I concluded Chapter 1 by rephrasing Schön’s sentences from ‘…with the situation’ and ‘…of a design situation’, to ‘…of the co-design situation’. In this section, I further extend these distinctions.
Exemplar 02
Exemplar 02 / circles 03, 05
Exemplar 02 / circles 02, 03, 05, 06, 07
Briefly, the design situation is viewed as flowing in often quite implicit one-designer or local team design processes. Yet, when aiming for under-standing and practically staging co-designing, I propose to focus on what I coin the co-design situation, which is quite explicitly staged at co-design events and aimed for participants to collaborate.
It could be argued that I interpret Schön’s phrases ‘...with the situation’
and ‘...of a design situation’ a bit literally when in a sense focusing on ‘in’
situated embodied actions, mainly at co-design events; yet, my reasons are that it directs a detailed focus on how people and materials are participa-ting in co-designing, and on how tangible materials assist in making tran-sitions among these co-design situations.
Schön’s and my examples of ’design situations’
In Schön’s exemplar, where the architectural student, Petra, is designing her proposal for a school, during her ‘reflective conversation with the ma-terials of a design situation’ (Schön, 1983/1992), she is developing and re-fining her proposal in a quite fluid process, roughly defined by the outer structures like the start and end of the curriculum project.
Generally, design processes with one person or a team of a few people working together on a daily basis are often flowing, and it can be diffi-cult to say exactly when a design situation is starting and ending. In this flowing process the topic and issues or problems are continually being explored and re-framed in various ways, with various materials, often in various places and over longer periods of time. My own process used to be as an architectural and industrial design student, as displayed in my ex-ample of designing a postal car.
Changing from one situation to another is sometimes quite clear, while changing at other times is subtler. As just described, Petra is going through a long process of designing her proposal for a school, but by dissecting her longer process, within it ‘...the design situation’ with her tutor, Mr. Quist, can also be considered as a special situation, in this case with a quite clear beginning and ending.
Likewise, in the Service Design project, the smaller teams of three to four interaction undergraduate students in one view had their ongoing processes or flowing situations in their teams throughout the five week service design project. On the other hand, the shared session during the previously planned and scheduled slots in the project brief, where we as tutors were engaged and staging how to collaborate, all had quite clear beginnings and endings, for example, each of the three times when all stu-dents collaboratively were materializing and later ‘defrosting’ and refin-ing their shared ‘service project landscape’.
As exemplified, design situations are often flowing, and during distri-buted co-design projects, of course, there are processes like that too; but there are also more explicitly staged situations. During co-design projects, when one person or a small local team on a daily basis engages in
pro-Chapter 1
cesses of exploring an issue in detail, this could be viewed as a flowing design situation. Through these flowing situations or processes, new in-sights and proposals for solutions on a certain issue, challenge or problem relevant to the overall project is of course often developed. However, co-design situations are different.
Quite explicitly staged ‘co-design situations’
Co-design events, as the ones I report from in the Exemplars, happened in a certain pre-picked place, around a certain or several pre-selected over-all issue(s), topic(s) or problem(s), with a certain pre-assigned person or team as event organizer(s) mainly staging how to collaborate, within a certain pre-defined time-period, and very often with a certain previously prepared assemblage of materials. As discussed in Chapter 2, within the PD community, such events are often called ‘participatory workshops’, but generally inherent in staging for participation at such events, is an expec-tation that the people present collaborate.
What I just listed could be viewed as parts of the plans for such events, but of course with Suchman I again repeat that these were not similar to what actually happened, the situated actions, but all these elements surely set some of the circumstances and conditions for what (possibly) could happen. These plans can generally be seen as parts of the staging of an event, and why I also suggest viewing co-design situations happe-ning during such events as being different from flowing design situations because they therefore often are quite explicitly staged for collaboration too. Generally, as initially argued in the Foreword: Program, I argue that co-design events, and thus co-design situations, are often more explicitly planned, prepared and staged than the daily flowing design situations.
Additionally, as exemplified, they therefore have, not definite, but much more clear beginnings and endings.66
There is a family resemblance across co-design situations – also within the same project, while every unique situation built upon the previous.
For example, in the service design project, the second time of collabora-tively defrosting the landscape built upon the first time, the third time build upon the first and second, etc. The first version of the landscape cap-tured various issues of interest among the students and was also created with the purpose of identifying the topics of the four different groups of students. On our request as teachers, the landscape was collaboratively defrosted and re-arranged after the halfway presentations, to now share, merge and match the four groups’ current focuses and interests.
A third time about a week later, again on my request as a tutor, the land-scape was defrosted again and a few changes were made, but at this point in the project, the students’ concepts, and thus their shared project landscape, were stabilizing, and only after about five minutes they did not have a need
66 The beginning and ending of a co-design situation, I further explore in Part C / Chapter 8 as situation warm-up and situation cooldown.
All Exemplars
for making anymore changes. Building upon each other, at an overall level, these three situations were unique, yet they had the same main intensions and in this series even many of the same materials were engaged; this can be viewed as examples of family resemblance of co-design situations.
Further, with a closer look at the first round of building the landscape, this situation could be further dissected into a flow of even shorter (and in some moments parallel) situations, which the participants (students and materi-als) moved in and out of, like the situation of negotiating and moving the po-sitioning of the car-parking lot on the edge of the board/town, or the situa-tion in which five students engaged in collaboratively creating a person transportation system up in the air. To me it is not the most important thing to know exactly what, when and how many of such shorter situations occur during co-designing. What is important is that material clearly mattered in the situations of co-designing and in the changes in the kind of inquiry they engaged in. This I further explore in the following section.