STS through/with Design: Reflection-in-Practice and Affective Engagement to Circumvent Disciplinary Boundary Maintenance

• In Event: STS, Critical Design, Critical Digital Humanities I

Abstract

This paper explores conceptual and institutional opportunities and challenges faced by STS scholars practicing STS through and with design practice. It argues for a reflexive and affective approach to engaging diverse participants in interdisciplinary design collaboration as a way to circumvent disciplinary boundary work that impedes collaborative inquiry. Rensselaer’s Programs in Design and Innovation (PDI)—a set of undergraduate interdisciplinary, hands-on, studio-based design programs whose intellectual and administrative home is Rensselaer’s STS Department. (This paper is complemented by an associated Making and Doing session proposal providing an overview of PDI’s structure and output.) While nominally an interdisciplinary design program, PDI has long been conceptualized by STS faculty as one instance of our department’s self-consciously “engaged” approach to STS scholarship. Despite a predominantly productive relationship between STS faculty members who participate in PDI and those who do not, challenges repeatedly arise around disciplinary identity formation (mostly of our students as “designers” and not “STS scholars”) and boundary work over whether various activities or components of the program are sufficiently “STS.” Drawing on my own 15 years’ involvement in the program, the past 6 of which I have served as program director, the paper will show how our STS approach to design embraces the world-making approaches of other disciplines even as it seeks to deconstruct and re-construe them. While much of contemporary work in STS and design is situated within a critical making or reflective design tradition (drawing for example on the work of Matt Ratto, Carl DiSalvo, Phoebe Sengers, Philip Agre), this paper will go back a bit further to Donald Schön’s work on reflection-in-practice to advocate a standpoint epistemology that reflexively and affectively engages different types and domains of disciplinary expertise in design that responds to complex sociotechnical problems.

Author

• Dean Nieusma, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute