Drifts of partner roles caused by an experimental collaboration set-up

The nine company partners had to sign a ‘statement of collaboration’ prior to the start of the project that worked as a programmatic intent indicating their motivation and reason for collaborating, here exemplified by Humankoncept’s declaration of the aim and purpose of participating:

Humankoncept participates in the SI project because it aligns well with the thoughts behind Humankoncept.

Humankoncept is an innovative exercise service for public and private organizations and companies. The company builds on the philosophy that a healthy body is best achieved through social experiences and a playful approach to physical training. The exercise is a means for experience and not a goal in itself. That's why the courses are well suited for groups that, for different reasons, do not use existing private or public service offerings.

Humankoncept thus perceives the SI project as an opportunity to bring the company's approach to exercise services to also reach the senior users. Humankoncept also hopes to gain experience and inspiration for how new technology can support the company's offerings.

(Extract from “Bilag 8 Samarbejdserklæring Humankoncept”, signed 21/09 2009).

In a process document written after the launch of the project, but prior to an initial partner workshop in January 2010, SUF, the project leaders, comments about the project’s overall aim and purpose in relation to partners:

The ‘purpose statement’ is still broad enough that the twelve project participants will each likely gain their own focus: Technology providers will focus on the use of technology in new contexts. Knowledge institutions will focus on knowledge production. Consultancies on the development of methods. And service providers of new services.

It is therefore important that SUF clarifies which focus we want to maintain for the project. There may be a:

• Focus on impact

• Focus on concrete solutions

• Relevance for the municipal care system

(Extract from Copenhagen Municipality 2009e: 1)

In that same document a comment is made about the aim of the internal anchoring in SUF and involvement of SUF users and employees, stating:

It has not yet been decided how the project will be anchored within SUF. The anchoring includes both the question of day-to-day project management and involvement of other employees and users.

The following questions considering what is appropriate and possible, must be clarified through a dialogue with the Department of Innovation of Aging and Health Care⁶⁵ and the Neighbourhood of Welfare Technology⁶⁶, and with ITU and KADK about what is methodologically desirable:

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• Project management: To what extent does the ‘Neighbourhood of Welfare Technology’ want to simply provide a ‘neighbourhood’ for the project or participate in the project management?

• Project participation: How should the project be carried out locally? In cooperation with a fixed number of units that project management communicates with directly, or in a more flexible setup where the local neighbourhood is the primary entrance?

• User and employee involvement: Under what frameworks and assumptions can we involve the elderly as inspirators, innovators or test subjects in the project?

(Extract from Copenhagen Municipality 2009e: 5)

Such clarifications of SUF’s internal focus for the project (whether the aim is impact, concrete solutions or relevance for the municipal care system) or questions of internal anchoring within the SUF organization and involvement of the ‘SUF users’ have most certainly been made, shared and discussed extensively. But participating as only a ‘minor part’ (with a partial

perspective), such decisions and conclusions were not always made public and explicit for the entire project group. My role as a design researcher participating from KADK was thus from the SUF department as project leaders perceived as part of a ‘knowledge institution’ that will focus on

‘knowledge production’. But a large part of the ‘knowledge production’ especially from the KADK institution had to do with co-constructing the shared platforms for rehearsing specific futures and engaging all the different partners to come together. This sometimes made my perception of my own role ambiguous, being uncertain of my role, the roles of the many company partners, and the possible participants of municipal organisations and their different aims and purposes of participating and balancing a common aim.

One example is seen in SUF’s initial uncertainty of how to perceive the role of senior citizens, initially tentatively portrayed as either inspirators, innovators or test subjects. Originally in the SI application citizens were not called ‘partners’ but listed under collaboration and ‘partner roles’⁶⁷. From the KADK perspectives senior citizens were to be perceived as partners on a somewhat equal level as other partners within the project. The three main ‘partner workshops’

within the Design Lab Phase were therefore aimed at engaging senior citizens on equal terms as other partners within the project collaboration and convincing the municipal project leaders that this way of working was feasible. Thus, workshop tasks were focusing primarily on the seniors’

everyday lives e.g. mapping A Great Day and Landscape of Relations from the horizons of the senior citizens (paired with project partners from the different organizations and companies). Some company partners complained that the three initial partner workshops focused too much on

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senior citizens, and only one company partner showed up for the third workshop. Three partners dropped out of the project after the first concept phase and only three remained active within the platform phase and design spaces of Living Labs. The programmatic framing of the companies’

areas initially framed a broad variety of contexts of the experiments e.g. related to care-service, a shopping centre, mobile phones etc., but later such directions drifted and focused on mainly covering the remaining partners’ interests.

Another aspect of my ‘role’ engaging within the SI project regarded finding and continuously adjusting a ‘position’ from where I could contribute to the project. Like an

experiment unfolding within a programmatic framing, I was told that I should not think of myself as different from the main project group of ‘we’ consisting of researchers and PhD students from KADK and ITU, but also including the project leaders from SUF. It was suggested that I perceive and think of myself as part of one group of a ‘we’; covering the ‘project group’ of ‘key partners’

different from domain-, service-, technological- and consultant partners and senior citizens. But I was also asked to take a lead on planning certain parts of workshops and the Living Lab

Valbyparken on behalf of KADK. Being advised to consider myself ‘a main part’ but also feeling

‘apart’ since I and other PhD students were not part of the steering committee meetings, where decisions were being negotiated and decided, meant that information was to be transitioned through summaries and through other partners which not always happened. This sometimes made it difficult for me to plan the process and navigate amongst shifting expectations and aims of the partners.

From my (partial) perspective, the ‘internal anchoring’ of the SI project within SUF and the Municipality of CPH was mainly centred on a few employees, such as the project leader and a project worker within the innovation department at SUF⁶⁸. Regarding the ‘Neighbourhood of Welfare Technology’⁶⁹ that was mentioned as a possible additional internal anchor throughout the initial phase, the SI project never engaged with the Neighbourhood project, except for the focus on the same district of Vesterbro, Kgs. Enghave & Valby. Within the initial mobilizing process, we visited and had dialogue meetings with around five leaders and employees at care homes and activity centres⁷⁰, in addition to the internal division of SUF working with innovation of elderly care services. At the three workshops four to six employees from the municipality (SUF) showed up to one/or part of a workshop. Some were political key figures such as Ninna Thomsen, the Mayor of the Department of the Health and Care Committee; Margrethe Kusk Pedersen, Head of

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the Innovation Department of Elderly Care⁷¹; Signe Grauslund, Head of Local Areas with a focus on internal management and learning⁷² and Lise Bitsch, Special Consultant for elderly care.

At the later stages, when mobilizing participants and partners for the Living Lab Valbyparken, employees from Sundhedshuset Vesterbro such as Frank Bøgelund, Consultant of Prevention⁷³ and Anders Vedel, Health Counsellor⁷⁴ and representatives of other health initiatives targeted senior citizens for example Anne Dorthe Rohde, Health Counsellor within Træningscenter Østerbro and Ældre Mænd i Bevægelse at Øbro Motion were consulted for a meeting with a ‘relay book’.

They addressed their concerns and pointed us to other relevant sources, but they were not engaged much further in the process of prototyping the specific practices or roles of Health Centres or Health Counsellors in their possible roles supporting a Living Lab for gathering citizens for exercise or developing welfare technology of coordinating and sharing experiences of the gatherings. Besides a visit by two civil servants, two caretakers and five senior citizens from a day-care activity centre to the park on 11 November 2011 that I shall report from in Chapter Five. A few employees took part in the workshop on 2 December, as I will unfold in Chapter Six.

Regarding the DAIM model of ‘system and use’ (Halse et al. 2010: 86-87) the two are mirror twins, and understanding ‘use’ and users must also entail a study of the ‘systems’ and infrastructures supporting the use practices. This means that both seniors but also municipal care practices must be engaged especially when trying to develop service systems that entail bridging the municipal and private interests of supporting groups of citizens as well as the citizens’ own interests. Also, ‘welfare technology’ as described by the Municipality of Copenhagen is supposed to support both the everyday lives of the citizens and the working lives of employees. As stated by Copenhagen Municipality: [since] “welfare technology should help employees in their daily work, they must play a central role in the development and use of welfare technology” (Copenhagen Municipality 2013: 7). But this seemed to be a bit difficult in practice.

Several civil servants from the Innovation Department of Health and Care Management participated in the initial phase, but it seemed to be difficult to convince the ‘local’ civil servants closer to the citizens⁷⁵ to take an active part in the later stages of the project. Maybe they needed a stronger ‘mandate’ from their organizations to allow them to spend their time on ‘other tasks’

besides their daily tasks. Or maybe it simply takes longer than expected to stir the initial interest and also schedule the time to partake. Such questions will have to wait to be addressed by other

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follow-up projects. But the Sundhedshus Vesterbro seemed to engage quite informally by

‘prescribing’ citizens to connect with the community within Valbyparken, and they hosted an exhibition and sponsored the game equipment after the workshop on 2 December. A service concept Sammen om Motion [Exercising Together] was later developed and tested at five sites in Copenhagen and later spread to other municipalities. But the view of the role played by citizens seemed to change during the SI project from (perceived by the municipality as) possible inspirators to active innovators and co-creation partners (especially in Living Lab Valbyparken). But citizens were also self-aware of their role as test subjects (especially at Living Lab Wimmersvej), as Ove states: “We are aware that this is a research project and we are ‘guinea pigs’, but that is what we have agreed on.”

When considering co-design of public-private partnerships collaborating around ‘mutual learning’ spaces among different partners, the roles and focus of aims change many times during a project period of three years. And this might need quite some adjusting along the project period for aligning expectations. In the SI project I represented the KADK/CODE agenda and had a particular focus on facilitating meetings among seniors and seniors and partners, not primarily between private commercial partners, since they had their own (strong) agents, with ‘stakes’ and agendas represented at steering committee meetings. If they had wanted to take a stronger part in the project, there would have been room for that as well. But I still felt somewhat responsible for fighting for, or protecting especially one commercial partner: Humankoncept when ‘strong agents’ talked about exclusion, as we had collaborated about the initial ideas of the Living Lab Valbyparken from the initial Concept Phase. But, as mentioned, I was not present at the steering committee meetings and I was mainly struggling on a small scale during the ‘public gatherings’ of the Living Lab activities where such political issues were not raised in the open or towards the entire group of participants, but took place more as private discussions in smaller groups.

In general, my active participation within the SI project spanned two years, from January 2010 to December 2011, and as mentioned, I did not participate in the last phase of the project –

‘dissemination of knowledge and learning’ – or in the general evaluation of the project collaboration, besides contributing written texts and providing pictures to the book and being present at a final book reception.

Brandt et al.’s “provisional programmatic knowledge regimes” (2011: 19) were in particular present in the ‘application document’ and the condensed scenarios and collages in the reiterated three versions of the dialogue books and later within the summary booklets from the three workshops and the relay book before the Living Lab Valbyparken. These programmatic collective documents framed and contextualized the experiments of what and how partners’ interest areas and communities of senior citizens could relate. But dialectic drifts from experiments of mobilizing and performing the Living Labs did not lead as strongly to a direct re-framing of the

common program by entire partner groups. Individual programs might have been informed and adjusted in directions, like the programs closest to my attention. It is, of course, impossible to completely navigate a collective common single direction of such large complex partnerships, but much of the effort initiating the projects could have been more evenly distributed over the three years. Or they could have been anchored with more tangible tools such as documents similar to the summary booklets visualizing and describing updates of shared decisions of the project’s collective aspirations, but also the partners’ individual re-framed and adjusted aims.

But in order to understand my position from where I am writing this thesis and will soon analyse the empirical encounters, I have seen my role as part of the overall program, but my focus has been on staying open and flexible, and opportunistically joining programs with partners that seemed interested in playing along. I might (unfortunately) sometimes have seen my role from the

‘traditional design tradition’ perspective, which I have been trying to avoid, of working for, or working on behalf of someone. Sometimes I felt responsible for working on behalf of the municipality as the project leaders and at other times on behalf of one of the private partners. My own program could likewise have been presented more explicitly for others throughout the process. But I do not question why we engaged through the municipal organisations of the neighbourhoods of Vesterbro, Kgs. Enghave & Valby (as defining the Neighbourhood of Welfare Technology). Or why we initially mobilized for participation at Nursing Homes (even though these seniors were less able to engage in long-term projects due to their poor health conditions), as these premises have been part of the overall research program and the aims established by the Municipality of Copenhagen as the project leaders of the SI project.

This has been a general description of some of the methodological program-experiment dialectics of the Senior Interaction project, leading to drifts of adjusted aims and partner roles and especially my relational role and position within the partnership. I will now introduce a more abstract framework for describing my research approach as embodied from different positions within co-design engagements in relation to modes of perceiving the environment of relations and lifeworlds around us.

3.3 Performative worldmaking through globe, sphere and dome