Social Sciences of the Artificial: Interrupting and Interrogating the Meanings of Design

Abstract

What is design? In 1969, the organizational theorist Herbert Simon demarcated the natural sciences from design, or what he called “the sciences of the artificial”—a capacious concept that encompassed engineering, management, and urban planning, among others—on the basis of the latter’s capacity to realize contingent human-made futures. His vision for a unified approach to design, presented in his eponymous book The Sciences of the Artificial, inspired and catalyzed the rise of “design science” and “design methods,” and while Simon neither invented “design” nor went without resistance from subsequent theorists like Christopher Alexander and Nigel Cross, his work nevertheless remains an important touchstone for the disciplines, techniques, and meanings of “design,” a term, which, as Bruno Latour (2008) and Keith Murphy (2015) have recognized, has come to signify so much more than Simon had originally intended. Indeed, within science and technology studies, design may refer specifically to institutionalized communities of design practice, such as industrial design or user experience design, more generally to the allied fields of engineering and architecture, and most expansively as a synonym for any process of making, tinkering, or innovating, or product thereof, including, most notably, “experimental design.” On the 50th anniversary of Simon’s genre-defining text, this panel seeks to interrupt and interrogate the received obviousness of “design,” within both the social worlds of our research subjects and our own analytic conventions as scholars. What is design? What does design mean? Echoing Lucy Suchman’s (2008) call to investigate the “cultural imaginaries and micropolitics that delineate design’s promises and practices,” it invites papers from a range of theoretical, methodological, and topical perspectives that critically reflect on the grammar and pragmatics of design, which include but are not limited to the following:

• Historical, ethnographic, and other empirical studies that explore how, why, and the implications of the way “design” came, or promises, to structure and describe certain domains and aspects of social action
• Characterizations of the nature of design within said domains: its contours, textures, politics, values, economics, rhythms, subjects, objects, orders, ideologies, and absences
• Examinations of the myriad ways actors inhabit or resist the norms and forms of design, especially those that contest the background assumptions of Simon’s own definition (for instance, antinomies between necessity and contingency, conjunctions and disjunctions between nature and artifice, or anthropo-genesis/anthropo-centrism of design)
• Inversions of design’s emphasis on futurity, perhaps through insights into its historicities
• Descriptions and comparisons of the ethical journeys and “plateaus” (Fischer 2003) enabled or foreclosed by design
• Taxonomies, genealogies, archaeologies, and cartographies of “design” within STS cases and theories, and/or the intellectual and cultural traditions from which it borrows
• Linguistic and conceptual analyses of the symbolic web expressed by “design,” from signification and materialization to intentionality, agency, and subjectivity

Discussant

• Keith Murphy, UC Irvine

Individual Presentations

• A City Is Not a Park – Natural Landscape as Urban Design - Des Fitzgerald, Cardiff University

• Beyond Intentionality: Biomimicry as More-Than-Human Design - Richard Fadok, MIT

• The Art of Wicked Problem Solving: Criticising Technical Rationality by Means of Design - Claudia Mareis, University of the Arts Basel / FHNW

• The Promise of “Good Design”: Architectural Imaginations of Ravines in Postwar Guatemala City - Melanie Ford, Rice University

Session Organizer

• Richard Fadok, MIT