vision of the conscious city has entered the radar. It takes as its heartland the idea of a “conversation” between inhabitants, digitally imbued objects, and responsive architectural fabrics on a city scale. They wonder whether advances in the internet of everything, neuroscience, AI, and big data can enable social opportunities in a more sentient city. This chapter considers the ethics of an architectural dialogic—bringing questions of computational neutrality and democratic participation to the fore in the design and curation of “intelligent architecture.”

Cameron Tonkinwise proposes in Chapter 14 that to be human is to be concerned about things, but too many concerns can be overwhelming. Humans can alleviate some of their concerns by designing things, but this can lead to an accumulation of too many things. Humans can also alleviate each other’s concerns, especially when they dwell in proximity to each other, in cities. Commercial services involve people being paid to take care of people they do not otherwise know. Sharing Economies are adding new peer-to-peer dimensions to these transactions. To preserve the ways in which these peer-to-peer services re-embed economic exchanges in social relations, designers must be careful not to reduce the social friction involved too much.

In Chapter 15 the narrative collection shifts from an understanding of a culture of care as being an interplay between people and their physical well-being. Here Noel Waite reflects on four examples of co-design that took place in Dunedin, New Zealand, between 2014 and 2016. Waite explores the possibilities of UNESCO Creative Cities as sites of locally specific narrative layers of care that might combine cultural and ecological knowledge and practices to strengthen the relationship between people and their environment. Waite identifies four layers of care that can underpin a Creative City and its relationship to the international UNESCO Network and 2016 UN Sustainable Development Goals in order to ensure a strong foundation of care and dependence between the natural environment and the people and cultures it sustains.

In Chapter 16 the collection comes to a close through a conversation between Laurene Vaughan and Mick Douglas, who explore what it means to perform practices of care. The authors meander through the proposition, unpacking ideas on the basis of their concerns and preoccupations around design, art, and the poetics and pragmatics of practices performed.

2

Design as a Practice of Care

Laurene Vaughan

Design. Care.

Designing. Care(ing).

This mixture of nouns and verbs, of things and actions, of dispositions and propositions—in the singular and/or the collective—is the focus of this discussion. On first encounter it seems simple or straightforward. We shall design with care. It is in or through care that we will design outcomes of meaning and connectivity. But as one explores more deeply, and considers each of the elements, alone and together, the complexity becomes apparent and you realize this combination of words is both an invitation and a declaration for how we might design, why we will design, and the value of this designing for the present and for the future. In this chapter, I will explore what care might offer for how we practise design.

As many readers will know, over the past ten to fifteen years there has been a shift in how we understand and articulate design and its capacity to contribute to the world that we manifest or destroy. Through contemporary discourses and movements in sustainable design, human-centered design, participatory methods, codesign, and the possibilities of connectivity through digital technologies, definitions of design as a problem-solving, materials-oriented suite of professions have been, and continue to be, challenged. With this some have argued that design is a socio-technical domain of practice (Kimbell 2015), which leads us in the right direction for expanding our thinking about design. Such critiques capture the links between social and cultural aspects of design, while retaining a focus on the material practices that are for the most part the basis for design practice. At the same time we have also seen the rise of design thinking as a particular articulation of design and its application to organizational or business contexts in particular.

Fundamental to this transformation in how we define design has been the evolution of new domains or contexts for design practice. These have been realized in areas such as service design, social innovation, and urban planning. Digital technologies and the rapid increase in the usage of digital things in everyday lives have, through their proximity to our bodies and pervasiveness in our private lives, the capacity to make the most intimate aspects of us public with the click of a button. This is coupled with the capacity to print things, make things, from all kinds of materials from the comfort of home, our office, or the back garden shed. We no longer have to rely on the manufacturing sector in the way we did in the past. All these new phenomena have called for us to transition our understanding of design, the materials that we design with, and the contexts for design practice and production. Increasingly, people and their commun...