R3: Ruptures, Repairs, and Reconfigurations Within Family Design Trajectories

• In Event: 18.045 - Science Capital => STEM Capitxl: Practicing Theory in a Science Museum Youth Informal Learning Program

Abstract

Design work often places more emphasis on the end product rather than the overall process.  Within this process lie many design pivots that participants negotiate along the overall trajectory of the making of an object.  I’m presenting a theoretical framing of data collected through a Participatory Design Research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) in collaboration with several local community organizations. TechTales sought to acknowledge and leverage the unique, cultural funds of knowledge from non-dominant communities in the Pacific Northwest.  With storywork (Archibald, 2008) as a central tenet of the experience, families were tasked to incorporate elements of STEAM to create a representation of a shared memory in a diorama format.  I propose a theoretical lens that highlights the different ways that expertise is gained, displayed, and shared through their design and build. Expertise can be shown through action taking place through discourse, performance, and the synthesis of different ideas.  Boundary Crossing accounts for when an individual delves into unfamiliar territory where their expertise does not have an immediate connection to the new context. Akkerman and Baker (2011) provide four learning mechanisms (identification, coordination, reflection, and transformation) that occur at these boundaries.  Through the engagement in these four mechanisms, I highlight moments of expansive learning (Engeström and Sannino, 2010), where participants ideate and build representations together in a collective memory making activity. Learning is a social endeavor and Cultural Learning Pathways (Bell, et al, 2012) account for how various contexts help shape one’s sociomaterial practices along their design trajectory.

Twenty hours of video data was collected and analyzed from two unique families over the course of a five session series of three hour workshops.  Two video cameras captured the facing formations present in the interactions between people, sensory modalities, and other semiotic materials (Hall and Stevens, 2015).  Interaction Analysis provided the framework to shape the content logs as knowledge is not situated within the heads of individuals, but formed through the interactions of participants engaging in the material world (Jordan and Henderson, 2004).   Families were tasked with using different forms of technology to help illuminate different components of their story. This technology spans from art and craft materials to a Hummingbird microcontroller paired with the Scratch programming language.   Through the production of their design artifact, different forms of STEAM practices emerged. The social arrangements families produced when crafting their narratives with these technology rich materials were then content logged. Moments of negotiation were identified when competing ideas were brought into the space by individual family members.  I call these temporal spaces ruptures in the flow of activity.   The social arrangements families form with one another after these moments of rupture result in instances of repair, where efforts are made to mend the breaches in the design process.  Family members used a variety of semiotic resources to help repair these ruptures in the flow of work activity.  Reconfigurations occur once participants were able to negotiate these differences to create new patterns of activity that make progress along their design trajectory.

Author

• Don LaBonte, University of Washington - Seattle